Bil'in, a village of Palestine

The bridge and the wall

27/06/2008

The Strings Bridge, inaugurated two days ago in a giant, spectacular and expensive extravaganza, was not drafted for its modest task, but rather for its aesthetic and symbolic value. After all, those who decided to bridge the modest height difference between Romema and Zion Valley via a quarter-billion-shekel monument did not seriously consider a plan that would cost one-tenth of this.

The planner of this monument (calling it a "bridge" is a lame excuse) defined its purpose very well: This is a "landmark: a city’s symbol of identity or myth." And indeed, the different opinions about its significance - "secular symbolism," or perhaps the profile of "David’s harp, or a shofar" - its appropriateness to the crowded and neglected urban landscape, financial and other considerations, divert attention from the "landmark" site and its significance for Jerusalem’s urban fabric.

Waste not, wall not

05/06/2008

[Ha’aretz] On September 4, 2007, the Supreme Court’s justices delivered a verdict that would impact life in the tiny West Bank village of Bil’in - a place which, more than any other, has come to symbolize the struggle against the separation fence. To the surprise of those in the courtroom, the judges ruled that the original route of the barrier as drawn up by defense officials was determined in order to accommodate the expansion of the nearby Jewish settlement of Modi’in Illit. The court therefore ordered the state to dismantle a 1.7-kilometer stretch of the fence, and noted that its route also put Israel Defense Forces soldiers in a vulnerable position.

Mazel Tov, Activists and Anarchists -- the Latter-Day Maccabees (But with a Better Sense of Humor)

05/12/2007

Move over Peace Now. Put away your signs and water bottles,you aging hippies who have been rallying ineffectually to "give a peace a chance" for the last forty years. Now that the Annapolis photo-op is over, get ready for the face of the future.

The Jewish People are not my People. My People are Hashem and his Family from Bil'in

02/04/2007

There is nothing festive in this posting. Passover, shmassover, I hate the holidays because while we celebrate, while us Jews babble slogans about freedom, and fantasize that we are a miserable enslaved nation, we are in fact busy enslaving the Palestinian people. It’s become banal and boring to repeat this a thousand times, but in my eyes, the hypocrisy cries out to the heavens. \[The Passover prayer\] ‘Oh bread of poverty’ is no longer the bread of poverty of Jews but of numerous Palestinian families in the Occupied Territories, who live off thirty or forty shekels the head of the household manages to scrounge together doing temporary jobs once every few days.

Does the radicalisation by the occupant radicalise the Resistance?

15/05/2006

In an article dating from last April 29, the Israeli anticolonialist “Anarchists against the wall” movement raised the question if the non-violent struggle against the wall in Bil’in was finished.

Why such a question? During the weekly demonstration in Bil’in on April 28, the anarchistic movement estimated that the number of stone throwers increased in spite of the disapproval by the Popular Committee of Resistance. Rather than finger-pointing, however, to the young people in Bil’in or the policies of the Palestinian Authority, it would be perhaps time to see what’s happening in Israeli politics.