Region | Palestinian Territories
Residents find new ways to fight wall
Palestinian teen tracks Israeli troops with a camera to document any abuse. An organiser travels with a PowerPoint presentation between villages to teach others the art of creative protest.
- AP
- Published: 20:27 July 31, 2008
Na'alin, West Bank: A Palestinian teen tracks Israeli troops with a camera to document any abuse. An organiser travels with a PowerPoint presentation between villages to teach others the art of creative protest.
Palestinians are using increasingly savvy methods to fight Israel's West Bank separation barrier, a campaign whose danger was driven home this week by the death of a ten-year-old boy.
Six years after Israel began building the barrier, Palestinian villagers march almost daily to try to halt construction work that threatens to swallow up thousands more hectares of West Bank land. Many protests turn into confrontations between youths and Israeli troops responding with tear gas, rubber-coated steel bullets and at times live fire.
Israel's separation barrier, a mix of towering concrete walls topped with barbed wire and electronic fences, is two-thirds complete, and is expected to stretch about 720km when finished.
A new focal point of the anti-barrier campaign is the village of Na'alin, which stands to lose its thousands of hectares of olive groves to the barrier.
Protests began in Na'alin three months ago when bulldozers started clearing village land for the barrier.
On July 7, during one of the protests, 17-year-old Salam Kana'an, was watching the village's entrance from her living room window. She trained her video camera on a group of Israeli soldiers, capturing them shooting a bound, blindfolded Palestinian demonstrator in the leg, wounding him. An Israeli battalion commander was holding the man's arm.
Kana'an said the film's impact made her more determined to keep her camera focused on troops. "This is a weapon for villagers like us, which an army can't defeat," she said.
Veteran anti-barrier campaigners from the nearby village of Bilin are teaching others how to keep the media interested, bulldozers idle and Israeli soldiers exhausted.
Bilin activists run workshops with PowerPoint presentations on how to protest, like tying demonstrators to trees. They also run question-and-answer sessions for other villages threatened by the barrier, and screen a documentary about Bilin's four-year struggle.
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