[ISM Updates] Action Alert: write the LA Times in support of Bil'in

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From: ISM Media Group <media@palsolidarity.org>
Date: Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 9:20 AM
Subject: [ISM Updates] Action Alert: write the LA Times in support of Bil'in
To: International Solidarity Movement <palsolidarity@googlegroups.com>



****please circulate widely****

Write the LA Times in support of Bil'in

Dear all,

The LA Times has published a great article (see below,
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-nonviolence4-2009nov04,0,226753.story?page=1&track=rss)
about Bil'in and the popular struggle in today's edition (November
4th).

As past experience teach us, an assault by Israel's supporter is sure
to follow immediately, and be directed at both the paper itself, its
editors and the reporter.

These attacks are beyond mere nuisance – they apply real pressure on
those targeted, and often dissuade major media from covering
Palestinian issues in an objective and truthful manner.

Media coverage generally and articles such as this are of great
importance for us here on the ground, and we would like to do
everything within our power to counter the attacks that threaten them.

I urge you to dedicate just a few minutes of your time and send a
supportive letter to the LA Times and to the reporter, Richard
Boudreaux.

The emails to send letters to are, respectively:
letters@latimes.com and boudreaux@latimes.com

Original letters are of course better, but also feel free to use or
model yours after the sample letter attached below.

Please bear in mind that letters to the editor in the LA Times have a
word limit of 150, and must include your full name, mailing address,
daytime phone number, and e-mail address. This information is seen
only by the letters editors and is not used for any commercial
purpose.

Thank you again for your support.

In solidarity,

Mohammed Khatib,
Popular Struggle Coordination Committee

________________________________________________________________________________________

Dear LA Times,

I was very pleased to see Richard Boudreaux's article "Palestinians
who see nonviolence as their weapon" in your November 4th edition.

As readers, we have gotten so used to seeing the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict solely through the perspective of the barrel of a gun, that
any civic engagement in it erroneously appears marginal and
unimportant to most audiences.

This misguided view of the Palestinian struggle is too often the one
that dominates the media's discourse. Most Palestinians, like most
people everywhere else, are not gun-toting fanatics hell bent on
violence, but rather are ordinary people determined to attain freedom
and justice from under an unbearable military occupation. Articles
like Boudreax's, which depicts Palestinian resistance, as it is –
multifaceted and diverse - are as important as they are rare.

I hope the LA Times will continue to defy the governing notions in the
media about Israel-Palestine, and publish articles true to the reality
on the ground.

Yours,

________________________________________________________________________________________

Palestinians who see nonviolence as their weapon

Mohammed Khatib and his West Bank supporters hope to rally others to a
peaceful campaign for statehood. But fellow Palestinians seem largely
indifferent, and Israel's army is not amused.

By Richard Boudreaux

November 4, 2009

Reporting from Bilin, West Bank -  Every Friday, Mohammed Khatib's
forces assemble for battle with the Israeli army and gather their
weapons: a bullhorn, banners -- and a fierce belief that peaceful
protest can bring about a Palestinian state.

A few hundred strong, they march to the Israeli barrier that separates
the tiny farming community of Bilin from much of its land. They chant
and shout. A few teenagers throw stones.

Khatib helped launch the weekly ritual five years ago in an attempt to
"re-brand" a Palestinian struggle often associated with rocket attacks
and suicide bombers.

"Nonviolence is our most powerful weapon," says the media-savvy
secretary of the Bilin village council. "If they cannot accuse us of
terrorism, they cannot stop us. The world will support us."

The problem is, he doesn't get muchsupport from other Palestinians.
After two uprisings in two decades, they seem largely indifferent to
his quixotic call for a third.

His message is a hard sell: Khatib, 35, is a modern-day Gandhi in a
culture that enshrines the language of the gun, even if most
Palestinians have never used one. And the risks of his activism are
enormous.

The Israeli army has targeted him. He was arrested, severely beaten
and threatened with death during a series of midnight raids on the
village this summer. He was freed on condition that he report to an
Israeli police station each Friday at the hour of the weekly protest.

Although the village has persisted with its marches and become a
widely acclaimed symbol of civil disobedience, his vision of the
"Bilin model" being replicated on a large scale across the West Bank
has not materialized.

A few thousand Palestinian activists have been taught nonviolent
principles and tactics in the last five years, according to the
independent Bethlehem-based Holy Land Trust, which conducts training.
Their scattered initiatives have won limited relief from Israel's
security restrictions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

But those efforts have not gelled into a mass movement, much less
compelled Israel to move toward agreement on a Palestinian state.

Activists say they are hindered by Israeli crackdowns, resignation
among ordinary Palestinians and a deep split in the political
leadership between Hamas' advocacy of armed struggle and the
Palestinian Authority's hope for a revival of U.S.-brokered peace
talks with Israel.

Relative calm prevails in the Palestinian territories, but Khatib says
it cannot last long under the diplomatic impasse.

A trim, articulate man with closely cropped hair, he radiates a
brooding intensity. In a long conversation, he spoke in rapid-fire
sentences about his role models -- Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King
Jr. and Nelson Mandela -- while taking cellphone calls about the next
move in a legal challenge to the barrier.

He believes Israel is trying to crush nonviolent activists because it
would rather take on an armed insurgency.

"This doesn't make it any easier for us to convince people that our
path of resistance is the right one," Khatib said. "It's going to be a
slow process. There aren't many visible successes so far."

Khatib got his first taste of militancy as a teenager during the first
intifada, the uprising that began in 1987. He blocked roads to try to
keep the army out of his village, painted slogans on walls and flew
the Palestinian flag, then an illegal act, at demonstrations.

The mass participation and relatively peaceful course of that
uprising, when few Palestinians were armed with more than rocks, won
sympathy abroad and a major concession: In the early 1990s, Israel
recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization and began to consider
the creation of a Palestinian state.

Today's nonviolence initiatives tap into nostalgia for the first
intifada, in what Khatib calls a sober reaction to the armed uprising
that bloodied the first half of this decade after peace talks broke
down. More than 4,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis died.

Khatib, who dropped out when things turned violent, remembers the
killings that changed him.

It was 2001. Khatib watched in horror as Israeli soldiers shot an
unarmed friend at a checkpoint. Two weeks later, the militant Al Aqsa
Martyrs Brigade made a revenge attack on the checkpoint, killing seven
soldiers.

"My first reaction was 'Good for Al Aqsa!' " Khatib said. Then he
realized the dead soldiers belonged to a different unit, not the one
on duty when his friend was shot.

"It made me wonder: This cycle of death, of violent action and
reaction, how we can break it?"

His answer was to help organize a movement against the intifada's
legacy: the barrier Israel built to protect against militant attacks
but that also cut deep into parts of the West Bank, isolating
Palestinians from 8% of the territory. The string of concrete walls,
fences and patrol roads extends more than 280 miles.

He recruited Israeli and international activists to march every Friday
with Bilin residents up to the fence, which is 14 feet high here. It
protects a part of the sprawling Jewish settlement of Modiin Illit
that was built on the village's land.

He made sure protesters carried video cameras to document the army's
use of tear gas and rubber-coated bullets to keep them away. And he
worked to enforce zero-tolerance of violence by the activists, failing
to stop only the few teenagers who sling rocks and occasionally strike
soldiers.

Michael Sfard, an Israeli lawyer retained by the village, credits
Khatib with the "brilliant idea" that turned the tide in a landmark
legal victory two years ago.

Under cover of darkness, Khatib led a clandestine construction crew
across the barrier and built a makeshift hut on village land that had
been usurped for a new neighborhood of the Jewish settlement. (The
stealth maneuver mimicked Israel's expansionist strategy of creating
"facts on the ground.")

When the army threatened to demolish the hut, the village went to
Israel's Supreme Court and challenged the new neighborhood, which
lacked formal government authorization. The court ordered Israel to
stop building in the neighborhood, move the fence and restore about
half the 575 acres of olive groves Bilin's farmers had lost.

Khatib then set up an alliance of 11 West Bank villages to share his
strategies, and some have borne fruit. Six communities have
successfully challenged the barrier's route across their land.
Activists have linked up with outside supporters to sneak water trucks
into parched communities cut off by the army and to protect olive
harvesters from harassment by settlers.

But in Bilin, the legal victory gave way to setbacks.

The army has yet to comply with the ruling and move the barrier; the
precise new route has been tied up in litigation. Meanwhile, soldiers
began reacting with greater force to the protests, and most Israelis,
who value the barrier as a shield against violence, remained
indifferent.

In April, Khatib was standing a few feet away when a companion, Bassem
Abu Rahma, was killed by a high-velocity tear gas grenade fired into a
crowd of marchers.

Abu Rahma's death still haunts him. Twice, he says, soldiers have
warned him that he'll "end up like Bassem" if he keeps resisting their
presence in the West Bank.

Khatib and 27 other protest leaders and participants were arrested in
their homes during the midnight raids that began in June. Seventeen
are still being held. Khatib faces charges of inciting violence.

Asked to explain the crackdown, a battalion commander said protesters
causing damage to the fence had been photographed and singled out for
arrest. But after a week of requests, the army did not detail any
damage claims.

On a recent Friday, the villagers had one visible impact on the fence,
a Palestinian flag left hanging from barbed wire. After the marchers
had gone home, a soldier tore it down, wiped his hands with it and
stuffed it into a pocket.

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