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The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil,    but because of the people who don't do anything about it

Occupation magazine - Siege, Wall, Checkpoints Home page  back Print  Send To friend We were in Bil`in today at the big demonstration against the fence By Adi Dagan Translated from Hebrew by Mark Marshall 28 April 2005 Many women from the Women’s Coalition for Peace, along with activists from Taayush [“Co-existence”], Gush Shalom [“the Peace Bloc”], Anarchists Against Fences and many others went to Bil’in today to participate in a non-violent demonstration against the fence, that had been coordinated as such in advance the organizers of the demonstration from the village. We planned to march to the fence-route and plant olive trees. As soon as went out of the village towards the groves in which the work is taking place, we were welcomed by tear-gas grenades and soldiers storming towards us (onion helps a lot!). Suddenly we saw masked people from within the demonstration throwing stones at the soldiers and in a short time they drew pistols and dragged a demonstrator with them – thus it became clear that they were a unit of Mista’arvim [Israeli soldiers who go under cover and disguise themselves as Arab civilians] who were sent to heat up the situation and cause provocations. It was just like a movie with Mista’arvim playing the Ninjas. You have to see it to believe it. The army continued to rain tear-gas and stun-grenades on us and also to fire bullets. I talked to an Israeli woman who was struck by two bullets, which fortunately did not penetrate her body. We did not manage to get to the fence route, the work of drilling into the rock continued, and we waited several hours as negotiations went on for the release of the detainees, looking towards the ghastly housing developments of the Kiryat Sefer settlement that will swallow up the lands of Bil’in, about 2,300 dunams that will be annexed to west of the fence, which is about half of the land of the village. The only bright spot was the extensive media coverage; Channels 2 and 10 came as well as foreign correspondents, simply because of the larger-than-usual Israeli presence. Thus a quiet, nonviolent demonstration of Israelis and Palestinians became a frustrating and violent incident with injured and arrests, all thanks to some unit of Mista’arvim and some unit of the Israel Prison Service called “Masada” that they decided to train on us. Adi Read more about it on the nrg/Maariv website (Hebrew): Links to the latest articles in this section For sale: Gaza zoo where the zebras were not all they seemed Palestinians still waiting for right to use Highway 443 B`Tselem and 6 US Peace and Human Rights Groups to Obama: Lift Gaza Siege