{"id":10606,"date":"2013-03-16T08:47:54","date_gmt":"2013-03-16T08:47:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/haimbresheeth.com\/gaza\/?p=10606"},"modified":"2013-03-18T12:20:39","modified_gmt":"2013-03-18T12:20:39","slug":"march-16-2013","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/haimbresheeth.com\/gaza\/2013\/03\/16\/march-16-2013\/","title":{"rendered":"March 16, 2013"},"content":{"rendered":"

EDITOR<\/strong>: New heights of racist behaviour in Israel<\/span><\/p>\n

As disgusting and shocking as the facts below, they should hardly surprise us. Zionism was always racist, and not just against the Palestinians (as Goys<\/em> – non-Jews – and as the indigenous population of Palestine) but also against the ghetto Jews and the Mizrahi Jews – the Jews from the Arab world. When racism is oozing from all sides – the home, school, street, the army, the media, government legislation and actions – everywhere in Israel racism is present – how could Israelis not be racist? Most also believe in the bizarre notion of being the chosen people, so this goes especially well with racist views. That they see themselves as ‘proud racists’ is a direct result of their daily life in an apartheid state.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMay all Arabs die!\u201d Israelis on Facebook express joy at Jordan bus crash that killed Palestinian pilgrims<\/a>: Electronic Intifada<\/h3>\n
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Submitted by\u00a0Ali Abunimah\u00a0on Sat, 03\/16\/2013 – 15:58<\/div>\n
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Jordan Bus Crash (Middle East)<\/a><\/h2>\n<\/div>\n

Israelis, including at least one person identifying himself as a soldier, reacted with genocidal joy on Facebook to the horrifying news this morning that\u00a017 Palestinians returning from a pilgrimage had been killed in a bus accident in Jordan and dozens more injured<\/a>. Early reports had put the number of dead at 14.<\/p>\n

According to\u00a0The Jordan Times<\/em>, the accident occurred as the bus descended toward the Jordan Valley \u201cand slammed into a passenger vehicle causing it to overturn. The bus then slammed into a truck and the two vehicles crashed resulting in the deaths and the high number of injuries.\u201d<\/p>\n

Israelis overjoyed at horrifying deaths<\/h2>\n

\u201cI couldn\u2019t ask for a better morning than this,\u201d\u00a0wrote Facebook user Kobi Yaacov Saroussi<\/a>\u00a0under an item about the accident on the Facebook page of Israel\u2019s Channel 2, \u201cShame there isn\u2019t another zero at the end [of the number of victims].\u201d<\/p>\n

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Kobi Yaacov Saroussi is disappointed there weren\u2019t ten times as many deaths.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

There were dozens more similar comments. Facebook user\u00a0Demri Alice wrote<\/a>\u201cFinally it\u2019s possible to \u2018Like\u2019 something,\u201d to which she added a smiley face.<\/p>\n

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In horrifying deaths of Palestinians, Demri Alice finally find something to \u201cLike\u201d on Facebook.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Many were brief. Tomer Reuven\u00a0simply commented<\/a>\u00a0\u201cVery good.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cGreat! Let\u2019s hope everyone on the bus was an Arab!\u201d\u00a0said Eitan Wolfer Eifergan<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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\u201cI\u2019ve never tolerated Arabs,\u201d\u00a0wrote Kobi Noga<\/a>, \u201cI\u2019m an extreme rightist. We should kill them all.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Kobi Noga, self-described \u201cextreme rightist,\u201d thinks all Arabs should be killed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Shenhav Sharbit,\u00a0using the perjorative term \u201carboushim\u201d<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 roughly the equivalent of the N-word \u2013 said Arabs could \u201call die\u201d and that was \u201call good.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Shenhav Sharbit uses a racist epithet for Arabs to express her joy at their deaths.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Golani Brigade soldier: \u201cMay all Arabs die \u2026 I am a proud racist.\u201d<\/h2>\n
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In a screenshot from his Facebook page, Chen Shaptiban is seen in a uniform bearing the tree symbol indicating that he is a member of the Israeli army\u2019s Golani Brigade.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Among the most horrifying of the many horrifying comments were those of Chen Shaptiban who, based on a photo on his Facebook page, appears to be a member of the Israeli army\u2019s notorious \u201cGolani brigade<\/a>\u201d which was recently in the news because some of its members have posted shocking photographs on\u00a0Instagram<\/a>. One ofShaptiban\u2019s reactions to the road accident<\/a>\u00a0was this:<\/p>\n

May all Arabs die. There is no place for Arabs in the land of Israel. Maybe it sounds terrible to some people in north Tel Aviv, but they too do not deserve to live in this state, and yes, I am a proud racist, proud of my state and the soldiers guarding it!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Objections to racism shut down with more racist abuse<\/h2>\n

Some Palestinian citizens of Israel and Israeli Jews objected to the pervasive racism. Facebook user Marwan Momo, for example,\u00a0wrote<\/a>, \u201cYou keep crying Holocaust Holocaust but look how you talk!\u201d<\/p>\n

Gilad Kapeliuk\u00a0wrote<\/a>, \u201cThe sickening racism does not surprise me \u2026. I\u2019m ashamed to be part of this nation.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Avigail Mishaiv\u00a0replied to Kapeliuk<\/a>, \u201cGaza is waiting for you with open arms. You can go and be proud over there.<\/p>\n

Golani soldier Shaptiban\u00a0also retorted<\/a>, \u201cGilad, you leftists are the cancer in the state, traitors to the state, the garbage of Israeli society.\u201d<\/p>\n

Regev Cohen, responding to another Facebook user, whom he addressed with a homophobic epithet,\u00a0wrote<\/a>, \u201cAll the terrorists in the world, all the fucking martyrs, who are they? Arabs and Muslims\u201d before referring to Arabs as \u201cbarbarians\u201d and \u201chuman waste.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ori Avraham\u00a0reacted to criticism<\/a>\u00a0of the racist statements from a user called \u201cIrit\u201d by telling her, \u201cDo you know what the biggest dream of the Muslims is? To exterminate all the Jews by any means, so be quiet.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not an isolated incident<\/h2>\n

It is important to emphasize that the racist comments in this incident were not rare or exceptional, but numerous and pervasive.<\/p>\n

While the comments above were collected from the Facebook page of Israel\u2019s Channel 2, many similar racist comments could be seen just as frequently under the news item about the crash\u00a0on the Facebook page of Walla! News<\/a>, another major Israeli media outlet.<\/p>\n

At Walla! for example, Elior Mizrahi\u00a0commented<\/a>, \u201cSabbath morning, a beautiful day!\u201d and added a smiley face. Shai Hadad\u00a0expressed the sentiment<\/a>, \u201c14 is too few, shame it wasn\u2019t more.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Nor is this an isolated incident. The Electronic Intifada has previously documented numerous examples of\u00a0Israelis expressing shocking racism and calls for racist and genocidal violence on Facebook<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s disgusting comments are also reminiscent of what happened when someIsraelis expressed delight after a number of Palestinian children were killed in a bus accident<\/a>\u00a0in February last year.<\/p>\n

It is also notable that while the habitual expressions of joy by Israelis at the deaths and suffering of Palestinians go largely unremarked, an Egyptian activist, Samira Ibrahim, was the focus of worldwide condemnation recently after her nomination for a White House award was withdrawn when it came to light that she had expressed joy on Twitter at the deaths of Israelis in the July 2012 bombing of a bus in the Bulgarian resort town of Burgas among other\u00a0objectionable and racist comments<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Words lead to killing<\/h2>\n

This shocking and pervasive racism is not harmless. Many of those expressing it are members of Israeli occupation forces who hold immense power over the Palestinian population.<\/p>\n

In at least one case we know about, an Israeli occupation \u201cborder policeman,\u201dMaxim Vinogradov<\/a>, had\u00a0expressed a desire on Facebook to assist in \u201cannihilating\u201d Arabs<\/a>\u00a0just one week before he shot dead Palestinian father\u00a0Ziad Jilani<\/a>\u00a0at a checkpoint in eastern occupied Jerusalem, a killing for which Jilani\u2019s family continues to seek justice.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

EDITOR<\/strong>: Below, a very long article by Ben Ehrenreich, in NYTIMES magazine. It is interesting and well informed and well-worth reading.<\/span><\/p>\n

Is This Where the Third Intifada Will Start?<\/a>: NYTIMES<\/h3>\n
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Peter van Agtmael\/Magnum<\/a>, for The New York Times<\/div>\n

Protesters fleeing from tear gas launched by the Israel Defense Forces. In the background, the Israeli settlement of Halamish<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

By\u00a0BEN EHRENREICH<\/p>\n

Published: March 15, 2013
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On the evening of Feb. 10, the living room of Bassem Tamimi\u2019s house in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh was filled with friends and relatives smoking and sipping coffee, waiting for Bassem to return from prison. His oldest son, Waed, 16, was curled on the couch with his 6-year-old brother, Salam, playing video games on the iPhone that the prime minister of Turkey had given their sister, Ahed. She had been flown to Istanbul to receive an award after photos of her shaking her fist at an armed Israeli soldier won her, at 11, a brief but startling international celebrity. Their brother Abu Yazan, who is 9, was on a tear in the yard, wrestling with an Israeli activist friend of Bassem\u2019s. Nariman, the children\u2019s mother, crouched in a side room, making the final preparations for her husband\u2019s homecoming meal, laughing at the two photographers competing for shots from the narrow doorway as she spread onions onto oiled flatbreads.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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On the living-room wall was a \u201cFree Bassem Tamimi\u201d poster, left over from his last imprisonment for helping to organize the village\u2019s weekly protests against the Israeli occupation, which he has done since 2009. He was gone for 13 months that time, then home for 5 before he was arrested again in October. A lot happened during this latest stint: another brief war in Gaza, a vote in the United Nations granting observer statehood to Palestine, the announcement of plans to build 3,400 homes for settlers, an election in Israel. Protests were spreading around the West Bank.<\/p>\n

That night, the call came at about 7:30. Twenty people squeezed into three small cars and headed to the village square. More neighbors and cousins arrived on foot. (All of Nabi Saleh\u2019s 550 residents are related by blood or marriage, and nearly all share the surname Tamimi.) Then a dark Ford pulled slowly into the square, and everyone fell silent.<\/p>\n

Bassem, who is 45, stepped out of the car, straight-spined, his blue eyes glowing in the lamplight. He seemed a little thinner and grayer than the last time I saw him, in July. He hugged and kissed his eldest son. Ahed was next, then one by one, in silence, Bassem embraced family and friends, Palestinian activists from Ramallah and Jerusalem, Israeli leftists from Tel Aviv. When he had greeted everyone, he walked to the cemetery and stopped in front of the still-unmarked grave of his brother-in-law Rushdie, who was shot by Israeli soldiers in November while Bassem was in prison. He closed his eyes and said a quick prayer before moving on to the tomb of Mustafa Tamimi, who died after being hit in the face by a tear-gas canister in December 2011.<\/p>\n

Back at home, Bassem looked dazed. Nariman broke down in his arms and rushed outside to hide her tears. The village was still mourning Rushdie\u2019s death, but the young men couldn\u2019t keep up the solemnity for long. They started with little Hamoudi, the son of Bassem\u2019s cousin, tossing him higher and higher in the air above the yard. They set him down and took turns tossing one another up into the night sky, laughing and shouting as if they never had anything to grieve.<\/p>\n

From most south-facing<\/strong>\u00a0windows in Nabi Saleh, you can see the red roofs of Halamish, the Israeli settlement on the hilltop across the valley. It has been there since 1977, founded by members of the messianic nationalist group Gush Emunim, and growing steadily since on land that once belonged to residents of Nabi Saleh and another Palestinian village. Next to Halamish is an Israeli military base, and in the valley between Nabi Saleh and the settlement, across the highway and up a dirt path, a small freshwater spring, which Palestinians had long called Ein al-Kos, bubbles out of a low stone cliff. In the summer of 2008, although the land surrounding the spring has for generations belonged to the family of Bashir Tamimi, who is 57, the youth of Halamish began building the first of a series of low pools that collect its waters. Later they added a bench and an arbor for shade. (Years after, the settlers retroactively applied for a building permit, which Israeli authorities refused to issue, ruling that \u201cthe applicants did not prove their rights to the relevant land.\u201d Recently, several of the structures have been removed.) When Palestinians came to tend to their crops in the fields beside it, the settlers, villagers said, threatened and threw stones at them.<\/p>\n

It took the people of Nabi Saleh more than a year to get themselves organized. In December 2009 they held their first march, protesting not just the loss of the spring but also the entire complex system of control \u2014 of permits, checkpoints, walls, prisons \u2014 through which Israel maintains its hold on the region. Nabi Saleh quickly became the most spirited of the dozen or so West Bank villages that hold weekly demonstrations against the Israeli occupation. Since the demonstrations began, more than 100 people in the village have been jailed. Nariman told me that by her count, as of February, clashes with the army have caused 432 injuries, more than half to minors. The momentum has been hard to maintain \u2014 the weeks go by, and nothing changes for the better \u2014 but still, despite the arrests, the injuries and the deaths, every Friday after the midday prayer, the villagers, joined at times by equal numbers of journalists and Israeli and foreign activists, try to march from the center of town to the spring, a distance of perhaps half a mile. And every Friday, Israeli soldiers stop them with some combination of tear gas, rubber-coated bullets, water-cannon blasts of a noxious liquid known as \u201cskunk\u201d and occasionally live fire.<\/p>\n

Last summer, I spent three weeks in Nabi Saleh, staying in Bassem and Nariman\u2019s home. When I arrived in June, Bassem had just been released from prison. In March 2011, Israeli soldiers raided the house to arrest him. Among lesser charges, he had been accused in a military court of \u201cincitement,\u201d organizing \u201cunauthorized processions\u201d and soliciting the village youth to throw stones. (In 2010, 99.74 percent of the Palestinians tried in military courts were convicted.) The terms of Bassem\u2019s release forbade him to take part in demonstrations, which are all effectively illegal under Israeli military law, so on the first Friday after I arrived, just after the midday call to prayer, he walked with me only as far as the square, where about 50 villagers had gathered in the shade of an old mulberry tree. They were joined by a handful of Palestinian activists from Ramallah and East Jerusalem, mainly young women; perhaps a dozen college-age European and American activists; a half-dozen Israelis, also mainly women \u2014 young anarchists in black boots and jeans, variously pierced. Together they headed down the road, clapping and chanting in Arabic and English. Bassem\u2019s son Abu Yazan, licking a Popsicle, marched at the back of the crowd.<\/p>\n

Then there were the journalists, scurrying up hillsides in search of better vantage points. In the early days of the protests, the village teemed with reporters from across the globe, there to document the tiny village\u2019s struggle against the occupation. \u201cSometimes they come and sometimes they don\u2019t,\u201d Mohammad Tamimi, who is 24 and coordinates the village\u2019s social-media campaign, would tell me later. Events in the Middle East \u2014 the revolution in Egypt and civil war in Syria \u2014 and the unchanging routine of the weekly marches have made it that much harder to hold the world\u2019s attention. That Friday there was just one Palestinian television crew and a few Israeli and European photographers, the regulars among them in steel helmets.<\/p>\n

In the protests\u2019 first year, to make sure that the demonstrations \u2014 and the fate of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation \u2014 didn\u2019t remain hidden behind the walls and fences that surround the West Bank, Mohammad began posting news to a blog and later a Facebook page (now approaching 4,000 followers) under the name Tamimi Press. Soon Tamimi Press morphed into a homegrown media team: Bilal Tamimi shooting video and uploading protest highlights to his YouTube channel; Helme taking photographs; and Mohammad e-mailing news releases to 500-odd reporters and activists. Manal, who is married to Bilal, supplements the effort with a steady outpouring of tweets (@screamingtamimi).<\/p>\n

News of the protests moves swiftly around the globe, bouncing among blogs on the left and right. Left-leaning papers like Britain\u2019s Guardian and Israel\u2019s Haaretz still cover major events in the village \u2014 deaths and funerals, Bassem\u2019s arrests and releases \u2014 but a right-wing Israeli news site has for the last year begun to recycle the same headline week after week: \u201cArabs, Leftists Riot in Nabi Saleh.\u201d Meanwhile, a pilgrimage to Nabi Saleh has achieved a measure of cachet among young European activists, the way a stint with the Zapatistas did in Mexico in the 1990s. For a time, Nariman regularly prepared a vegan feast for the exhausted outsiders who lingered after the protests. (Among the first things she asked me when I arrived was whether I was a vegan. Her face brightened when I said no.)<\/p>\n

Whatever success they have had in the press, the people of Nabi Saleh are intensely conscious of everything they have not achieved. The occupation, of course, persists. When I arrived in June, the demonstrators had not once made it to the spring. Usually they didn\u2019t get much past the main road, where they would turn and find the soldiers waiting around the bend. That week though, they decided to cut straight down the hillside toward the spring. Bashir led the procession, waving a flag. As usual, Israeli Army jeeps were waiting below the spring. The four soldiers standing outside them looked confused \u2014 it seemed they hadn\u2019t expected the protesters to make it so far. The villagers marched past them to the spring, where they surprised three settlers eating lunch in the shade, still wet from a dip in one of the pools. One wore only soggy briefs and a rifle slung over his chest.<\/p>\n

The kids raced past. The grown-ups filed in, chatting and smoking. More soldiers arrived in body armor, carrying rifles and grenade launchers. Waed and Abu Yazan kicked a soccer ball until a boy spotted a bright orange carp in one of the pools and Abu Yazan and others tried to catch it with their bare hands, splashing until the water went cloudy and the carp disappeared.<\/p>\n

Four settlers appeared on the ledge above the spring, young men in sunglasses and jeans, one of them carrying an automatic rifle. Beside me, a sturdy, bald officer from the Israel Defense Forces argued with an Israeli protester. \u201cI let you come,\u201d the officer insisted. \u201cNow you have to go.\u201d<\/p>\n

The children piled onto the swing the settlers had built and swung furiously, singing. A young settler argued with the I.D.F. officer, insisting that he clear the protesters away.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat difference does 10 minutes make?\u201d the officer said.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery 10 seconds makes a difference,\u201d the settler answered.<\/p>\n

But before their 10 minutes were up, one hour after they arrived, the villagers gathered the children and left as they had come, clapping and chanting, their defiance buoyed by joy. For the first time in two and a half years, they had made it to the spring.<\/p>\n

They headed back along the highway, which meant they would have to pass the road leading to Halamish. Ahed, her blond hair in a long braid, clutched a cousin at the front of the procession. As they approached the road, a border-police officer tossed a stun grenade \u2014 a device that makes a loud bang and a flash but theoretically, at least, causes no bodily harm \u2014 at Ahed\u2019s feet, and then another, and another. Within a few seconds, the marchers were racing up the hill back toward their village, tear-gas grenades streaking through the sky above their heads.<\/p>\n

On warm summer evenings,<\/strong>\u00a0life in Nabi Saleh could feel almost idyllic. Everyone knows everyone. Children run in laughing swarms from house to house. One night, Bassem and Nariman sat outside sharing a water pipe as Nariman read a translated Dan Brown novel and little Salam pranced gleefully about, announcing, \u201cI am Salam, and life is beautiful!\u201d<\/p>\n

Bassem is employed by the Palestinian Authority\u2019s Interior Ministry in a department charged with approving entrance visas for Palestinians living abroad. In practice, he said, P.A. officials \u201chave no authority\u201d \u2014 the real decisions are made in Israel and passed to the P.A. for rubber-stamping. Among other things, this meant that Bassem rarely had to report to his office in Ramallah, leaving his days free to care for his ailing mother \u2014 she died several weeks after I left the village last summer \u2014 and strategizing on the phone, meeting international visitors and talking to me over many cups of strong, unsweetened coffee. We would talk in the living room, over the hum of an Al Jazeera newscast. A framed image of Jerusalem\u2019s Al Aqsa Mosque hung above the television (more out of nationalist pride than piety: Bassem\u2019s outlook was thoroughly secular).<\/p>\n

Though many people in Nabi Saleh have been jailed, only Bassem was declared a \u201cprisoner of conscience\u201d by Amnesty International. Foreign diplomats attended his court hearings in 2011. Bassem\u2019s charisma surely has something to do with the attention. A strange, radiant calm seemed to hover around him. He rarely smiled, and tended to drop weighty pronouncements (\u201cOur destiny is to resist\u201d) in ordinary speech, but I saw his reserve crumble whenever one of his children climbed into his lap.<\/p>\n

When Israeli forces occupied the West Bank in 1967, Bassem was 10 weeks old. His mother hid with him in a cave until the fighting ended. He remembers playing in the abandoned British police outpost that is now the center of the I.D.F. base next to Halamish, and accompanying the older kids who took their sheep to pasture on the hilltop where the settlement now stands. His mother went to the spring for water every day. The settlers arrived when he was 9.<\/p>\n

Halamish is now fully established and cozier than most gated communities in the United States. Behind the razor wire and chain-link perimeter fence, past the gate and the armed guard, there are playgrounds, a covered pool, a community center and amphitheater, a clinic, a library, a school and several synagogues. The roads are well paved and lined with flowers, the yards lush with lemon trees. Halamish now functions as a commuter suburb; many of the residents work in white-collar jobs in Tel Aviv or Modi\u2019in. The settlement\u2019s population has grown to more than double that of Nabi Saleh.<\/p>\n

I first met Shifra Blass, the spokeswoman for Halamish, in 2010. She talked about how empty the West Bank \u2014 she used the biblical name, Judea and Samaria \u2014 was when she and her husband emigrated from the U.S. in the early 1970s, intent on establishing a Jewish presence in a land they believed had been promised to them. Relations with the surrounding villages, she told me, had remained cordial, friendly even, until the first intifada. (When I asked people in Nabi Saleh about this, no one remembered it that way.) During the second intifada, three residents of the settlement, Blass said, were killed by gunfire on nearby roads. They weren\u2019t near the village, but attitudes hardened.<\/p>\n

When I visited her again last month, she was not eager to talk to me about the conflict over the spring and the lands surrounding it. \u201cWe want to live our lives and not spend time on it,\u201d Blass said. She dismissed the weekly demonstrations as the creation of \u201coutside agitators who come here and stir the pot \u2014 internationalists, anarchists, whatever.\u201d It was all a show, she said, theater for a gullible news media. \u201cI\u2019ll tell you something: it\u2019s unpleasant.\u201d On Fridays, she said, the wind sometimes carries the tear gas across the valley into the settlement. \u201cWe have some grown children who say they cannot come home from university for Shabbat because of the tear gas. They call and say, \u2018Tell me how bad it is, because if it\u2019s really bad, I\u2019m not coming.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

When the first\u00a0<\/strong>intifada broke out in late 1987, Nabi Saleh was, as it is now, a flash point. The road that passes between the village and the settlement connects the central West Bank to Tel Aviv: a simple barricade could halt the flow of Palestinian laborers into Israel. Bassem was one of the main Fatah youth activists for the region, organizing the strikes, boycotts and demonstrations that characterized that uprising. (Nabi Saleh is solidly loyal to Fatah, the secular nationalist party that rules the West Bank; Hamas, the militant Islamist movement that governs Gaza, has its supporters elsewhere in the West Bank but has never had a foothold in the village.) He would be jailed seven times during the intifada and, he says, was never charged with a crime. Before his most recent arrest, I asked him how much time he had spent in prison. He added up the months: \u201cAround four years.\u201d<\/p>\n

After one arrest in 1993, Bassem told me, an Israeli interrogator shook him with such force that he fell into a coma for eight days. He has a nickel-size scar on his temple from emergency brain surgery during that time. His sister died while he was in prison. She was struck by a soldier and fell down a flight of courthouse stairs, according to her son Mahmoud, who was with her to attend the trial of his brother. (The I.D.F. did not comment on this allegation.)<\/p>\n

Bassem nonetheless speaks of those years, as many Palestinians his age do, with something like nostalgia. The first intifada broke out spontaneously \u2014 it started in Gaza with a car accident, when an Israeli tank transporter killed four Palestinian laborers. The uprising was, initially, an experience of solidarity on a national scale. Its primary weapons were the sort that transform weakness into strength: the stone, the barricade, the boycott, the strike. The Israeli response to the revolt \u2014 in 1988, Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin reportedly authorized soldiers to break the limbs of unarmed demonstrators \u2014 began tilting international public opinion toward the Palestinian cause for the first time in decades. By the uprising\u2019s third year, however, power had shifted to the P.L.O. hierarchy. The first Bush administration pushed Israel to negotiate, leading eventually to the 1993 Oslo Accord, which created the Palestinian Authority as an interim body pending a \u201cfinal status\u201d agreement.<\/p>\n

But little was resolved in Oslo. A second intifada erupted in 2000, at first mostly following the model set by the earlier uprising. Palestinians blocked roads and threw stones. The I.D.F. took over a house in Nabi Saleh. Children tossed snakes, scorpions and what Bassem euphemistically called \u201cwastewater\u201d through the windows. The soldiers withdrew. Then came the heavy wave of suicide bombings, which Bassem termed \u201cthe big mistake.\u201d An overwhelming majority of Israeli casualties during the uprising occurred in about 100 suicide attacks, most against civilians. A bombing at one Tel Aviv disco in 2001 killed 21 teenagers. \u201cPolitically, we went backward,\u201d Bassem said. Much of the international good will gained over the previous decade was squandered. Taking up arms wasn\u2019t, for Bassem, a moral error so much as a strategic one. He and everyone else I spoke with in the village insisted they had the right to armed resistance; they just don\u2019t think it works. Bassem could reel off a list of Nabi Saleh\u2019s accomplishments. Of some \u2014 Nabi Saleh, he said, had more advanced degrees than any village \u2014 he was simply proud. Others \u2014 one of the first military actions after Oslo, the first woman to participate in a suicide attack \u2014 involved more complicated emotions.<\/p>\n

In 1993, Bassem told me, his cousin Said Tamimi killed a settler near Ramallah. Eight years later, another villager, Ahlam Tamimi escorted a bomber to a Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem. Fifteen people were killed, eight of them minors. Ahlam, who now lives in exile in Jordan, and Said, who is in prison in Israel, remain much-loved in Nabi Saleh. Though everyone I spoke with in the village appeared keenly aware of the corrosive effects of violence \u2014 \u201cThis will kill the children,\u201d Manal said, \u201cto think about hatred and revenge\u201d \u2014 they resented being asked to forswear bloodshed when it was so routinely visited upon them. Said, Manal told me, \u201clost his father, uncle, aunt, sister \u2014 they were all killed. How can you blame him?\u201d<\/p>\n

The losses of the second intifada were enormous. Nearly 5,000 Palestinians and more than 1,000 Israelis died. Israeli assassination campaigns and the I.D.F.\u2019s siege of West Bank cities left the Palestinian leadership decimated and discouraged. By the end of 2005, Yasir Arafat was dead, Israel had pulled its troops and settlers out of Gaza and the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, had reached a truce with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. The uprising sputtered out. The economy was ruined, Gaza and the West Bank were more isolated from each other than ever, and Palestinians were divided, defeated and exhausted.<\/p>\n

But in 2003, while the intifada was still raging, Bassem and others from Nabi Saleh began attending demonstrations in Budrus, 20 minutes away. Budrus was in danger of being cut off from the rest of the West Bank by Israel\u2019s planned separation barrier, the concrete and chain-link divide that snakes along the border and in many places juts deeply into Palestinian territory. Residents began demonstrating. Foreign and Israeli activists joined the protests. Fatah and Hamas loyalists marched side by side. The Israeli Army responded aggressively: at times with tear gas, beatings and arrests; at times with live ammunition. Palestinians elsewhere were fighting with Kalashnikovs, but the people of Budrus decided, said Ayed Morrar, an old friend of Bassem\u2019s who organized the movement there, that unarmed resistance \u201cwould stress the occupation more.\u201d<\/p>\n

The strategy appeared to work. After 55 demonstrations, the Israeli government agreed to shift the route of the barrier to the so-called 1967 green line. The tactic spread to other villages: Biddu, Ni\u2019lin, Al Ma\u2019asara and in 2009, Nabi Saleh. Together they formed what is known as the \u201cpopular resistance,\u201d a loosely coordinated effort that has maintained what has arguably been the only form of active and organized resistance to the Israeli presence in the West Bank since the end of the second intifada in 2005. Nabi Saleh, Bassem hoped, could model a form of resistance for the rest of the West Bank. The goal was to demonstrate that it was still possible to struggle and to do so without taking up arms, so that when the spark came, if it came, resistance might spread as it had during the first intifada. \u201cIf there is a third intifada,\u201d he said, \u201cwe want to be the ones who started it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bassem saw three options. \u201cTo be silent is to accept the situation,\u201d he said, \u201cand we don\u2019t accept the situation.\u201d Fighting with guns and bombs could only bring catastrophe. Israel was vastly more powerful, he said. \u201cBut by popular resistance, we can push its power aside.\u201d<\/p>\n

As small as the\u00a0<\/strong>demonstrations were, they appeared to create considerable anxiety in Israel. Paul Hirschson, a spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told me that while the West Bank demonstrations do not pose an \u201cexistential threat\u201d to Israel, they \u201ccertainly could be more problematic in the short term\u201d than a conventional armed revolt. Eytan Buchman, a spokesman for the I.D.F., took issue with the idea that the weekly protests were a form of nonviolent resistance. In an e-mail he described the protests as \u201cviolent and illegal rioting that take place around Judea and Samaria, and where large rocks, Molotov cocktails, improvised grenades and burning tires are used against security forces. Dubbing these simply demonstrations is an understatement \u2014 more than 200 security-force personnel have been injured in recent years at these riots.\u201d (Molotov cocktails are sometimes thrown at protests at the checkpoints of Beitunia and Kalandia but never, Bassem said, in Nabi Saleh.) Buchman said that the I.D.F. \u201cemploys an array of tactics as part of an overall strategy intended to curb these riots and the ensuing acts of violence.\u201d He added that \u201cevery attempt is made to minimize physical friction and risk of casualties\u201d among both the I.D.F. and the \u201crioters.\u201d<\/p>\n

One senior military commander, who would agree to be interviewed only on the condition that his name not be used, told me: \u201cWhen the second intifada broke out, it was very difficult, but it was very easy to understand what we had to do. You have the enemy, he shoots at you, you have to kill him.\u201d Facing down demonstrators armed with slings and stones or with nothing at all is less clear-cut. \u201cAs an Israeli citizen,\u201d the commander said, \u201cI prefer stones. As a professional military officer, I prefer to meet tanks and troops.\u201d<\/p>\n

But armies, by their nature, have one default response to opposition: force. One soldier who served in Nabi Saleh testified to the Israeli veterans\u2019 group Breaking the Silence about preparing for Friday protests. \u201cIt\u2019s like some kind of game,\u201d he said. \u201cEveryone wants to arm themselves with as much ammo as possible. . . . You have lots of stun grenades . . . so they\u2019re thrown for the sake of throwing, at people who are not suspected of anything. And in the end, you tell your friend at the Friday-night dinner table: \u2018Wow! I fired this much.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

According to a leaked 2010 U.S. State Department memo, Maj. Gen. Avi Mizrahi of Israel \u201cexpressed frustration\u201d with the West Bank protests to American diplomats, and \u201cwarned that the I.D.F. will start to be more assertive in how it deals with these demonstrations, even demonstrations that appear peaceful.\u201d The memo concluded that \u201cless-violent demonstrations are likely to stymie the I.D.F.,\u201d citing the Israeli Defense Ministry policy chief Amos Gilad\u2019s admission to U.S. officials, \u201cWe don\u2019t do Gandhi very well.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sagi Tal, a former I.D.F. soldier, who was stationed near the villages of Bil\u2019in and Ni\u2019lin, which also held weekly demonstrations, explained to me that his unit sometimes conducted night raids to gather intelligence or make arrests and sometimes simply so \u201cthat they should feel that we are here and we are watching them.\u201d<\/p>\n

After dinner one Sunday, Nariman put on a DVD shot both by her and Bilal, the village videographer. (\u201cFrom the beginning,\u201d Bilal told me at the march on the previous Friday, filming calmly as tear-gas grenades landed all around us, \u201cwe decided that the media is the most important thing in the popular resistance.\u201d) We watched a clip shot in the house in which we sat: soldiers banged on the door late at night; they rifled through the boys\u2019 room as Salam and Abu Yazan cowered beneath the covers and Nariman yelled in Arabic: \u201cWhat manliness this is! What a proud army you\u2019re part of!\u201d The soldiers confiscated a gas mask, two computers, Waed\u2019s camera and two of his schoolbooks \u2014 geography and Palestinian history. (In an e-mail, an I.D.F. spokesman described such night raids as \u201cpre-emptive measures, taken in order to assure the security and stability in the area.\u201d)<\/p>\n

We watched footage of Nariman being arrested with Bilal\u2019s wife, Manal, early in 2010. Soldiers had fired tear gas into Manal\u2019s house, Nariman explained. Manal ran in to fetch her children, and when she came out, a soldier ordered her back in. She refused, so they arrested her. Nariman tried to intervene, and they arrested her too. They spent 10 days in prisons where, they say, they were beaten repeatedly, strip-searched and held for two days without food before each was dumped at the side of a road. (The I.D.F.\u2019s Buchman said, \u201cNo exceptional incidents were recorded during these arrests.\u201d He added that no complaints were filed with military authorities.)<\/p>\n

We watched a clip of crying children being passed from a gas-filled room out a second-story window, down a human ladder to the street. Early on, the villagers took all the children to one house during demonstrations, but when the soldiers began firing gas grenades into homes, the villagers decided it was safer to let them join the protests. We watched footage of a soldier dragging a 9-year-old boy in the street, of another soldier striking Manal\u2019s 70-year-old mother. Finally, Nariman shook her head and turned off the disc player. \u201cGlee\u201d was on.<\/p>\n

One Friday, shortly after<\/strong>\u00a0the marchers had barricaded the road with boulders and burning tires in order to keep the army out of the village center, a white truck sped around the bend, a jet of liquid arcing from the water cannon mounted on its cab. Someone yelled, \u201cSkunk!\u201d and everyone bolted. Skunk water smells like many things, but mainly it smells like feces. Nariman wasn\u2019t fast enough. A blast of skunk knocked her off her feet. Moments later, she was standing defiantly, letting the cannon soak her and waving a Palestinian flag at the truck\u2019s grated windshield. An hour or so later, smelling of skunk and shampoo, she was serving tea to a dozen protesters.<\/p>\n

Every Friday was a little different. Some demonstrations were short and others almost endless. Some were comic, others not at all. Some days the I.D.F. entered the village, and others they stuck to the hills. Sometimes they made arrests. The basic structure, though, varied little week to week: a few minutes of marching, tear gas fired, then hours of the village youth \u2014 the\u00a0shebab<\/em>, they\u2019re called \u2014 throwing stones while dodging tear-gas canisters and rubber-coated bullets until the sun set and everyone went home. Or failed to make it home.<\/p>\n

It was strange, asymmetric combat: a few dozen masked\u00a0shebab<\/em>\u00a0ranging in age from 8 to 38, armed with slings and stones, against 20 or more soldiers in armored vehicles and on foot, dressed in helmets and body armor, toting radios and automatic weapons. Theshebab<\/em>\u00a0put a great deal of thought into tactics, trying to flank and surprise the soldiers. But even when their plans were perfectly executed, they could not do much more than irritate their enemies. The soldiers, though, would inevitably respond with more sophisticated weaponry, which would motivate the\u00a0shebab<\/em>\u00a0to gather more stones Friday after Friday despite \u2014 and because of \u2014 the fact that nothing ever seemed to change, for the better at least.<\/p>\n

I asked one of the boys why he threw stones, knowing how futile it was. \u201cI want to help my country and my village, and I can\u2019t,\u201d he said. \u201cI can just throw stones.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe see our stones as our message,\u201d Bassem explained. The message they carried, he said, was \u201cWe don\u2019t accept you.\u201d While Bassem spoke admiringly of Mahatma Gandhi, he didn\u2019t worry over whether stone-throwing counted as violence. The question annoyed him: Israel uses far greater and more lethal force on a regular basis, he pointed out, without being asked to clarify its attitude toward violence. If the loincloth functioned as the sign of Gandhi\u2019s resistance, of India\u2019s nakedness in front of British colonial might, Bassem said, \u201cOur sign is the stone.\u201d The weekly clashes with the I.D.F. were hence in part symbolic. The stones were not just flinty yellow rocks, but symbols of defiance, of a refusal to submit to occupation, regardless of the odds. The army\u2019s weapons bore messages of their own: of economic and technological power, of international support. More than one resident of Nabi Saleh reminded me that the tear gas used there is made by a company based in Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n

One afternoon, I visited the family of Mustafa Tamimi, who was 28 when he died in December 2011 after being shot at close range with a tear-gas canister from the back of an Israeli Army jeep. (An I.D.F. investigation concluded, according to Buchman, that when the soldier fired the canister \u201chis field of vision was obscured.\u201d) The walls were covered with framed photos: an action shot of Mustafa in profile, his face behind a red Spider-Man mask as he slung a stone at soldiers outside the frame.<\/p>\n

In the weeks before her son\u2019s death, Ekhlas, his mother, told me that soldiers had twice come to the house looking for him. When she got a call that Friday asking her to bring Mustafa\u2019s ID to the watchtower, she thought he\u2019d been arrested, \u201clike all the other times.\u201d Beside me, Bahaa, a tall young man who was Mustafa\u2019s best friend, scrolled through photos on a laptop, switching back and forth between a shot of Mustafa falling to the ground a few feet behind an I.D.F. jeep, and another, taken moments later, of his crushed and bloody face.<\/p>\n

Ekhlas told me about a dream she\u2019d had. Mustafa was standing on the roof, wearing his red mask. There were soldiers in the distance. She called to him: \u201cMustafa, come down! Everyone thinks you are dead \u2014 it\u2019s better that they don\u2019t see you.\u201d<\/p>\n

He turned to her, she said, and told her: \u201cNo. I\u2019m standing here so that they will see me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is the worst<\/strong>\u00a0time for us,\u201d Bassem confided to me last summer. He meant not just that the villagers have less to show for their sacrifices each week, but that things felt grim outside the village too. Everyone I spoke with who was old enough to remember agreed that conditions for Palestinians are far worse now than they were before the first intifada. The checkpoints, the raids, the permit system, add up to more daily humiliation than Palestinians have ever faced. The number of Israeli settlers living in the West Bank has more than tripled since the Oslo Accords. Assaults on Palestinians by settlers are so common that they rarely made the news. The resistance, though, remained limited to a few scattered villages like Nabi Saleh and a small urban youth movement.<\/p>\n

I sat down one afternoon in Ramallah with Samir Shehadeh, a former literature professor from Nabi Saleh who was one of the intellectual architects of the first intifada and whom I met several times at Bassem\u2019s house. I reminded him of the car accident that ignited the first uprising and asked what kind of spark it would take to mobilize Palestinians to fight again. \u201cThe situation is 1,000 times worse,\u201d he said. \u201cThere are thousands of possible sparks,\u201d and still nothing has happened.<\/p>\n

In the 1980s, youth organizers like Bassem focused on volunteer work: helping farmers in the fields, educating their children. They built trust and established the social networks that would later allow the resistance to coordinate its actions without waiting for orders from above. Those networks no longer exist. Instead there\u2019s the Palestinian Authority. Immediately after the first Oslo Accord in 1993, the scholar Edward Said predicted that \u201cthe P.L.O. will . . . become Israel\u2019s enforcer.\u201d Oslo gave birth to a phantom state, an extensive but largely impotent administrative apparatus, with Israel remaining in effective control of the Palestine Authority\u2019s finances, its borders, its water resources \u2014 of every major and many minor aspects of Palestinian life. More gallingly to many, Oslo, in Said\u2019s words, gave \u201cofficial Palestinian consent to continued occupation,\u201d creating a local elite whose privilege depends on the perpetuation of the status quo.<\/p>\n

That elite lives comfortably within the so-called \u201cRamallah bubble\u201d: the bright and relatively carefree world of cafes, NGO salaries and imported goods that characterize life in the West Bank\u2019s provisional capital. During the day, the clothing shops and fast-food franchises are filled. New high-rises are going up everywhere. \u201cI didn\u2019t lose my sister and my cousin and part of my life,\u201d Bassem said, \u201cfor the sons of the ministers\u201d to drive expensive cars.<\/p>\n

Worse than any corruption, though, was the apparent normalcy. Settlements are visible on the neighboring hilltops, but there are no checkpoints inside Ramallah. The I.D.F. only occasionally enters the city, and usually only at night. Few Palestinians still work inside Israel, and not many can scrape a living from the fields. For the thousands of waiters, clerks, engineers, warehouse workers, mechanics and bureaucrats who spend their days in the city and return to their villages every evening, Ramallah \u2014 which has a full-time population of less than 100,000 \u2014 holds out the possibility of forgetting the occupation and pursuing a career, saving up for a car, sending the children to college.<\/p>\n

But the checkpoints, the settlements and the soldiers are waiting just outside town, and the illusion of normalcy made Nabi Saleh\u2019s task more difficult. If Palestinians believed they could live better by playing along, who would bother to fight? When Bassem was jailed in decades past, he said, prisoners were impatient to get out and resume their struggles. This time, he ran into old friends who couldn\u2019t understand why he was still fighting instead of making money off the spoils of the occupation. \u201cThey said to me: \u2018You\u2019re smart \u2014 why are you doing this? Don\u2019t you learn?\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

At times the Palestinian Authority acts as a more immediate obstacle to resistance. Shortly after the protests began in Nabi Saleh, Bassem was contacted by P.A. security officials. The demonstrations were O.K., he said they told him, as long as they didn\u2019t cross into areas in which the P.A. has jurisdiction \u2014 as long, that is, as they did not force the P.A. to take a side, to either directly challenge the Israelis or repress their own people. (A spokesman for the Palestinian security forces, Gen. Adnan Damiri, denied this and said that the Palestinian Authority fully supports all peaceful demonstrations.) In Hebron, P.A. forces have stopped protesters from marching into the Israeli-controlled sector of the city. \u201cThis isn\u2019t collaboration,\u201d an I.D.F. spokesman, who would only talk to me on the condition that he not be named, assured me.\u201cIsrael has a set of interests, the P.A. has a set of interests and those interests happen to overlap.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bassem saw no easy way to break the torpor and ignite a more widespread popular resistance. \u201cThey have the power,\u201d he said of the P.A., \u201cmore than the Israelis, to stop us.\u201d The Palestinian Authority employs 160,000 Palestinians, which means it controls the livelihoods of about a quarter of West Bank households. One night I asked Bassem and Bilal, who works for the Ministry of Public Health, how many people in Nabi Saleh depend on P.A. salaries. It took them a few minutes to add up the names. \u201cLet\u2019s say two-thirds of the village,\u201d Bilal concluded.<\/p>\n

Last summer,<\/strong>\u00a0my final Friday in Nabi Saleh was supposed to be a short day. One of theshebab<\/em>\u00a0was getting engaged to a girl from a neighboring village, and everyone planned to attend the betrothal ceremony. The demonstration would end at 3.<\/p>\n

Four armored cars waited at the bend in the road, the skunk truck idling behind them. Manal pointed to the civilian policemen accompanying the soldiers. \u201cThere is a new policy that they can arrest internationals,\u201d she explained. Earlier that month, as part of the effort to combat what Israelis call the \u201cinternationalization\u201d of the conflict, the defense forces issued an order authorizing Israeli immigration police to arrest foreigners in the West Bank.<\/p>\n

About half the marchers headed down the hillside. Soldiers waiting below arrested four Israelis and detained Bashir, the owner of the land around the spring. Everyone cheered as Mohammad raced uphill, outrunning the soldiers. (Three months later they would catch up to him in a night raid on his father\u2019s house. He was imprisoned until late December.) I saw Nariman standing in the road with a Scottish woman. I walked over. Two soldiers grabbed the Scottish protester. Two more took me by the arms, pulled me to a jeep and shoved me in. I showed my press card to the driver. His expression didn\u2019t change. Two frightened young women, both British, were already locked inside. After almost an hour, the soldiers brought a Swede and an Italian who had been hiding in the convenience-store bathroom. More soldiers piled in. I showed one my press card and asked if he understood that I was a journalist. He nodded. Finally, the driver pulled onto the road. As we passed the gas station, the\u00a0shebab<\/em>\u00a0ran after us.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey were so beautiful a few minutes ago, right?\u201d the soldier beside me said as theshebab<\/em>\u2019s stones clanged against the jeep. \u201cThey were so cute.\u201d<\/p>\n

They drove us to the old British police station in the I.D.F. base in Halamish. While I was sitting on a bench, an I.D.F. spokesman called my cellphone to inform me that no journalists with press cards had been detained in Nabi Saleh. I disagreed. (The next day, according to Agence France-Presse, the I.D.F. denied I had been arrested.) A half-hour later, an officer escorted me to the gate.<\/p>\n

As I walked back to Nabi Saleh, the road was empty, but the air was still peppery with tear gas. I made it back in time for the engagement party and flew home the next day. The five activists detained with me were deported. Two nights after I left, soldiers raided Bassem\u2019s house. The following week, they raided the village five days in a row.<\/p>\n

This past October,<\/strong>\u00a0the popular resistance movement began to shift tactics, trying to break the routine of weekly demonstrations. They blocked a settler road west of Ramallah, and the following week staged a protest inside an Israeli-owned supermarket in the settlement industrial zone of Shaar Binyamin. Bassem was arrested outside the market \u2014 soldiers grabbed at Nariman and dragged Bassem off when he stepped forward to put his arms around her. Less than two weeks later, Waed was arrested at a Friday demonstration. Soldiers beat him, he said, \u201cwith their fists and their rifles.\u201d When he appeared in court, Waed was still bruised. The judge threw out the charges. But while he was detained, he was in the same prison as his father and saw him briefly there. \u201cWhen I said goodbye to him,\u201d Waed told me with obvious pride, \u201che had tears in his eyes. I was stronger than him.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the day of Waed\u2019s arrest, a camera caught Ahed shaking her fist, demanding that soldiers tell her where they were taking her brother. The Internet took over: video of the tiny, bare-armed blond girl facing down a soldier went viral. She and Nariman were invited to Istanbul, where, to their surprise, Nariman said, they were greeted at the airport by dozens of children wearing T-shirts printed with Ahed\u2019s photo. They drove past billboards displaying Ahed\u2019s image. Reporters followed them everywhere. Crowds gathered when they walked in the streets. They were taken to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the southeastern city of Urfa, Nariman said, and flew back with him to Istanbul on his plane.<\/p>\n

Not everyone reacted so enthusiastically. One right-wing blogger dubbed Ahed \u201cShirley Temper.\u201d The Israeli news site Ynet took the images as evidence that \u201cPalestinian protesters use children to needle I.D.F. soldiers in the hope of provoking a violent response.\u201d<\/p>\n

In mid-November, Israeli rockets began falling on Gaza. Protests spread throughout the West Bank. \u201cWe thought it was the start of the third intifada,\u201d Manal told me. The demonstrations in Nabi Saleh stretched beyond their usual Friday-evening terminus. One Saturday in November, Nariman\u2019s brother Rushdie \u2014 who worked as a policeman near Ramallah and was rarely home on Fridays \u2014 joined the\u00a0shebab<\/em>\u00a0on the hill. He was standing beside Waed when he was hit by a rubber-coated bullet. Then the soldiers began shooting live ammunition, but Rushdie was hurt and couldn\u2019t run. As he lay on the ground, a soldier shot him in the back from a few meters away. Nariman ran to the hillside with her video camera and found her brother lying wounded. \u201cI wanted to attack the soldier and die with Rushdie right there, but I knew I had to be stronger than that,\u201d Nariman said. \u201cWhy is it required of me to be more humane than they are?\u201d Rushdie, who was 31, died two days later. An I.D.F. investigation found that soldiers fired 80 shots of live ammunition and neglected to \u201ccontrol the fire.\u201d The unit\u2019s commander was reportedly relieved of his command.<\/p>\n

When the fighting<\/strong>\u00a0stopped in Gaza, the protests in the West Bank ceased. I went back to Nabi Saleh in January, three weeks before Bassem was expected home. The village seemed listless and depressed, as if everyone were convinced of the futility of continuing. On my first Friday back, the demonstration ended early: the\u00a0shebab<\/em>\u00a0had a soccer match in another village. It rained the next week, and everyone went home after an hour. \u201cWe are still living the shock of Rushdie\u2019s killing,\u201d Mohammad told me.<\/p>\n

Elsewhere in the West Bank, though, momentum was building. In late November, Netanyahu announced plans to build 3,400 settlement units in an area known as E1, effectively cutting off Jerusalem from the West Bank. Just before I arrived in January, popular-resistance activists tried something new, erecting a tent \u201cvillage\u201d called Bab al-Shams in E1, symbolically appropriating the methods of land confiscation employed by settlers. \u201cThe time has come now to change the rules of the game,\u201d the organizers wrote in a news release, \u201cfor us to establish facts on the ground \u2014 our own land.\u201d The numbers were relatively small \u2014 about 250 people took part, including Nariman and a few others from Nabi Saleh \u2014 and, on direct orders from Netanyahu, soldiers evicted everyone two days later, but the movement was once again making headlines around the globe. Copycat encampments went up all over the West Bank \u2014 some in areas where the popular resistance had not previously been active.<\/p>\n

The day after his release, Bassem told me that even sitting in prison he had felt \u201ca sense of joy\u201d when he learned about Bab al-Shams. The popular resistance was finally spreading beyond the village demonstrations. \u201cWe have to create a sense of renewal,\u201d he said, \u201cnot only in Nabi Saleh but on a larger scale.\u201d The village\u2019s losses \u2014 and his own \u2014 he acknowledged, were daunting. \u201cThe price is now higher,\u201d he said, but \u201cif we don\u2019t continue, it would mean that the occupation has succeeded.\u201d It would take constant creativity, he said, to hold onto the momentum. He didn\u2019t know what it would look like yet, but just talking about it seemed to add inches to his height.<\/p>\n

Within days, thousands of Palestinians would protest around the West Bank, first in solidarity with prisoners on hunger strikes to demand an end to the indefinite detention of Palestinians without trial, later in outrage at the death of a 30-year-old prisoner named Arafat Jaradat. Once again, the words \u201cthird intifada\u201d were buzzing through the press. Avi Dichter, the head of Israeli domestic security during the second intifada and the current minister of Home Front Defense, cautioned in a radio interview that an \u201cincorrect response by the security forces\u201d might push the protests into full-out revolt.<\/p>\n

When I saw Bassem in February, I asked him whether he was worried that the uprising might finally arrive at Nabi Saleh\u2019s moment of greatest self-doubt, that it might catch the village drowsing. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter who is resisting,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat\u2019s important is that they are resisting.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the last Friday I was there, the wind was against the demonstrators. Nearly every grenade the soldiers fired, regardless of how far away it landed, blew a cloud of gas up the road right at them. A dozen or so villagers watched the clashes from the relative safety of the hillside. Bassem\u2019s cousin Naji was sitting on a couch cushion. Mahmoud, Bassem\u2019s nephew, poured coffee into clear plastic cups. Bright red poppies dotted the hill between the rocks. The way was clear, but no one tried to walk down to the spring.<\/p>\n

When the demonstration seemed over, I trekked back to the village with a young Israeli in a black \u201cAnarchy Is for Lovers\u201d T-shirt. He told me about his childhood on a kibbutz bordering the Gaza Strip. His parents were \u201cright-wing Zionists,\u201d he said, \u201chard-core.\u201d They didn\u2019t talk to him anymore. A group of soldiers appeared behind us, and we ducked into Nariman\u2019s yard as they tossed a few stun grenades over the wall. Later that evening, at Naji\u2019s house, I watched Bilal\u2019s video of the same soldiers as they strolled down the drive, lobbing tear-gas grenades until they reached their jeeps. They piled in and closed the armored doors. One door opened a crack. A hand emerged. It tossed one last grenade toward the camera. Gas streamed out, the door closed and the jeep sped off down the road.<\/p>\n

\n

Ben Ehrenreich<\/a>\u00a0won a 2011 National Magazine Award in feature writing. His most recent novel is \u201cEther,\u201d published by City Lights Books.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

EDITOR: New heights of racist behaviour in Israel As disgusting and shocking as the facts below, they should hardly surprise us. Zionism was always racist, and not just against the Palestinians (as Goys – non-Jews – and as the indigenous population of Palestine) but also against the ghetto Jews and the Mizrahi Jews – the … Continue reading March 16, 2013<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[12],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/haimbresheeth.com\/gaza\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10606"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/haimbresheeth.com\/gaza\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/haimbresheeth.com\/gaza\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimbresheeth.com\/gaza\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimbresheeth.com\/gaza\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10606"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/haimbresheeth.com\/gaza\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10606\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10610,"href":"https:\/\/haimbresheeth.com\/gaza\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10606\/revisions\/10610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/haimbresheeth.com\/gaza\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimbresheeth.com\/gaza\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/haimbresheeth.com\/gaza\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}