During the first full week of June there were demonstrations/actions throughout Palestine against the 1967 Israeli War of Occupation.  In 1947, the UN gave Israel 55% of Palestine.  The Israelis took military control of 78% of Palestine, forming the state of Israel, as a result of the 1948 War.  This week in June, Israelis celebrate the Israeli victory of the 1967 War, in which Israel occupied the remaining 22% of Palestine, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank or the whole of Palestine.

There were two demonstrations Friday, June 8^th, in the Bethlehem area. One was in Umm Salamuna where land is being grabbed to expand the huge illegal Israeli Efrat settlement. We heard reports that journalists, including those from Reuters, were beaten up. 

Beth and Martha went to the demonstration at Artas in the western section of the Bethlehem area. We had been here a few weeks ago protesting the recent bulldozing of fruit groves that will be used for sewage drainage from the illegal Israeli settlement nearby.  This drainage will eventually destroy the fruit trees growing in this narrow valley.

At Artas we waited for a time outside the impressive mosque there while the men and boys finished the midday prayer and then proceeded down the dirt road with bright Palestinian flags flying.

When we arrived, there were only three or four soldiers in a concrete tower on the upper road guarding the bulldozer. Down below on the valley floor we saw the family farm folks camped on the land with the hope of saving the land from further destruction.

All of us demonstrators, perhaps 50 Palestinians, many of whom were young men and eleven internationals, proceeded slowly up the road to the site below the watch tower.  A pickup and later three army jeeps came on the upper road bringing more soldiers, which made a total of seventeen.

We began to walk toward the area that had been bulldozed a couple weeks ago. With this the soldiers began to move down the hill toward us. One soldier stopped and cocked his automatic rifle which was pointed at the young Palestinians in the land below. This was a most frightening experience because we had heard that an older Palestinian man had been killed this week in Hebron by soldiers invading his home. Young heavily armed soldiers can be very unpredictable. Just this week two 14 year-olds in Gaza were shot and killed by Israeli soldiers for flying their kites near a military area.

The soldiers got in front of us and began to back us up the hill. The people moved, but slowly and deliberately, chanting at times, “No, No to the Wall.” One tall husky soldier near Martha really pushed and harassed the young Palestinians teenage men. It seemed in an effort to provoke them into an action that would warrant arrest. This soldier grabbed one young teen and was really manhandling him. Martha squeezed herself between the young man and the soldier and the young man was let go. This husky soldier continued to try to provoke other young men into behavior that would get them arrested. 

The soldiers kept two young men back and it seemed like they were going to force them to walk down below off the road to return to the village. Both young men were treated very roughly. It seemed one might have his arm twisted until it broke.  The youths showed extreme courage in remaining nonviolent and unwavering in their resistance.  Martha got particularly nervous when people were left behind, and were thus surrounded by soldiers.   Her intercessions may have been effective, since no one was arrested.

When the soldiers had backed us up to a certain point they stopped. They lined up so that it was easy to take a “group photo” of them. We slowly moved back down the dirt road, but then some journalists stopped to do some filming and news reporting on the road. They appeared to be foreign free lance journalists.

This was Beth’s first demonstration, during which she scrambled over rock and dirt road blockades and went amongst the pushing and shoving armed Israeli soldiers to get good photographs of the demonstration. She tried ardently to document the type of treatment the Palestinians were receiving from the Israeli soldiers; however the soldiers did not seem delighted to see her recording their actions. When she tried to photograph the soldiers pushing and choking these young men, an Israeli soldier would put his hand in front of her camera. A soldier also did this when she was attempting to capture the scene of the soldier that was going to arrest the young Palestinian teen. She saw first hand the valiant resistance of the Palestinian people against the illegal Apartheid [separation] wall and the oppressive actions of the occupying Israeli army. Both Martha and Beth felt the anger and aggression of the one particularly tall and husky Israeli soldier towards the Palestinians.

It is difficult to be present where there is brute force used against people who are defending their lands from illegal occupiers. Martha was thanked by a Palestinian man who said she probably saved the young man from being arrested and spending 6 months in an Israeli prison where he might be tortured. There is a strong commitment by many Palestinians to never kill anyone knowing that they could not live with the damage they would do to themselves personally. That is a strong conviction toward nonviolence.

After the demonstration, a young man invited us to his home.  We enjoyed Arabic coffee on his roof, which overlooked a narrow valley with a large picturesque Christian church – perhaps an old monastery.  There was also an equally beautiful mosque to the south of the church.