I met Atta while helping his family pick tomatoes last September. Their home lies five minutes outside Hebron, but at the time you'd have been lucky to make it in an hour. There is a good, recently-built 'bypass' road going straight into Hebron, but Palestinians aren't allowed to use it - it's a settler road. All other roads have 'roadblocks' - big piles of dirt, rubble and cement blocks - inhibiting movement. You can usually clamber over, but need to leave your vehicle behind. While not making movement impossible, the roadblocks make transport of crops very difficult - both Atta and his brother had seen their grapes and tomatoes rot in the fields when they couldn't get them to the market. Luckily the car that came to pick up the tomatoes made it out without being stopped by the Israeli Army.

These restrictions on movement, that we never hear about in our media, are a very effective form of collective punishment. Known as the 'closure', these measures were crippling the Palestinian economy. People couldn't get to work, children to school, crops to the market, ambulances to the sick. Despite this, many people remained optimistic. It seemed a strange time for people to be optimistic - less than two weeks after September 11th. Sharon had seized the opportunity to invade the Area A cities of Jericho, Jenin and finally Ramallah. Area A land was given over to the Palestinian Authority control in the Oslo accords, according to which the Israeli military were not allowed to enter. Yet Sharon had declared the Oslo accords dead, and the Palestinian had no real means of defence - a Kalashnikov is pretty unlikely to stop a tank in its tracks. The partial optimism stemmed from the US condemning the Israeli invasions, telling Sharon to remove the tanks. No Palestinian had any delusions about Bush, yet the very optimistic hoped that maybe America had learnt from the Sept 11th attacks, and was finally going to tackle some of the roots of violence. Even the more cynical pointed out that if the US wanted to establish a true global alliance which included the Middle East, it would have to take a more honest approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Fast forward three months to December, Ramallah is still occupied. There are almost daily Apache attacks on police stations and nearby buildings. The Israeli's punitive 'security' measurers are enforced by driving the tanks further into town every time the Palestinians so much as twitch. Swathes of the city are now not only under Israeli control, but have regular curfews. An Israeli curfew does not begin in the evening - it is continuous, 24x7 while it lasts, though if you're lucky you'll get 20 minutes off to go shopping. Arafat is held captive in his own offices in the Mukata by the tanks parked just outside - ironically directly underneath a Marlboro advert proclaiming 'The Big Taste of America'. The Israeli military has recently set up a checkpoint at Surda, between Ramallah and Birzeit university, the largest university in Palestine. This checkpoint has nothing to do with security. It stops Palestinian men trying to go to work, students and lecturers going to university, children going to school. The lucky ones manage to scuttle pas the tanks and APCs (Armoured Personnel Carriers). Most men are stopped and detained. Supposedly, the Israelis are 'looking for terrorists'. But it is not the name that they check, but whether the ID card allows them to travel (reminiscent of the South African 'pass system'). Sometimes, the road is completely closed. There are alternate ways, but these are dangerous and many can't afford them. Like all checkpoints in the occupied West Bank, its purpose is harassment, not security. They don't stop suicide bombers, just disrupt the lives of the vast majority.

An International Action

On December 29th, Birzeit university was finally supposed to re-open. Of course, the soldiers at the checkpoint don't defer to term-time, a checkpoint remains a checkpoint. The students had invited us to help them get to school and open the road, our group of fifty ISM (International Solidarity Movement) nonviolent activists from America and Britain set off from Bethlehem in the early morning. We met over a hundred Italians and French in a hotel near the checkpoint, to prepare the action. The plan was to isolate the soldiers with lines of internationals, so that Palestinians could pass through undisturbed, with signs proclaiming their human rights. The British and Americans were to block the military access roads to stop reinforcements arriving.

When we reached the checkpoint, it turned out that the soldiers had left the checkpoint 15 minutes earlier, as there had supposedly been some commotion nearby. While people could move through, cement blocks stopped any vehicles from passing. With luck having handed us the checkpoint on a plate, it only remained to stop the military vehicles returning down the two access roads. There were also the two main roads, leading to Birzeit and into Ramallah. However, there were no military vehicles in Birzeit, and to bring vehicles from Ramallah would mean partially de-occupying, a pretty unlikely move for the Israeli Army.

To enable the traffic to pass, Palestinians (with help from the French and Italians) began to take the checkpoint itself apart. Several cement / tent structure used to detain passing Palestinians were toppled, sandbags emptied, and nearby trucks brought up to help shift the obstructing cement blocks off the road. Finally, a sniper post was removed from a strategic spot above the road and taken apart. As soon as the road was clear, traffic started flowing through, including taxis (minibuses), cars, ambulances and cement trucks.


Not surprisingly, the soldiers didn't approve of their checkpoint being dismantled and the vehicles passing through. As soon as we had arrived, they attempted to bring jeeps and APCs down the access roads. Faced with internationals lying across the road, they didn't know how to react (soldiers are trained to use force on Palestinians, they don't know how to handle nonviolent internationals). After a stand-off and revving their engines , the vehicles backed off and tried the other access road. Realising they weren't going to get down either road, they began to shoot tear gas down on the Palestinian vehicles and pedestrians beneath, with reasonable success. The two international affinity groups blocking that road marched up to the jeeps and APC to try to block their line of sight. To our surprise, the vehicles reversed to the top of the hill - from where they could no longer hit the people passing through the ex-checkpoint. Instead, they used the gas and sound grenades on us, hoping to move the internationals off the road long enough to squeeze through - to no avail. After several such attempts to break through our line, the soldiers ran out of projectiles to throw at us! They tried moving people physically instead, but every time they moved someone off the road, that person would get up and come back on the road again (obviously). The soldiers had neither the training nor manpower to remove us.

It was 1pm before the Army finally pulled some jeeps and APCs out of Ramallah, which blocked the road further up from the checkpoint. A line of French activists ensured that Palestinian pedestrians could get through without being stopped, but the vehicles were stuck again. By 2pm it was decided that we were no longer of much use, as people had to walk further than before, so we pulled out.

Assessment and ways forward

So, was the action a success? On the one hand yes, we managed to open the road for half the day, letting through lots of traffic that would otherwise not have reached Birzeit. No-one was stopped and detained, and all the students could get to university. The checkpoint was dismantled and the sniper post disabled. However, this shows the temporary nature of some of our successes. The checkpoint is back, Army trucks brought in a load of new cement blocks a few days later. In the immediate aftermath, Palestinians passing through Surda were treated worse than before - supposedly as 'punishment' for dismantling the checkpoint. The overall situation in Ramallah has not improved; this is why my first two paragraphs on Ramallah and Surda checkpoint are in the present tense - change on the ground has only been negative.

Despite this, I believe that our actions did have long-term positive effects. For a start, the media coverage was relatively positive - CNN, ABC, BBC World and Al-Jazeera were all showing footage of Israeli soldiers shooting gas and grenades at peaceful protesters and hitting people on the ground with their guns. Al-Jazeera is always positive, but having anything on CNN that doesn't vilify Palestinians is pretty rare. Even the Israeli right-wing press printed relatively neutral articles (except for the extreme right-wing, who branded us "Terror Tourists"!) More importantly, the action showed how Palestinians can empower themselves nonviolently. When any Palestinian resorts to violence, Israel receives US (& often EU) support in upping the stakes and responding with increased punitive measures. However, nonviolent action is very risky for Palestinians - according to the Israeli Army, all Palestinian protests are illegal and liable to suppression with 'necessary' force. If the students had tried to take the checkpoint apart without the international protection, they would have been shot. But because we had internationals working with Palestinians, it opened up a potential nonviolent space for future actions against the occupation. Such actions are vital for the Palestinians to regain moral stature in the eyes of Israel and the US. Until Israelis believe they can trust Palestinians, they will continue to support the aggression of Sharon and Netanyahu - widely perceived as 'defensive measures'. And Israelis will only recognise that the Occupation itself is the root cause of violence, when they see their soldiers using force on nonviolent Palestinians.

Of course, it is easy for us to sit here in Britain and tell Palestinians that their actions don't make strategic sense. "Why don't you just put down your guns. Then when Israel bombs you the world will see how unfair it is, and swing behind you." is all very nice and good, but the vast majority of Palestinians are nonviolent, and Israeli soldiers regularly shoot unarmed children, bomb schools and shoot missiles into ambulances, without much of a squeak from the rest of the world. Nonviolent direct action is a lot to ask when you face these risks and there seems little hope of reward. It's often hard to see how things will change for the better. While I was out there, I often felt helpless and impotent in the face of the Israeli military machine and the astounding Orwellian efficiency of our media in denying the true events on the ground.

Showing the resilience of the their people, it was the Palestinians who would cheer us up with both their optimism and their gratefulness for our mere presence. Many Palestinians have access to CNN, and can experience their own demonisation in the eyes of the West. Knowing how easy it was for us to dismiss all Palestinians as terrorists, they were insistent that "The important thing is that you see that we are humans too." Few Palestinians hesitated to welcome the Israeli & American Jews amongst us as friends, and many said they were happy to live next to the settlers, as long as they shared the water (systematically concentrated in settlements), and didn't attack them or destroy their olive groves. And there are positive signs on the other side - the Israeli peace movement as received a much-needed boost from the (still-rising) refusals to serve in the Occupied Territories. More surprisingly, Ami Ayalon, the leader of Shin Bet (Israeli 'Internal + Occupied Areas security) from 1996-2000 has called for unconditional withdrawal from the Occupied Areas and a viable Palestinian state, for the sake of both Israelis and Palestinians.

So what can we do? On the one hand, we need to continue to pressure our governments. Straw has referred to the Occupied Territories as 'Palestine', which is a positive step (and angered Sharon), but the EU continues to pussy-foot around and do nothing much. The UN has repeatedly demanded that Israel let in international observers - Israel has refused, unless they are CIA 'observers' - making the US-Israel link rather blatant. If Israel continues to refuse observers, occupy Palestinian Authority controlled areas, demolish houses, neutralise any infrastructure left and increase the 'closure', we should at least end our free trade agreements with Israel. However, there is also a need for voluntary observers and nonviolent activists.

There is a need for people to monitor Israeli soldier transgressions at checkpoints, remove roadblocks, support Palestinians in nonviolent action and offer protection by mere presence, as we did when we picked tomatoes at Atta's. This requires people of many different backgrounds. Our group had people ranging from a retired probation officer to an ex-IRA soldier, from a 74-year old Russian professor who fought for Israeli independence in 1948 to Earth First activists, from American Christian peacemakers to anarchist trade unionists. Nobody can do everything, but everybody can do their bit. Even if the situation sometimes seems intractable, there is still hope - as Nawaf, a Palestinian nonviolent activist told us, "When you come next time, intshalla there will be a free Palestine. Then we can work together to make peace in other places in the world."