The first thing I knew I had to do upon returning to Ramallah was pay a visit to the four lions of Manara Square. Recently I had been told by reliable sources that years ago, when the Palestinians drew up the architectural sketches of the city’s feline centerpiece, someone in the room doodled a little wristwatch above one of the beast's paws. Afterward the plans were sent off to China, that land of cheap but hasty labor, for cheap but hasty assembly. The story goes that when the completed statues returned from the Orient, the first thing everyone noticed was one of the lion guardians sporting a sleek, stone Rolex.

I can now confirm for everyone that Manara Square is not nicknamed “Wristwatch Square” in Arabic for any other known reason. I don’t know how I missed it last time I visited.



After this brief mission in the capital I shot off to Bil’in, a place now infamous for its weekly protests against the Israeli wall. It is a relatively small village in the Ramallah governorate, but it holds much significance to people as an exemplary site of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.

In 1991 two hundred acres of Bil’in agricultural lands were annexed and became the property of the Kiryat Sefer settlement. Other settlements, many erected without permit and through bogus documents, then gobbled up more of this land up until 2004, when the Israeli army began building up a “security fence” for the sake of the settlers. In 2007, after years of weekly protests at this wall, organized by Bil’in’s Committee of Popular Resistance, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled the wall unnecessary and ordered it to be rerouted so the Palestinians here might once again access their land. My friend Iyad Burnat is the head of said Popular Committee, and I scheduled a meeting with him for my weekend stay in Bil’in to cover the Friday demonstration.

I rolled into town slightly anxious about how long it would take to stumble upon Iyad’s house, to which I’d been given no direction. As I stepped out of the cab I approached the first people in sight, two men sitting outside of the shop right before me. Underneath a green tarp they chatted in the shade, looking ready for me to interrupt.

“Marhaban. Ayna Iyad Burnat?”

“Ahhh, Iyad Burnat. Welcome! You sit down. I get him.”

If only every arbitrary taxi drop could lead me so fluidly to my rendezvous! Iyad lives directly above the convenience store, and until he sauntered downstairs I made some chat with the two gentlemen, Raed and Jassam. The latter spoke more English and seemed happy to flex it.

As our conversation advanced, Jassam kept shifting his opinion of the “big problem.” First he identified it as the load of flies swarming around us in the shade. “Thubaab. Flies.” “Got it—yes, they’re horrible.” Soon after he asked me what I thought of the situation facing Bil’in. I answered briefly and returned the question: then the big problem revealed itself to be the occupation: “It is no way to live. This is a small village, most are farmers, and the occupation has taken the farmland. And we are arrested, in night raids.” Finally I asked him about when he thinks the wall might come down for good, reuniting the village with said land:

“Hah. And who takes the wall down? The Israelis? The American government? Without America, the occupation would be (wipes hands) finished. America, in my opinion, is the big problem.”



Iyad then appeared and I bid the other gentlemen goodbye. I walked to my lodgings not entirely pleased knowing that around here, my home country’s name takes the cake against both martial law and pestilence.

The next day, approaching the same shop, I saw at least a hundred people loitering and a series of buses. Friday prayers were ending soon, and the weekly march to the wall was about to begin. Bustling here were the soon-to-be demonstrators. There was a considerable international presence among them, which doesn’t surprise once one remembers how symbolic this protest has been grown over the past few years. I heard Italian, French, and some British squawking. And of course clustered together were quite a few Israeli activists that probably do this thing all the time. Most of the faces were young, especially among the locals, but the number of graying peacenik professors did not disappoint.

Sipping my coke amid the thubaab I saw some stranger elements shuffling around; there was a man in a spotless white lab coat and wraparound shades. Standing (too) near me was a man in a Charlie Brown shirt with a deep wheeze. In a way I feel as though I’ve let down both you and myself by not following up on their stories.

I spoke with Iyad briefly: he was in an organizational mode and would not actually be accompanying the crowd this week. Last time ‘round he caught a teargas canister in the leg and was advised by the doctor to sit this one out.

The imam wrapped it up over the loudspeaker and a second bullhorn was produced to lead the march. With what must have been around sixty or seventy people—though the ranks would thin out as we came closer to the actual soldiers and barbed wire—I joined the excursion from the center of Bil’in up to the wall that stands in front of one of the settlements. As the megaphone began to crackle and the locals sprung into marching mode, the great blob of internationals began to follow the flags and batons out of town and onto the rocky plain toward the wall.

It is a long way there on foot, or at least longer than I figured. Ahead of everyone was a younger guy confined to an electric wheelchair, with a gas mask strapped around the seat. Every now and then a couple of cars weaved through the cavalcade, most of them filled with local kids blasting music. Much of the chanting the bullhorn barked out was in English, to my ear tailored for young Western and Israeli idealists: “One, two, three, four—Occupation no more! Five, six, seven, eight, Israel is fascist state!” The group stopped for a moment at the memorial of Bassem Abu Rahme, a resident of Bil’in who was killed by a gas canister to the chest one month ago. From this point on the parade became more of a procession, though it continued to irritate me how obsessed some of the internationals were with taking photos. There was, at this point, really nothing to see. At times it felt as though the front half of the group was just collectively snapping their friends behind them while the latter half did the same for those ahead. It was also around this time I began to realize how oppressive the heat was and how bright the others were for bringing along their jugs of water.

Finally we came upon the menacing sight of the wall. Tall, grey and vast, it was actually more imposing than I had expected. In fact, it was so imposing that the eight soldiers poking their heads out from behind it looked comically insignificant, almost like a Three Stooges group-gawk. Even more goofy looking were the handful of settlers visible from beyond the wall, atop a hill, struggling to wave a string of Israeli flags to do emblematic battle with our rags of red, white and green.



As I said, right about now is where our numbers began to thin, as the man up front with the megaphone urged us along the length of the wall, barbed wire to our left, thorny shrubbery and stones beneath our feet. The leader of the demonstration shouted at the guards, stating the nonviolent nature of the protest and asking them to open the main gate so the Palestinians could reclaim their land. The first cluster of soldiers weren’t stirring much at this besides the one who was filming our tiny, passing figures on his iPhone. Looking behind me I felt as though the international demonstrators saw the soldiers as some kind of exhibit, as if soon they would all reconfigure and strike a different ‘occupier-on-duty’ posture for everyone to see.

Soon we had waddled through the shrubs to the main gate, guarded from on high by about six more soldiers. Our man with the bullhorn, flanked by what were obviously the most involved of the local kids, shouted more admonishments at this lot. These soldiers were more engaging than their colleagues down the line, though I couldn’t decipher the Hebrew they were shouting back at megaphone man. While this argument went back and forth I began chatting with a French fellow traveler and a handsome cameraman for Palestine Today TV. In the middle of our conversation I heard two mysterious shots ring out. My best guess as to their source would be an angry settler’s rifle from behind the wall.

Without further ado the heads of our (now considerably smaller) group turned their attention westward, toward a new branch of Mattityahu Mizrah (I believe; someone correct me on this). It lay a mile or so away, separated from us by a gravelly crag, barbed wire, another section of the wall, and a newly paved road upon which a few IDF trucks would soon roll out.

I was more or less ready for the handful of young locals that shot ahead of the internationals and the bullhorn, doing some negligible, token damage to the barbed wire sprawled across the crag. I was also ready for them to start throwing stones, and for others to join. I was ready for someone to overstep the mark—on this occasion a kid began to upheave a modest boulder to roll down the hill and was quickly reprimanded by his comrades. And, needless to say, I was ready for teargas from the aforementioned trucks below. But I did not expect the first canister to fly up and thrash about the air as a result of one stone hitting the roof of one of those Jeeps.

I didn’t see the stone bounce off of the crown of the car but I did hear the unanimous cheer let out by the demonstrators when they observed the direct hit.

I did however see the tiny Jeep pull over on the grey ribbon of pavement, miniature men in miniature helmets streaming from the sides. Within seconds they had aimed and fired, and the first canister shot up and its gas began to mingle with the wind. It took a little while longer, and a few more canisters, until my eyes, scalp and tongue were trimmed and burning and I backed away from the cliff. Without a gas mask one really must make haste to flee the scene, especially since the wind disperses the stuff faster than one can waddle away. At this point the group really was down to the lone few locals and those with gas masks. The soldiers fired off enough gas to send most of the internationals on a trek back to town. I returned to the cliff with my hat over my mouth for a brief stint, long enough to see the flames rise up off of the ground from the burning canisters. The makeshift bonfires made the whole scene remarkably grim, black earth underneath you and grey smoke above.


I caught a ride back to the village with the crew of Palestine Today TV. (Another fabulous stroke of luck; as I made my way down the dirt road, breathing heavy breaths under the sun, a silver auto pulled up next to me. The handsome cameraman from before rolled down the window and said, simply, “Get in.”) The car’s A.C. gusting on my face, I scribbled down some thoughts about the protest.

It is easy to view this whole process—enacted every Friday, let’s remember—as just another bizarre dance that plays out in the historically canonized “Israeli/Palestinian Conflict.” The protesters know they’ll be gassed and the gate will not open; the soldiers know they’ll be chided and the state will receive more bad press. And if one wishes to stress institutional, procedural struggle as the real force for change, it was a ruling by the High Court that dismantled the earlier stretch of the wall, not a dramatic rush by Bil’in minutemen. That would be have been a bloodbath.

True, such a rush is not how one achieves a solid victory against this occupation. But even if I find this dance a bit hackneyed; even if I find the internationals a bit poseur; even if court orders and diplomacy are the brute forces of change, I cannot dismiss or ignore the work that Iyad and the Popular Committee do each day. They have recovered half of the land originally appropriated by an overwhelmingly powerful occupier; they convinced UNICEF to severe all relations with Israeli-American billionnaire Lev Leviev, whose money props up the settlements surrounding Bil’in. These people have waited for years for the Israeli justice system to live up to its purpose, with many a demonstration in between. It would be impossible to say any single one of the protests served as the last straw for the intransigent ministries of Justice and Defense. But something tells me that every Thursday night, enough of those judges and generals had Iyad and the Committee on their minds, wondering what the villagers might cook up the following morning to embarrass the army once again.