the graceful arc of the projectile

A blue-skyed Friday.
Soft, and crisp.

I awake in Jerusalem, well-rested, and showered, and fed, and such, and I am in a service taxi with four others, headed for Bil'in, via Qalandia checkpoint, where the massive grey wall crisscrosses with a field of fences and a maze of pathways, through which one must pass to enter the Jerusalem area from Ramallah. We negotiate a taxi and head onwards.

Cliffs of perfectly shaped pines. The onwards expanse of white rock, dry grass. A crowd of birds, moving like arrowheads.

We go a long way around, but at the entry to Bil'in we are stopped at a flying checkpoint, and made to wait for twenty minutes or so by the soldiers. Then: they tell the driver in Hebrew to turn around and take us away, and he does. We have been denied access to the town.

Bil'in is a town east of Ramallah, and is one of the many Palestinian towns which will suffer greatly from Israel's planned Annexation wall. The wall itself is quickly snaking itself across the countryside, and despite its distance from the Green Line, Bil’in will lose 60% of its agricultural land once it is completed. As Israel has revoked all Palestinian work permits since the most recent intifada, the people of Bil'in rely hugely on their agricultural land in order to survive. The route of the Wall through Bil’in is designed to annex land for the continuing illegal expansion of Modi’in Illit settlement.

Every Friday the town holds, in conjection with a number of Israeli and International activist groups, a non-violent protest in their town in order to oppose the walls construction. This is one such Friday.

We ring our contact in Bil'in, Mohammed, and we explain that we cannot get in. Within three minutes Mohammed has arrived, his car passing past the checkpoint, and towards us, further down the road, out of sight. Let's go! he cries. We jump out, grab packs, and the car returns to the town, while we begin to hike, through the olive orchards, around the checkpoint. Our shoes thud on the dusty soil as we leap down the tiers. And into the town, and back into the car, and towards the meeting point.

There are about 200 of us in all, marching along the road. People have their arms tied with fake black handcuffs, their fists raised high, the photographers snapping. There are banners, there are songs, and clapping hands. There is a Japanese Buddhist monk, banging a small drum. On the hill, above us, towards us, there is the army, spread out, staggered, against the fence.

We meet them and face them and stand there, still and chanting, for twenty minutes or so. A soldier is taking photos of internationals to use as proof against them at immigration, and the others stand, legs apart, two hands on large guns. We shout and sing and bang and clap and watch the armymen clench their jaws and flex their hands.

Then the group begins to move down the hill, some running, some walking, drawing the soliders down. They rush us, pushing us, punching, waving batons. There are clashes, and shouting soliders attempt to drag seated activists. It is a kind of chaos on the hill. We link arms and they tackle us, ripping us apart, moving us a metre or two then dropping us again. Soldiers block people's path to nowhere, unwilling to let them go along this exact path despite the fact that there are others walking around them, a short distance away. An arrest, a broken arm. And the crowd disperses further, and more soliders appear, and the whole thing continues more and more down the hillslopes.

Then the shebab on the hill appear, swinging slingshots, launching rocks. And the army, down there on the construction site, tiny plastic figurines in the valley, they answer with tubes of tear gas. The canisters whistle through the sky, plooming white smoke, and land with a spin and a jump on the rocks. The kids walk downwind of the cloud, wait for it to stop pouring, and retrieve the hot canisters, collecting them to sell by the kilogram for scrap metal. And continue slinging rocks in graceful arcs.

There are four of us leaving the area, uphill, when we are pinpointed and hit with tear gas. A canister lands at our feet, dancing with glee and spewing bitter smoke. Immediately, the chemically induced panic, the red inflamed eyes. We divide onion, break it, place it beneath our nose to smell it. We take refuge behind a stone wall. The shots continue, the whistling continues, the slings keep twirling. The action moves away, across hill, into another olive plantation, and it is now that the army begins shooting rubber bullets into the trees. The actual demonstration is long finished, all this that is left is a game, an advanced type of 'capture the flag', each team just waiting for the other to retreat first.

We return to the town. We have been out in the fields for two hours or so, in all. It has been a fairly quiet protest, by Bil'in standards.

photo by Jason Moore, not by me, note.