Every night in Bi’Lin I have prayed that we do not need to come out – that is, that the Israeli army does not invade the village at night in order to arrest the people they can’t arrest during the demonstrations due to international presence.
I was in this village at the very beginning of my trip and it feels like it is ages ago.
Today M. comes and shows us some wonderful videos explaining the history of the Palestinian rip-offs, how some foreign Jews first began legally buying land and then the Israeli government stole and conquered. The potential Palestinian estate, “granted” by the United Nations, got smaller and smaller and more and more fragmented – and therefore not viable -, becoming what it is now, a few territories scattered apart and surrounded, besieged, each of them, by … THE WALL.
Bi’lin is very near Ramallah; in fact the road that communicates with what is now the de-facto capital of Palestine is one of the very, very few, that I have seen here without a permanent military checkpoint. It is not a long road; it usually takes taxis fifteen or twenty minutes to arrive here depending on the amount of passengers they need to drop.
It is because of this proximity to Ramallah that this small city is affected by the Wall that is being built around Ramallah. Again, Israel says it is for security reasons. Again too, deeds demonstrate that it is one more exercise, more or less civilised, of lands theft.
