How I Got Gassed in the West Bank

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Fadi Arouri / Reuters While Barack Obama met with Benjamin Netanyahu, Max Blumenthal was dodging tear-gas canisters in the West Bank, where a two-state solution seems very, very far away. WATCH THE VIDEO.

When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met Barack Obama at the White House on Monday, he warned the president that time was running out to stop a nuclear Iran. By impressing upon Obama the immediacy of the threat from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Netanyahu hoped to avoid committing to the two-state solution he and his right-wing governing partners have so far openly and forcefully opposed. While Netanyahu attempts to recalibrate the discussion toward Iran, his government continues a vast expansion of the occupation of the West Bank, creating “facts on the ground” to fulfill the vision of a Greater Israel.

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The recognition by the U.S. and the West of a viable Palestinian state in partnership with Israel has never seemed more like a pipe dream. After spending a week on the West Bank, I observed that settlement of the West Bank is being consolidated and expanded. Armed resistance by Palestinian groups lies dormant, while those Palestinians who employ nonviolent means to resist the Israeli government’s plan to divide and annex their land are being met with draconian and sometimes lethal force.

The small Palestinian village called Ni’lin is located just miles outside Israel’s 1967 Green Line, directly in the planned path of the separation wall. Israel’s winding concrete and fence barrier would permanently sever Ni’lin from much of its farmland, effectively annexing the land to several Jewish settlements that surround the village. In May 2008, Ni’lin’s local governing committee declared a popular struggle against the wall, organizing weekly marches and actions to block the path of its construction. While factional divisions between Fatah and Hamas rivet most of the Occupied Territories, the struggle in Ni’lin is one of factional unity against dispossession.

International activists and a small band of Israelis who, after serving jail sentences for refusing to serve in the army, also rushed to Ni’lin, hoping that their presence would mitigate the army’s violence against local Palestinians.

Confronting a fusillade of tear gas, rubber bullets, and live ammo with protest signs and the occasional slingshot, the people of Ni’lin and their allies have so far managed to halt the wall. But their momentary success has come with a heavy price; since May, the Israeli army has killed four young villagers and critically wounded an American activist, Tristan Anderson, with a self-propelled tear-gas shell that hit him in the head.

I arrived in Ni’lin on the 61st anniversary of “Nakbah Day,” or what Palestinians call “the catastrophe.” Joining me was Jesse Rosenfeld, a 24-year-old Jewish-Canadian journalist who has lived on the West Bank and in Israel since 2007. Jesse is one of the few reporters to have covered Ni’lin’s struggle since its inception. He led me up a narrow street toward a crowd of demonstrators attempting to march to the wall. A phalanx of Israeli soldiers flanked on opposing hillsides by heavily armed troops blocked their path. The confrontation grew increasingly antagonistic when a man angrily displayed to the Israeli unit commander a photograph of Ahmed Mousa, a 10-year-old boy shot in the head and killed by Israeli forces when he attempted to remove barbed wire from the separation wall. “You killed him!” the man shouted. “You are responsible for his death!”

With that, the soldiers fired a salvo of tear-gas shells and percussion grenades at the crowd, sending everyone sprinting downhill. As I ran, tear-gas shells landed all around me. By the time I reached the town center, my eyes seared with pain and I struggled to breathe. “This is nothing,” Jesse remarked to me. “This is just soldiers having fun.”

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