Palestine-Israel, Bil'in, The Friday joint demonstration of 19-8-05

The joint Palestinian, internationals, and Israelis of the Anarchists Against The Wall initiative demonstration started as usual at center of village early afternoon. As usual, the demonstration had a special feature - this time mirrors on which were written texts of placards in an inverted mode so when they reflected the Sun light on any surface, it was seen as the surface became a placard of that text.
As usual, the two hundred participants marched towards the fence building site west of the village. As usual, slogans and other vocal expressions were expressing the mood of the marchers. As usual, just at the fringe of the buildings area of the village there was the line of the army soldiers behind the barbed wire line blocking the road. Not as usual, this time we reflected placards on the bodies of the soldiers the sun light....

As usual the commander of the reserves army force (that replaced the border police and special police unit - few weeks ago and behave much less belligerent) warned us that it is a military closed zone. He said harsh repression will be applied if the demonstration will continue longer than few minutes.... And the many photographers had their fun taking pictures of the virtual placards projected on the soldiers.

After a while, the unruly youngsters of the village became restless. (They are not respecting too much the requests of the village fence struggle comity members to refrain from stone throwing during our demo.) So, they started to act. First they threw few eggs on the soldiers in front of the demonstration who responded with a short assault on the nonviolent demonstration and detaining 8 of us - 3 internationals and 5 Israelis.

After the short assault, we regrouped again in line in front of a line of the soldiers refusing to give in. So the nonviolent demonstration continued.... while in the olive orchards on the two sides of the road the attrition battle between the youngsters and the army continued.

And again, after a lone stone of the youngsters strayed to the demonstration area, the soldiers used it as an excuse for another assault on the nonviolent demonstration, but their shock grenades and tear gas failed again to disperse us.

All the time of the demonstration, people "preached" to the reservist army people against the occupation, against the fence that rob more than half of the Bil'in village for enlarging the building area of the settlers city Modi'in I'lit. Some people shamed the soldiers for assaulting nonviolent demonstrators and for shooting on kids who only throw stones.

After a long while, the commander of the army unit decided to give in. He told us he will call his force back few meters and did it. At that point we decided to end our demonstration, and return to center of village, and the arena became the battle ground between the unruly youngsters and the army.

As usual lately, an hour or so after the demonstration ended most of the people detained were released and only 3 internationals were taken to police station.

As usual, collected video clips that prove the arrested demonstrators were falsely accused of violence were taken by comrades to the police station for releasing the comrades taken there.

During the demonstration, few comrades were lightly injured and one person was more seriously wounded in her head from a stone thrown by the youngsters from a near by house roof....