Israel’s ‘New’ peace wave protests IOF violence in Bil’in

Israel’s peace and justice movement has been reborn. Ten years after the body blow that (current War Minister) Ehud Barak delivered to it when he said the Palestinians had “turned down a generous offer” (which wasn’t generous at all), and that there was “no-one to talk to” among the Palestinians, a new generation of Israeli activists has taken to the streets.
Literally.
This evening, several hundred Israeli peaceniks blocked the street in front of the War Ministry headquarters in Tel Aviv for over an hour as they protested yesterday’s killing-by-poison-gas of Bil’in villager Jawaher Abu Rahmeh. Eight demonstrators including former Meretz MK Mossi Raz were arrested there. Later, some of the demonstrators went to the home of U.S. ambassador James Cunningham in Herzliya, in order to “return” to him spent gas canisters picked up in Bil’in, which had generously been given to Israel by the U.S.
No word yet on any reaction Cunningham has voiced regarding Ms. Abu Rahmeh’s killing. But U.S. officials and spokespeople should be peppered with questions about it at every turn.
Ms. Abu Rahmeh was seeking, along with friends and colleagues from Bil’in and elsewhere, to gain access to her family’s land. Since 2004, Bil’in’s villagers have been quite illegally barred from huge swathes of their land by Israel’s Apartheid Wall.
You can follow the near real-time tweets of activist Joseph Dana (“Ibn Ezra”) here.
… Back in 2009, I reported and wrote this essay about the decline of the Israeli peace movement since 2000 (or perhaps, since much earlier than that.) Thank goodness a new generation of peace-and-justice activists has emerged there and has started to organize in a serious way.