David Rolstone's Letters from Palestine

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Wednesday, 31 December 2003 - From Budros

Hi All,

New Years Eve and still the violence increases, and we internationals are losing our ability to challenge what is happening. Budros is a small village of just 1,200 people just inside the green line. Its neighboring village Kidya was the village that was attacked by Sharon in 1952 when most of the inhabitants were killed and for these war crimes he was condemned by the Israeli Government. But back to today, Budros has decided as a community to resist the building of the annexation wall that will take 10 durams of their best agricultural land and olive trees. Three days ago they sat down in the olive trees and refused to move, they were successful and the bulldozers went away. The next day internationals and Israeli activist joined them and again after clashes with the IDF the bulldozers left although they had managed to destroy about 75 meters of olive trees.

This morning a group of internationals and myself joined the others already there. The situation when we arrived was already fairly tense, the army had deployed in the valley where the fence was being built overlooked by the village. Villagers and internationals had tried to reach the olive trees in the bottom of the valley and had managed to work their way down through the fields.

Then the army had attacked using battens to beat the village women and driving them and the internationals back. Some of the soldiers now targeted the internationals and first grabbed the three Israeli activists and took them away followed by the two Swedes, one of whom was the Swedish MP Gustaf Fridolin, so hopefully this will cause some sort of diplomatic incident as the second Swede was beaten by the soldiers. The soldiers were now skirmishing through the olive trees and prickly pears beating at the women and suddenly we realized that they were again targeting the internationals trying to cut them off and detaining them; this was when Kate was arrested. The group I was with had already decided that we did not want to risk arrest so started to climb out of the valley back to the village. As we and the older villagers including the women who had been beaten retreated the soldiers advanced until the children started to throw stones, the soldiers stopped under a hail of stones and we continued on up to the level ground to get out of the line of fire both from the stones and the soldiers who were now firing rounds of rubber bullets. This sort of advance and retreat continued for some time with Army jeeps entering the village and firing both live and rubber bullets at the villagers. At one time I was showered with fragments of stone from the house I was scurrying passed as the soldiers fired live rounds at us. The whole group decided to retreat to a safe distance and to reassess what was happening. Some of the group decided that the situation was more than they wanted to deal with, and one experienced man had to leave for other reasons so it was decided that 4 of the group would leave. The village had now all gone in to the mosque to decide on what to do next and decided to have a demonstration walking through the village and along the road that overlooked the valley.

We told the village leaders that we would not stay with the demo if stones were thrown and they assured us this would not happen, which it did not.

Once the demo reached the road overlooking the valley we turned around and started to return to the village, it had been completely peaceful. Then a jeep arrived with a soldier standing in the back firing at the crowd and once more people were hurt. More than 50 Palestinians needed medical treatment from the ambulance and medical volunteers during the day with six people being arrested.

Tomorrow I'm returning to Nablus with new internationals. Nablus is still under occupation so it will be interesting trying to get in.

All for now Dave

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