Itai Levinsky says that he will return to the struggle after he recovers. It was Levinsky who, last December 26, saved the life of Gil Na'amati after Na'amati was shot by an IDF sniper near Maskha. While the soldiers ignored the demonstrators' pleas to summon an ambulance, Levinsky organized a quick evacuation of the bleeding Na'amati in a Palestinian car, and at the checkpoint an Israeli ambulance joined them. Na'amati lost a great deal of blood and arrived at the hospital in serious condition. The doctors told his father, Uri, the head of Eshkol Regional Council, that if the evacuation had been delayed they would probably not have been able to save his son's life.
Almost three months later, on March 12, it was Levinsky who ended up in hospital. "I went to demonstrate at Hirbata," he recalls. "The army's reaction was violent to the extreme this time. They simply fired rubber bullets like crazy, even though most of the people quickly lay down on the ground among the rocks. Naturally, when you're lying down, there's no difference whether they fire at your head or your legs, because it's all at the same height. I was standing in front and talking to the soldiers via the megaphone, to make them understand that there were Israelis there, too, which sometimes makes them calm down a little. It's scary, but what can you do?"
This time, though, the megaphone and the Hebrew weren't an insurance policy. Levinsky took a rubber bullet between his nose and his left eye.
"Suddenly I felt terrible pains around the eye and nose," he says. "My eye was injured, but luckily wasn't blown up, and the left side of my nose was completely shattered. I lay on the ground but was in total focus. A Red Crescent ambulance took me to the checkpoint, and from there I got to Tel Hashomer [Sheba Medical Center]. I was hospitalized for 10 days and had an operation on my nose, and because my vision is still pretty much of a mess I'll need eye surgery, too. The truth is that I was really lucky, because a rubber bullet that enters the eye can reach the brain. It's total chance that I'm alive. For both me and Gili it's pure luck that we weren't killed."
Film shot at the Hirbata demonstration - though the actual instant when Levinsky was wounded was not photographed - reinforces his version of events. The soldiers fire massively at dozens of people who are lying on the ground and seeking shelter amid the rocks.
"At about 6 A.M., as soon as the bulldozers started working, the villagers started to demonstrate," relates Raz Avni, 23, a former kibbutznik who now lives in Tel Aviv. "We were about six Israelis that day. The soldiers were standing in a row across from the demonstrators and there was a lot of cursing, pushing and punching, and then the soldiers suddenly pulled back quickly, turned around and started firing rubber bullets. I was next to Itai. He said through the megaphone, `This is not a violent demonstration. Don't shoot.' Suddenly he shouted. I looked at him - he was lying on the ground and his eye was bleeding. I called the Red Crescent medics, who come to every demonstration. It took them a few minutes to reach us, because the shooting continued. They put a dressing on his eye and evacuated him to the ambulance on a stretcher."
Levinsky, 20, grew up in Ramat Efal and Holon and now lives in the lower-class Hatikva neighborhood in South Tel Aviv. He did not do army service. Until recently he worked in construction. He plans to go back to the demonstrations as soon as his health permits. One day during Pesach, Uri and Gil Na'amati - whose shattered knee is still in the rehabilitation process - drove from their home in the south of the country to visit Gil's rescuer, who was afterward wounded himself.
"What is left to say?" Uri Na'amati summed up. "It's heartbreaking."
Provocateurs
As in every quarrel, here, too, the dispute revolves around the question of who started it. How does happen that demonstrations whose organizers term them nonviolent evolve into events with dozens of wounded, mainly from massive use of rubber bullets? A senior IDF officer finds it difficult to accept the pastoral descriptions of a nonviolent intifada: "I don't know of any quiet demonstration where the people stood and sang, but which ended with rubber bullets fired by us," he says. "We have set ourselves a clear line that distinguishes a demonstration from a disturbance: The moment an attempt is made to attack equipment or soldiers, it's a disturbance, and then our response ratchets up. The mission as defined for us by the political echelon is to enable construction of the fence, and as fast as possible, and if a bulldozer is burned every day the fence won't get built. The instructions to the forces in the field are clear: The first means they are allowed to use is stun grenades and tear gas. If that doesn't help, we recommend that the instigators be arrested and that a complaint against them be filed with the police, because that often disperses things. Only if we have gone through that procedure, and the soldiers are on the receiving end of stones - and from our point of view stones are a mortal danger - the next level is to fire rubber [bullets], with the authorization of a battalion commander at least, and the firing has to be aimed at someone specific, a chief instigator who we didn't succeed in arresting."
The films shot at many demonstrations show that there is a large gap between these instructions and their application in the field. Time after time the camera records massive firing by many soldiers at the same time in the general direction of demonstrators, who are sometimes dozens or hundreds of meters away. One thing is certain: The firing is not aimed at a lone "instigator." As for the stone throwing, it's difficult to decide which comes first: the stones or the rubber bullets. The impression is that things change from village to village and from event to event.
"In some cases two or three children throw stones from a distance of 100 meters, and it's obvious that this is symbolic and can't hurt anyone," says Dr. Kobi Snitz, who teaches mathematics at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and has taken part in a number of demonstrations. "Sometimes three hours of an encounter go by without one stone being thrown, and then suddenly the soldiers lose it - they're standing out in the sun for hours, you know - and they start throwing stun and tear-gas grenades, and then all hell breaks loose. [Some] villages have a committee that tries to keep the children under control, but it's hard."
Snitz says the escalation is the result of deliberate policy - if not at the political level, then at least at the decision-making level in the army: "There are now demonstrations of hundreds and thousands of people every day. Whoever takes 10 soldiers to a site like that tells them, `No matter what happens, [demonstrators] don't get close to the bulldozers,' knows what the result will be."
What do you expect the soldiers to do - let the bulldozers be torched?
Snitz: "A properly run state understands that when there is resistance at a certain level to policy, either it heightens the violence and crushes the resistance or it sits and listens. Naturally, I think the soldiers should refuse to do what they are doing, but beyond that, every major in the field can [inform his superiors] via radio - when he's facing this number of people - that the mission he has been given is impossible to execute unless they want the whole thing to blow up. The problem is that he then ruins his chances of promotion. I often talk to the soldiers in the field and many of them say that they're there because `I have no choice,' or `What do you want me to do,' or `I know there's something wrong, but what can I do?' When senior officers describe serious events as `hitches,' they are effectively transferring responsibility to the individual soldier."
Legal battles
In the past few weeks the "intifada of the fence" has also been keeping the High Court of Justice busy. As part of the effort to play the game according to the rules of Israeli democracy, a number of villages have filed petitions to the court against the route of the fence. Most of the cases are still pending. The lawyer in the majority of the petitions is Mohammed Dahla, an Israeli citizen whose office is located in East Jerusalem.
Dahla sums up the results of the legal battle to date: "Roughly speaking, I can say that in more than 70 percent of the routes with respect to which petitions have been filed to the High Court, interim injunctions have been issued prohibiting the continuation of the work. In another 15 percent the court allowed the state to work without limitations, though noting that if the petition is accepted the state will have to restore the status quo ante and compensate residents. And in the other 15 percent of the cases, the court allowed irreversible work to be carried out."
In some cases Dahla filed the petition together with Palestinian villages and Jews from nearby communities who support the moving of the fence from the villagers' farmlands to inside the Green Line. In one such case, a joint petition was filed by residents of Beit Suriq, a village situated across a ridge from the Jerusalem suburb of Mevasseret Zion, and by 30 residents of the suburb. A far larger number of residents of Mevasseret Zion, more than 600, signed a petition supporting the moving of the fence inside the Green Line, and 50 of them joined the residents of Beit Suriq in a demonstration.
An interesting development in this case occurred when the petitioners added the names of several retired IDF generals from the Council for Peace and Security, among them Assaf Hefetz, Avraham Adan, Shaul Givoli and others, who have recently visited various parts of the fence route and reject the defense establishment's claim that the route was established with security considerations in mind. This connection between a group of security-conscious veterans and Palestinian villagers is little short of surrealistic against the backdrop of the current intifada, but has arisen due to the struggle against the route of the fence.
Last week, at the height of the army's encirclement of a house in Biddu, the residents called Dahla, who rushed to court and was able to get an interim injunction against the demolition of the house.
"This is an interesting process," he says. "It is reviving the popular uprising. Willy-nilly, the residents are getting involved in this because they are simply losing everything they have. They understand that if they don't act, they will end up living in a ghetto, without their lands or a source of livelihood. The decision on an unarmed uprising is a strategic one. We can see that in these places there is no use of firearms, not only when it comes to soldiers but also in regard to the nearby settlements or Israeli locales located across the hill. Maybe it's because of their location - these are places [whose residents] have worked a great deal with Israelis - or maybe it's because of the cooperation with the left-wingers, or maybe it's because they understand that the important war is the one for Israeli public opinion."
However, that battle is so far not succeeding. Three and a half years of intifada, and some 37 years of occupation, have made the Israeli public and its establishments blind to developments on the other side, leaving them unable or unwilling to take note of subtleties. True, the IDF doesn't view the demonstrators as armed gangs, but disperses the protesters with a force that they perceive as a way to persuade them that even nonviolent protest is useless. The media ignore the demonstrations almost totally, and because this is a daily struggle that is also dangerous, no more than dozens of Israelis are taking part in it, joined occasionally by activists from movements such as Ta'ayush [the Arab-Jewish Partnership grass-roots organization] and Gush Shalom. "The message that Israel is sending the Palestinians who are trying to protest nonviolently is that we don't want any such protest," says one Israeli who participates in the demonstrations. "It's that we prefer a violent struggle and that we are not willing to accord legitimacy to any type of resistance by them. For years we have been asking them why they don't follow the path of Mahatma Gandhi, but when they do just that we respond with rubber bullets and tear gas. What we are doing now is shooting the Palestinian peace camp."n
Olive trees and rubber bullets "A demonstration by Palestinians against the construction [of the fence] is a loaded business with plenty of emotions - land, work, olive trees - and when Israelis, internationals and the media join in, it becomes even more complex," says a senior IDF officer who is responsible for the sector where most of the events in the past few months have taken place. "That complexity finds expression in the way we can allow
ourselves to respond, morally and in terms of values, and also taking into consideration how it looks to the world and to Israeli society."
The turning point, the officer says, was the shooting of Gil Na'amati. "That event was investigated by the chief of staff, and afterward clear instructions were issued. The most significant thing that changes when Israelis are in the field is the rules of engagement [for opening fire]. We try to make use of a great deal of police intervention
and to address the subject through the courts. I've heard that the Palestinians call it a 'peaceful demonstration,' but it seems to me we have a conceptual gap here. When the Palestinians throw stones, they regard it as a quiet demonstration. And I'm not talking about one stone. It's important to point out that at one demonstration, in Beit Lakiya,
there was also shooting; we arrested the squad that did the shooting, though it's true that this was the only case.
"I don't say there are no hitches. A soldier is out there for hours, being cursed. Not all of them are icemen and sometimes even commanding officers lose control. There is friction, it's not sterile. As part of the verbal friction our people also say things they shouldn't. Some of them call the soldiers 'Nazis' or 'sons of bitches,' especially if they're Israelis, and the soldiers lose their cool and call them 'collaborators.' The instructions are to try to end the incident with as few as casualties as possible, and in many cases the way to put an end to the story is to seize the chief instigators."
How do you define an instigator?
The officer: "Someone who calls out things through a megaphone, agitates, tries to reach the [construction] equipment. In most cases, the moment we try to arrest those people, the event turns violent, with stones and things. You have to remember that it's in the participants' interest for the demonstration not to occur quietly. They want the event to be talked about, for people to say that there was a demonstration at which such-and-such happened. We try very hard to restrain ourselves, but you have to remember that when it comes to mortal danger, there is also a matter of subjective feeling - standing among hundreds of Palestinians at Bitunia, which is on the outskirts of Ramallah, is not like walking through Tel Aviv. You feel threatened.
"There is no doubt that the situation of the recent period poses a dilemma for us. If you're fired at, there is no dilemma, it's a black-and-white affair, you know what to do. In events of the kind we are talking about, which are now occurring almost every day, there's a lot of gray."
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