Ben Ehrenreich is the author of this week's cover article about the weekly Friday protests against Israeli occupation of Nabi Saleh in the West Bank. Ehrenreich has published two novels, "Ether" and "The Suitors," and contributed to Harper's Magazine, Los Angeles Magazine and other publications.
How did you first hear about the village of Nabi Saleh?
I was in the region in 2011, working on an article about the role of water in the occupation for Harper's Magazine, and I heard about the conflict over the spring in Nabi Saleh from an Israeli activist. I ended up going to one Friday protest, which left a deep impression on me. I spent only a few hours there that time, but in the months after I returned to the States, I kept thinking about the village. I wanted to understand what would motivate people to keep fighting, to keep demonstrating every week, knowing exactly what the consequences would be and how much they stood to lose.
What most surprised you after you first arrived in the village?
I had heard a great deal about the warmth and hospitality of the people there — it's a favorite among foreign and Israeli activists for a reason — but I was still taken aback. On my first Friday there, once the tear-gas grenades started flying and the Israeli Defense Forces entered the village, I ended up having to take shelter in one house after another. No one thought twice about welcoming a complete stranger (or a large group of complete strangers) even though it might mean attracting the soldiers' attention and a considerable amount of danger for their homes and families. The first house in which I took shelter that day turned out to be the home of Mustafa Tamimi, who was killed a few months later, when an Israeli soldier fired a tear-gas canister directly into his face.
The protests seem like a lot of additional work, especially for women like Nariman who must cook for international protesters and receive visitors. Are there families or people in the village who don't participate in the protests?
Yeah, I sometimes thought that dealing with all the journalists (myself included) and international visitors who pass through the village seemed a more onerous task than dodging bullets and tear-gas grenades. But yes, there are certainly people in Nabi Saleh who don't participate in the demonstrations. When I was there in the summer, about half the households in the village took part. In January and February, after the death of Rushdie Tamimi, that number seemed to have dropped even more. It is hard to overstate what the loss of two young men in one year means to a village of 550 people.
I was struck by the heterogeneity of the group of protesters. How big is the presence of Israeli activists, and do they have significance in wider Israeli politics?
In my experience, there were always at least a few Israelis at the protests, generally between 6 and 12. Some of them show up week after week and have been doing so for years. Many of them have been arrested repeatedly (though it's worth saying that the consequences of arrest are much less severe for Israelis, who are tried in the Israeli civil courts, than for West Bank Palestinians, who are tried in military courts and have far fewer rights). A few have established strong bonds with people in the village. But I don't think this sort of activism should be taken to reflect any overall leftward shift in Israeli attitudes. The activists who go to demonstrations in Nabi Saleh and the other popular resistance villages in the West Bank are a tiny and quite lonely group. I think it's fair to say that most Israelis are not particularly interested in what goes on across the Green Line. More than the turn to the right, what was remarkable about this most recent election campaign was the degree to which the occupation was simply not an issue for most Israeli politicians and voters. For the first time it wasn't even addressed by the Labor Party's platform. The religious right is actually far more concerned with what's happening in the West Bank than the secular center and all but a few people on the left.
The participation of international protesters seems both helpful and not. Did you get the sense of how committed they were to the cause?
Some were quite serious and committed and some were not. At the first demonstration I went to, a group of mainly European activists sat down in front of an I.D.F. jeep to prevent the arrest of a Palestinian journalist. They held their ground even as an Israeli border police officer lifted their chins so he could spray their eyes with pepper spray. Some international activists have lost their lives — Rachel Corrie, famously, was killed after attempting to stand down a bulldozer in Gaza. One American activist who spent a lot of time in Nabi Saleh lost an eye after being hit by a tear-gas canister at a protest outside Ramallah. Nariman, who was standing next to her when it happened, spoke about her with great affection. All of that said, most of the internationals are quite young, and I've encountered groups who seem much more interested in photographing one another in their khaffiyehs than in engaging with the people in the village.
Are there plans to take the kind of protest going on in Nabi Saleh and scale it up, to bring it to a larger number of villages?
Until last October, the village demonstrations had been going on in a fairly routine way — in some villages for as long as seven years — without much forward momentum. Since then, though, there have been a series of actions aimed at spreading the resistance to the rest of the West Bank, of taking it outside of the villages. In January, activists put up a tent village on Palestinian land in the area known to Israel as E1, which Netanyahu had recently marked for massive settlement expansion. People from all over the West Bank took part. They were evicted after two days, but that action in particular hit on some magical, symbolic resonance. Suddenly the popular resistance was making headlines again, and Palestinians all over the West Bank began erecting tent villages of their own. There have been much larger protests in the West Bank over the last month — in solidarity with hunger-striking prisoners; in reaction to the death of a Palestinian prisoner following his interrogation by Israeli intelligence officers; and in reaction to the shooting deaths of six unarmed Palestinians by Israeli forces. Not one of these has been confined to a few villages. I don't want to guess at what might happen. There is certainly enough frustration and rage to spark a wider uprising, but I don't know if there's a sufficient level of organization to sustain one right now.
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