A Village Mobilized: Lessons from Budrus

A Village Mobilized: Lessons from Budrus

Ida Audeh, The Electronic Intifada

Residents of Budrus sit in front of a bulldozer surrounded by Israeli
soldiers trying to prevent the Israeli Army from uprooting olive
trees and confiscating more land from the village . (Peace and Love
Center)

This year marks the 59th anniversary of the dismemberment of
Palestine, otherwise known as the establishment of the state of
Israel, and the 40th anniversary of Israel's occupation of the West
Bank (including East Jerusalem), the Gaza Strip, and the Golan
Heights. Israel and the western world have imposed sanctions on the
Palestinians in the occupied territories, the majority of whom now
live below the poverty level; and Israel in collaboration with
willing Palestinian lackeys continues its savage assault ostensibly
on members of Hamas but in reality on all Palestinians who reject the
shabby future assigned to them in the Oslo agreement.

The people of Budrus, a village (population 1,300) about 12
kilometers northwest of Ramallah and no more than 3 kilometers from
the green line, teach us that Palestinian fate is not carved in
stone; the outcome to the Israel-Palestine struggle is not a foregone
conclusion. After the 1948 war, Israel confiscated about 80 percent
of the land area of Budrus, leaving less than 5,000 dunums, and later
established a military training base. Despite the provocation of the
base on village lands, not a single shot was ever fired by the
villagers, and not a single suicide bomber ever emerged from the
village. Then in 2004 Israeli bulldozers arrived to start work on a
wall that, when completed, is expected to extend for about 650
kilometers; it had begun in the Jenin area in the northern West Bank
in 2003, jutting well into the West Bank and encircling Qalqilya as
it snaked along a southwesterly course. And Budrus brought the
bulldozers to a standstill.

The story of Budrus is noteworthy because it reminds us that unarmed
people are not powerless. Confronted with an Israeli plan to
confiscate 1,000 dunums of village lands to erect a wall that would
ultimately enclose area villages in a canton, Budrus residents put
their bodies in front of the bulldozers that came to raze their
farmlands. Unarmed, and abandoned to their fate by the increasingly
useless and indifferent Palestinian Authority, the villagers quickly
realized that the wall would stifle the area and make their lives
unsustainable. They resisted the Israeli juggernaut with their bodies
and temporarily stopped it in its tracks. The villagers paid a high
price -- the Israeli occupation forces conducted mass arrests and
inflicted numerous injuries with live ammunition -- and despite a
legal victory in an Israeli court, ultimately they could not prevent
the 3,500-meter wall from being built. But they did manage to change
its course, and in so doing safeguarded some of their own and other
village lands. This is an achievement that has eluded local and
international activists in Bil'in, who have been holding well-
attended and well-publicized (2.4 million hits on Google for "Bil'in"
versus 51,600 for "Budrus") demonstrations at the wall every Friday
for at least two years now.

The following interview is a synthesis of two conversations with Abd
al-Nasser Marrar, head of the Peace and Love Society and one of the
coordinators of the popular resistance committee formed to confront
the wall. The wall had not been completed when I met Marrar, then 34
years old, for the first time on 27 August 2005; when we met again
less than two years later (24 April 2007), the wall was in place, but
it has been the focus of school kids with shears who cut through the
coiled wires every chance they get. And although Israel restores the
wall that has helped it steal village lands, what has been
established is that Palestinians in this small village have not
resigned themselves to its presence.

As Marrar noted, "the Berlin Wall fell. The day will come when peace-
loving people will wake up. I think there are many Israelis who are
working against the wall. If Budrus resists on the eastern side of
the wall, let the Israelis resist on the western side. If there
really are peace-loving people, that wall will come down. But even
without the wall, the occupation is intolerable and cannot be borne."