From the front door of his single-storey stone house, Waheed Suleiman Yassin has an enviable view over the surrounding hills and a compelling vantage point in front of one of Israel’s most controversial projects in the occupied West Bank.
Just 20m from his door and running down two sides of his house stands the wide metal system of fences and patrol roads that make up this stretch of the 720km West Bank barrier.
This week, in a rare victory for the barrier’s critics, Israel’s Supreme Court ordered the government to reroute the barrier away from Bil’in, which should eventually allow villagers like Yassin to reclaim some of the large slice of their farmland that has been cut off from them for nearly three years.
Yassin (43), who sells limestone from a nearby quarry, has lived in this house with his family for 25 years. On a hilltop overlooking the rest of Bil’in and nearby villages, it was once much admired. “People envied us for having such a beautiful scene,” he said, sitting outside his house. “Three years ago it was a heaven, then the wall came.”
Like many in the village, Yassin suddenly found most of his farmland out of bounds. Instead he could see in the near distance Modiin Illit, one of the fastest-growing settlements in the occupied West Bank stretching ever closer. Modiin Illit is home to 30 000 mostly ultra-Orthodox settlers, and is projected to expand to a city of 150 000.
But, to the embarrassment of the Israeli government, the Supreme Court this week ordered the Defence Ministry to present a new path for the barrier and said the current route could not be justified.
Chief Justice Dorit Beinish said: “We were not convinced that it is necessary for security-military reasons to retain the current route that passes on Bil’in’s lands.” In certain places it would mean the fence must be torn down.
Although not the first such decision by the court, the ruling stands out for its tough language and the fact that Bil’in, almost alone among Palestinian villages, has mounted over the past two and a half years a successful campaign of peaceful resistance to the barrier.
“Weapons were forbidden from the start,” Yassin said. “People decided we should take a prominent role with a peaceful movement because we knew that with an armed struggle we were not capable of taking back one inch of land. If we had fired one bullet, the Israeli army would have found an excuse to kill the whole village.”
Demonstrators gather every Friday, march to the barrier singing and waving flags, and confront the Israeli soldiers. Stones are thrown and answered with tear gas, stun grenades and often rubber-coated bullets. At least two people have been seriously injured and many others suffered lesser injuries.
On Tuesday, trucks and vans carried dozens of singing villagers out to the barrier again where they waved flags and rattled sticks on the metal fence in front of the Israeli soldiers. One villager shouted to the crowd through a loudspeaker: “Your steadfastness brought you here.”
One of the protest organisers, Nasir Samarra (27), stood in the crowd wearing a T-shirt that read “Free Palestine”. “Our struggle has only just started,” he said. “Now we want Israel to implement this decision, not simply to pass judgement.” — Â