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Palestinians Face Mounting Barriers to Peaceful Protest

Associated Press

   RAMALLAH, WEST BANK - Abdullah Abu Rahma has been arrested by Israeli
   soldiers eight times in the last 15 years, spending weeks or months in
   prison and paying tens of thousands of dollars in fines for organizing
   protests.

   He's among a growing number of Palestinians who have embraced
   non-violent means of protesting Israel's military rule and expanding
   settlements, and who are increasingly finding those avenues of dissent
   blocked.

   Israel says the Palestinians should address their grievances in peace
   talks. But negotiations ground to a halt more than a decade ago, and
   the current government's position on core issues is rejected by the
   Palestinians and most of the international community.

   More than 50 years after occupying the West Bank, Israel is still
   systematically denying Palestinians civil rights, including the right
   to gather, Human Rights Watch said in a report released last month.
   Israel has also stepped up its campaign against the Palestinian-led
   international boycott movement, and the United States and other
   countries have adopted legislation to suppress it.

   Israel has also come down hard on Palestinian attempts to seek redress
   at the International Criminal Court. Last month, after a five-year
   preliminary investigation, the court said it was ready to open a full
   investigation pending a ruling on territorial jurisdiction. Israeli
   Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the court's decision "pure
   anti-Semitism."

   Omar Shakir, the Israel and Palestine director for Human Rights Watch,
   said Israel has "all but declared Palestinian opposition to the
   systematic discrimination they face illegitimate." Shakir himself was
   deported from Israel in November over his alleged support for the
   boycott movement.

   If it succeeds in banning forms of peaceful advocacy, he says, Israel
   will have "effectively left Palestinians no choice but submission to a
   regime of systematic repression, or violence."

   For decades, the Palestinians were branded terrorists because of their
   armed struggle against Israel, which included suicide bombings and
   other attacks on civilians. At the height of the Second Intifada, the
   violent uprising in the early 2000s, and for years afterward, observers
   wondered why there was no "Palestinian Gandhi."

   One candidate for such a title might be Abu Rahma, who for several
   years organized weekly protests outside his West Bank village of Bilin
   against Israel's controversial separation barrier. Israel says the
   barrier is needed for security, but would have cut off village
   residents from their land. The protesters eventually forced authorities
   to reroute the barrier following a court order.

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