The creation of the camp

In March 28, 2003 there was a demonstration and march into the olive fields that were to be taken away from the village of Mas'ha (5,500 dunums out of the 6,000 dunums of the village's agricultural lands). Villagers received notification that their lands would be confiscated by the Israeli military in February 2003 for the construction of the first phase of the Apartheid Wall. At the end of the march, we've settled down in a camp, which is maintained by villagers and international and Israeli peace activists 24 hours a day. Originally we thought that we'd be evacuated right away, but we've managed to stay there until July (when the building of the wall made it impossible to carry water and supplies and we had to move to a new location).

The second location

For various logistic reasons, we had to move the camp to a smaller area in June 2003. One of the advantages was that we were able to supply electricity from the village to the camp, so it became an information center where we were able to use computers and edit presentations about the wall (like the exhibition we did at Salfit town). By this time about one thousand Israeli and international activists had visited the camp and, for the first time, the construction of the wall in the West Bank was broadcast on Israeli TV Channel 2 due to the attention that the peace camp demanded.

Hani Amer's yard

For more pictures click here

On the evening the 2nd of August 2003, we've found out that in the morning the constructors of the wall intended to start working inside Hani Amer's yard at the edge of the village of Mas'ha (all this during the "Hudna" agreement where Israel is supposed to stop construction in disputed areas).

In order to construct the wall inside the yard several structures had to be destroyed (crippling Amer's sources of income), and the final plan is to have his yard surrounded with fences, and to "allow" his family and visitors strict times during the day to enter and exist the Amer yard (as if it were a prison camp). Of course, this is also dependant on the "good will" of the Israeli soldiers and police.

Early morning on the 5th of August, after a promise from the constructor that he wouldn't destroy structures in the yard until the issue was discussed with higher authorities, all structures but the house itself were destroyed, a total of more than 60 Palestinian, Israeli and international activists were detained. The tent for the camp was removed, and the Amer's yard was declared a closed military zone.

Shooting of Gil Na'amati

The camp was over and the construction of the wall completed, but villagers continued to protest the closure of the fence that they had been promised access to. On December 26, 2003 they organized a protest and invited Israeli and international activists to participate in protesting the closed gate of the wall they the army had promised it would open periodically. In the non-violent protest, demonstrators cut the fence and Israeli soldiers shot live rounds at the protesters, hitting Israeli Gil Na'amati twice in the legs. He was rushed to a hospital and received immediate surgery and life-saving blood transfusion. The violent response of the Israeli army caught the attention of international press, which had been mostly ignoring the detrimental effects of the wall and its protestors.

Read Al Jazeera's Dec. 27, 2003 article

Read the BBC Dec. 26, 2003 article

Read an eye witness account with pictures

To view the video produced about the protest called Democracy is Not Built on Demonstrators' Bodies click here

See also:

• The camp in the eyes of a Palestinian activist
• The camp in the eyes of an Israeli activist

published first on znet.org on May 18, 2006

"On April 5 2003, as the U.S. was bombarding Baghdad, the first anti-wall camp was founded in the village of Mas’ha, just south of the northern West Bank town of Qalqilya. “Under the haze of the war on Iraq, the deception of ‘security,’ and the silence of the media,” said the first flyer put out by the camp, “the apartheid wall is being built distant from the green line, confiscating thousands of dunams of agricultural land and water sources of entire villages.” And the information sheet of the camp explained the background:

The bulldozers have arrived to the village Mas'ha, adjacent to the Israeli settlement Elkanah. Elkana is about 7 kilometers away from the green line, but the route of the fence, approved in the government meeting of June 24, 2002, was changed so that it will include Elkana as well in the Israeli side. The bulldozers have started to separate Mas'ha, in effect, from its only remaining source of livelihood after two and a half years of closure. 98% of the lands of Mas'ha will be placed in the Israeli side of the fence - between the fence and the green line, together with thousands of dunams of Bidia Sanniriya and other villages in the area. Along with the lands that will be cut off the villages, the fence disconnects the road from Jenin to Ramallah, a segment of which will now be in the Israeli side of the fence, thus establishing further the isolation of the Palestinian enclaves from each other.

The initiative to establish the camp came from the village’s farmers, who were losing their land. The driving force was Nazee Shalabi, a father of seven, who was determined to not give up his land without a struggle. He gathered together a group of equally determined fellow villagers, among them Tayseer Ezzedden and Ra’ad Amer, and together with Riziq Abu Nasser, the head of the Land Defense Committee in the Salfit region, they mobilized the village council, organized demonstrations and made contact with international activists in the area. The international women’s group IWPS (International Women’s Peace Service), based in the nearby village of Hares, responded immediately. Yonatan Pollak and other young Israeli activists, who were at the time traveling along the route of the wall in the northern West Bank and making contact with Palestinians, as well as members of the ISM and IWPS, were welcomed in Mas’ha and became partners in the struggle against the wall.

The Mas’ha camp was erected close to the path of the wall, with the aim of documenting, protesting, focusing Israeli and world attention, but strictly avoiding confrontations with the Israeli bulldozers or army. It was obvious that any attempt to physically disrupt the work on the wall would immediately lead to the military sealing off the area and dismantling the camp. By adhering to its principles of non-violent resistance, the camp lasted for four months.with the Israeli army unable to find an excuse to destroy it. [9]

A constant 24-hour presence in the camp was maintained, with a minimum of two Israelis, two Palestinians and two internationals sleeping there every night, and often many more. On the Israeli side, the camp quickly attracted a wide spectrum of young activists, ranging from environmental and animal-rights activists, to anarchists, students and high-school kids. This was the new generation of the anti-occupation struggle - youth that got their political education through alternative internet zines, and who were themselves involved in forming the Israeli Indymedia. Some were graduates of the Prague and Genoa anti-corporate demonstrations, and viewed themselves as part of the generation of globalist rebels; others were just driven by an intuitive search for justice.[10] Of the veteran anti-occupation groups, the one that lent its support from the start was Gush Shalom, with Oren Medics as one of the camp’s organizers, and Uri Avnery often speaking in the camp’s demonstrations. Other individual veterans who joined in included Dorothy Naor and myself.

The Mas’ha camp quickly became the center of the struggle against the wall, with bigger groups spending a day there on activities ranging from demonstrations and non-violent resistance training, to meetings and discussions that went on long into the night. The principles shared by the young activists were those of the global movements: direct democracy and grassroots struggle. Significantly, this was the first time in the entire history of the Occupation that a real joint Israeli-Palestinian grassroots struggle was forming. Previously, Israeli-Palestinian cooperation had been the product of coordination between the "leaderships" in Ramallah and Tel Aviv, often ending in nothing more than the issuing of a joint petition. In Mas’ha, the spirit of direct democracy prevailed: decisions on the actions and policies of the joint struggle were taken in meetings at the camp by those present, rather than made by some remote leadership. For many of the Israelis, this was the first time that they had encountered the other side, while the Palestinians had only known Israelis as employers or soldiers. “Until you arrived,” Nazee Shalabi said once, “I didn’t have any idea that there were Israelis who want to live with us in peace.” In the midst of the discourse of blood and terror that has prevailed in Israel for so long, people in Mas’ha were building new forms of coexistence in struggle.

The American activist and writer Starhawk, who visited Mas’ha as part of her trip with the ISM [International Solidarity Movement], captured vividly its spirit in her piece ‘Next year in Mas’ha’:

On the eve of Passover, after a month I spent in the occupied territories of Palestine working with the International Solidarity movement, a month that saw one of our people deliberately run over by a bulldozer driven by an Israeli soldier, and two young men deliberately shot, one in the face, one in the head, I found myself unable to face the prospect of a Seder, even with my friends in the Israeli peace movement. I couldn¹t sit and bewail our ancient slavery or celebrate our journey to the promised land. I was afraid that I might spew bitterness and salt all over any Seder table I graced, and smash something. So I went to the peace encampment at Mas’ha. Mas’ha needed people, and the moon was full, and I thought I could just lay down on the land under the moonlight and let some of the bitterness drain away...

To be at Mas’ha is to be on the absolute edge of the conflict. The road block that separates the village from the settlement is the divide between two realities. I got to Elkanah from Tel Aviv on the settlers¹ bus, full of elderly women who could have been my aunts and old men that could have been my uncles... We drove through one settlement to let people off and I got a tour of what looks like a transplanted Southern California suburb, complete with lush gardens and new houses, all with an aura of prosperity and complacent security-provided by armed guards and razor wire and the Israeli military... From Elkanah, I walked down the road a few hundred yards and climbed over the road block bulldozed to keep Palestinians out of Israel. I was in a dusty village of old stone and new cement houses and shuttered shops, backing onto open hillsides of ancient olives.

The camp at Mas’ha is on a knoll, two pink tents set up in an olive grove on stony ground studded with wildflowers, yellow broom, and prickly pear. The olives give shade and sometimes a backrest. If you look in one direction, the groves are spread out below the hilltop for miles of a soft gray green with blue hills in the back ground and small villages beyond, But encircling the hill, and cutting a gray swath across the hillsides, is the zone of destruction, a wide band of uprooted trees and bare subsoil, where a giant backhoe is wallowing like some giant, prehistoric beast, grabbing and crushing stones, gouging the earth, filling the air with dust and the mechanical bellowing of its engines...

A young man is sitting under a tree as I arrive, writing on stones with a black marker. He¹s a farmer, he tells me. In Arabic, he writes, "Don¹t cut the trees." He thinks for a moment, and adds another graceful line. I ask him to translate. He gives me a sweet smile, and points to the ground. "What is this?" "Earth?" I ask... "The earth speaks Arabic," he tells me.

All the Israelis but one have gone, to celebrate Pesach with their families. There are only two of us from the ISM and one woman from IWPS who stay over, along with two of the Palestinians, to guard the camp. As the full moon rises, I lie on the stones and meditate. I am hoping to find some peace or healing, but the earth is tortured here and all I can feel is her anguish. Down and down, through layers and centuries and epochs, I hear the ancestors weeping. The land is soaked in blood, and generations have faced ruthless powers and been cut down, and why should we be any different? I am woken up at three AM to take my shift on watch. I sit by the fire, exhausted, and finally drift back into sleep, waking again in the morning feeling sick at heart.

But people begin to arrive, for a midday meeting. The women from the IWPS, and the men from the village, and dozens of Israelis. We sit under the tent with its sides raised, talking about building an international campaign against the wall. One of the men, a stonemason, makes miniature buildings out of the stones at our feet as we talk. "Maybe we can’t stop it here," one man from the village says,"

But maybe we can stop it other places."

The Israelis who come are mostly young. They are anarchists and punks and lesbians and wild-haired students, and it strikes me that the mayor of Mas’ha and the village leaders in a very socially conservative society might actually have more in common with the Orthodox Jews who hate them than with these wild, social rebels. But the village accepts them all with good grace and a warm-hearted Palestinian welcome. One woman is from the group "Black Laundry", which requires a somewhat complicated three-way translation of a Hebrew play on words. [In Hebrew, the word for laundry is kvisa, and the word for sheep is kivsa. So the name of the group -black laundry suggesting exposure of evil, creates an association with black sheep – standing for those viewed by the consensus as deviant.] She explains that it is a lesbian direct action group, and asks our translator if that¹s a problem. "Not for me," he says with a slightly quizzical shrug, and the meeting goes on.

Later we meet with the village women, who want to know if we can help them in any way. They are about to lose their source of livelihood‹is there anything we can do? We have a long discussion about what we do in the ISM, and promise to research organizations that do community development work.

Back at the camp, all the young shabab-the term for young, unmarried men--have come out for the evening. We sit around the fire while two of the men prepare us dinner, laughing and talking. And suddenly I realize something wonderful is happening. The Israelis and the Palestinians can talk to each other, because most of the young men speak Hebrew. They are hanging out around the fire and talking and telling stories, laughing and relaxing together. They are hanging out just like any group of young people around a fire at night, as if they weren¹t bitter enemies, as if it could really be this simple to live together in peace.

So it was a strange Seder this year, pita instead of Matzoh, the eggs scrambled with tomato, hummous instead of chicken soup, water instead of wine, and instead of the maror, the bitter herbs which I have already tasted, a slight sweet hint of hope.

I can¹t ever again say "next year in Jerusalem." I can no longer believe in the promise of a land which requires the building of concrete walls and guard towers and ongoing murder to defend it... But I would like to believe in the promise of Mas’ha, in the example of a people who, faced with utter destruction of everything they need and hold dear, opened their hearts to the children of the enemy and asked for help. I would like to believe in the Israel reflected in the eyes of those who answer that call. That somehow, on this chasm between the conquerors and those who resist being finally conquered, the bridges and connections and meetings are happening that can tear down the walls of separation.

By next year, the camp at Mas’ha will most likely be gone. Already the contractors who work for the Israeli military have begun blasting a chasm that will soon cut the olive groves off from the village. An international campaign to stop the building of the wall has begun, but the reality is that they have the capacity to build it faster than we can organize to stop it.

And yet I say it again, as an act of pure faith: Next year in Mas’ha.

By mid June 2003, about a thousand Israelis had visited the camp or stayed overnight, and the core of regular Israeli activists was approaching three hundred people. The camp was beginning to attract some media coverage, thereby focusing attention on the wall, which until that point had hardly had any public debate in Israel. For the most part, the Israeli media continued to view the wall as a justified and vital security issue, but the actual reality of the wall was slowly penetrating international consciousness.

From the start, the Mas’ha camp faced an apparently unexpected obstacle – the Palestinian Authority. Not only did the PA district representatives not back the village’s grassroots organization; they also exerted all kinds of pressure against the camp. The reasons behind such behaviour are complex and painful. As we have seen, following the Oslo agreements the local grassroots network established during the first Palestinian Intifada in the late 1980s was completely destroyed and replaced by an administration tightly controlled by Arafat and his close circle.[12] Much is known by now about the corruption of these administrative bodies of control, but what has received less attention is the fact that they were working in close collaboration with Israel, from the level of security cooperation to that of the local administration of towns and villages. In each area there was a Palestinian “District Coordination Office” (DCO), working in coordination with its Israeli counterpart. The charitable explanation of the district administration’s opposition to the Mas’ha camp is that it could not give approval to grassroots activity outside its jurisdiction. The other, more painful explanation (true only of a few of the local administrators) is that they were carrying out Israeli instructions.

We should note that even three years after work on the wall had started, the Ramallah headquarters of the PA had still done nothing to protest against it, or to support the struggle of the people living along the path of the wall. In December 2004, eighteen months after the events of Mas’ha, when protest had already spread all along the wall’s route, Ha’aretz reported on a demonstration by dozens of Palestinians outside Palestinian cabinet meeting in Ramallah. They accused the cabinet of doing nothing to stop the wall: ‘The ministers don't care about the barrier, it doesn't affect them. They get VIP treatment at checkpoints and send their children to study abroad,’ Salameh Abu Eid, 25, from Biddu village told Reuters... ‘We ask you, Qureia, to stop supplying cement for the wall!’ they shouted... The furious demonstration attested to growing popular discontent with the perceived incompetence and corruption of the Palestinian Authority, which has contributed to a surge in popularity of Islamist militants.”[13] Sometimes, the Palestinian Authority’s measures against the struggle were disturbingly comparable to Israeli ones. In May 2005, in a similar demonstration organized by the popular committee of the village of Bil’in, to whose struggle I return, a demonstrator from the village was severely beaten by the Palestinian Authority police.[14]

The Mas’ha camp started as an initiative of the entire village, with the mayor and village council speaking at the opening demonstration. But the district authorities (DCO of the Salfit region) succeeded in persuading them to disassociate themselves from the camp, and the village Fatah party also withdrew its support. The only political parties to resist this pressure were the communist People’s Party, which had some influence in the village, and the smaller DFLP party (Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine). From the outset, their members viewed the resistance to the wall as a popular struggle of farmers trying to hold on to their land – a classic historical struggle. They formed part of the Palestinian core that initiated the camp, and were determined and courageous enough to continue in the face of considerable district authority pressure.

The Fatah and DCO authorities also much ingenuity in effort to discourage the Israeli activists from getting involved. On one occasion, rumors spread that Hamas was threatening to attack the Israelis at the camp; it later transpired that a Fatah member had spread these baseless rumors in order to scare the Israelis away. This did not dissuade the young Israeli activists from participating in the camp; however, the DCO was more successful with Ta’ayush. Ta’ayush, by then known and highly respected in the area through its many demonstrations and food convoys, had a strict policy of coordinating its activity with the local PA. The District Cooperating Liaison for the Salfit District, Nawaf Souf (also known as Abu Rabia), informed Ta’ayush that he would not support the camp, and that Fatah would not participate in it. This had an immediate impact: Ta’ayush announced that it would not extend its backing to the camp, and would not collaborate in “irresponsible” activity supported only by a faction of the Palestinian people – that is to say, the People’s Party and the DFLP. This in turn led to a Catch-22: throughout the whole period of the Mas’ha camp, the Palestinian activists kept trying to encourage Fatah’s participation, but were told that Fatah would not cooperate with an activity that Ta’ayush did not endorse.

Gradually, the Palestinian participation in the camp dwindled to a small group of the most determined. Rumors were spread about them, including accusations against Nazee Shalabi of past collaboration with Israel. This is a known strategy used by the PA against its opponents. When someone is accused of being a collaborator, he is isolated from his community, and is thus more vulnerable to persecution. On June 16 2003 I wrote in a personal letter: “Yesterday, in the activist meeting in Mas’ha, it seemed as though the Palestinians would not be able to stand the pressure of their own PA anymore. They seemed despairing, thinking of giving up. I am afraid the camp is going to collapse. As the camp had become so big and renowned, while strictly non-confrontational, the army did not try to evacuate us forcefully. Why should it? It can use its henchmen to destroy us quietly. I don't really know what else can be tried. It is all so closed, locked. The internationals are being chased out and killed. The Palestinians are squeezed between the occupiers and their own collaborators...”

Nevertheless, the camp did not collapse. It continued for two more months, with a smaller daily presence but with regular weekly meetings at which protest activities in neighboring areas were planned. In early August 2003, the protest concentrated on the case of one house on the edge of Mas’ha. The wall’s route was designed so that the house of Hani and Munira Amer and their six children would be completely sealed in: enclosed on three sides by the wall, and by the fence of a nearby settlement on the remaining side. Once the wall was completed, the Amer family would need permission to leave their own house through a gate in the wall controlled by the army. There was pressure on the family to agree to leave with compensation, but they refused. The camp activists decided to confront the bulldozers. They moved the camp (including a tent), into the Amer family’s yard. On August 3, as the bulldozers came to destroy the family’s barn, about 60 activists sat in front of it and managed to postpone the work. At dawn the next day, the bulldozers returned with the army. 47 of the activists were arrested, including Nazee Shalabi, many internationals and 24 Israelis. The tent was removed, and the Amer yard was declared a closed military zone.

The battle of Mas’ha was lost. The village lost its lands, its wells and its olive groves to the wall; the gates to these lands are locked most of the time. Currently, Mas’ha is squeezed in a narrow corridor between the already-completed section of wall, and the new wall which is planned. Mas’ha has joined the fate of Qalqilya (discussed in chapter 7), with feelings of despair and isolation replacing its spirit of struggle. The Israeli activists kept contact with the village, and meetings continued to be held there, but the camp did not return to what it was. In December 2003, it was decided to refound the camp in the neighboring village of Dir Balut, where the construction of the wall was just starting and local resistance was forming. Nevertheless, Mas’ha’s resistance marked the beginning of what was to become a long and enduring joint Palestinian-Israeli-International struggle all along the route of the wall, which was proceeding steadily southwards. The core of the Palestinian activists in the Mas’ha camp continued down the planned route of the wall, to join other struggling villages. From the perspective of the Israeli struggle, this was a period of mobilization – gathering and organizing people who were prepared to cross the lines and to join the Palestinian struggle. In the process, a number of the camp’s Israeli activists formed themselves into a movement devoted to a grassroots joint struggle against the wall, called “Anarchists against the Wall.” When the Palestinian popular struggle later spread to other areas, there was a core of organized Israeli activists ready to lend their support.