I remember one guy, who now works for the Palestinian Authority, in the Jenin branch of the Ministry of the Interior. We were there together at that time, and the clashes were going on and on and on. Soldiers were maybe 50 metres in front of us. We had stayed put since the beginning of the clashes and were really hungry! Someone went and got some biscuits and handed them around. So, there we were, with stones or empty bottles in one hand, and biscuits in the other! We would throw a stone or two, and they would get out the way. They would fire some rubber bullets, and we would duck. We would chew on some biscuits, throw a couple more stones and so it continued on. The soldiers were looking at us like we were mad. You could just see them thinking, What are these guys doing? They're standing there throwing stones and eating biscuits!
The Israelis were surrounding the village during this same series of demonstrations. At night, we organised ourselves to work in groups. One group would have to take care of this area, one group would have to take care of that area, another to bring supplies, some to patrol several areas. Some were assigned to check exactly where the soldiers were situated. We figured that a seige could not be a perfectly-sealed circle. They wouldn't station one soldier every ten meters. It would be safer for them to have bases of ten or fifteen soldiers every hundred metres or so.
So, I took a group of seven or ten guys to check their locations on one side of the village, down a forested valley. We spread out in a line, three metres between each of us and began making our way down the valley. We kept going and going until we were almost at the end of the trees, where there was a road. About ten metres along the road, we noticed soldiers based there and were glad to see they weren't close to the village.
We were sitting there, making signs to each other that it was time to go back, when a platoon of soldiers appeared, running in the towards us and coming from the village. We had past them as they were trying to break through our lines, when a bunch of the guys from the village had begun chasing them. So here we were, trapped between a bunch of soldiers on the road and another bunch running towards us from the village pursued by our friends, who were chasing them with stones and molotov cocktails. It wasn't that we were afraid that we would be caught, we were more afraid that the guys would stumble on us in the dark and and start throwing the molotovs at us! We froze, motionless, and crouched behind bushes and tree stumps, as soldiers ran right through our group. We hid for a couple of hours, not daring to move until we were sure that everyone had gone home, when we sneaked back into the village, freezing.
There is a road that comes from Haifa and Afula and passes through the northern part of the West Bank to Nablus that Israelis call in Hebrew "Trans-Samaria", 'Aabir As-Sammera in Arabic, although we call our part the "Jenin-Haifa road"). It used to always be full of settlers and soldiers driving to and fro. Our village is very near this road and all the demonstrations used to focus on it. We would block the road and within minutes of the first car finding it impossible to pass, lots of soldiers would appear. Then the demonstration would begin. The road from our village that joined the settler road was uphill, and both this and the stones we would use to block the road gave us plenty of time to get away if they came for us, because they would be forced to do it on foot.
Stone thrower in
Ramallah, 1997.
Photo by Nigel Parry.
"It felt like madness, but it was necessary madness!"
"You couldn't not do it. You had to do something and stones were the easiest thing to get your hands on."
"You would only start to remember what happened when it was over. You would talk with other guys afterwards and you realise that what you thought you saw you didn't, because another 20 people saw something different happening."
