By Jody McIntyre
BUDRUS: This Sunday, 7 November, will mark exactly seven years since Ayed Morrar first saw Israeli bulldozers arrive to destroy the land of his village, Budrus, in the occupied West Bank. Day by day, and night by night, the people of Budrus faced down the bulldozers, not realising they would give birth to a grassroots resistance movement that has now spread to villages throughout the West Bank. Seven years on, Ayed al-Morrar, founder of the first popular committee to resist Israel’s separation wall, discusses with The Electronic Intifada contributor Jody McIntyre his village’s struggle and victory and the future of the movement.
Jody McIntyre: Please introduce yourself.
Ayed Morrar: My name is Ayed Morrar, aged 48, and I am a resident of Budrus, a village of 1,500 people, 45 kilometers west of Ramallah [in the occupied West Bank]. In 2003, I founded the first popular committee to resist against Israel’s wall.
By “popular committee,” we mean a committee of volunteers, comprising all the Palestinian political factions, in those villages that are suffering from the wall and have decided to resist against its construction on their land through civil, unarmed resistance.
JM: Can you describe for me the theory of “popular resistance” you developed in Budrus?
AM: By “popular resistance,” we mean to collect all the possible means of putting pressure on the occupation, except those that involve killing. You will hear many different names for it, but this is what we mean. Of course, under international law we have the right to resist the occupation by any means necessary, but we must choose the most effective path of struggle. We see the struggle against the wall and the occupation as not only a right – after all, one may choose not to take advantage of one’s rights – but also as a duty. We feel that our form of civil resistance is the only way to unite all our people; our children, or our grandparents, for example, would not be able to participate in certain other forms of struggle. So a nonviolent form of resistance is not chosen because we are the most polite people in the world, but for the benefit of our struggle.
Also, it’s important for us to separate the Palestinian national struggle for liberation from international terrorism. We aren’t against Israelis, or Jews, we are against the occupation of our land, and nobody, not even the Israelis, would have an ounce of respect for us if we were to remain silent or to keep crying in the face of oppression …
I feel that by choosing civil resistance we are escaping the disease of harmful fighting between the political factions. It is shameful for us to know that in 43 years of the Palestinian struggle in Gaza, since 1967, there were 236 Israelis killed by Palestinian fighters, but in one year around 700 Palestinians were killed by our own people in the conflict between Fateh and Hamas. In order to be successful in our struggle, we must show the world that we are struggling not to kill people but for our freedom, and after our freedom, to achieve a real peace. A real peace means a peace between two equal sides, from human beings to human beings. The Israeli leaders talk about “economic peace,” or “security peace;” these amount to a peace between a slave and his master.
For all of these reasons – although the popular resistance is a longer way, a more complex way, and takes more strength and encouragement to stand face-to-face with the Israeli soldiers with their weapons and reputations, with nothing but your bodies – we believe it is the best way. In this time of high tensions between the political parties, to unite them is difficult, but not impossible. What it takes is detailed coordination and organization, and a strong leadership. In Budrus, we understood all these elements. We were not simply “good boys” wanting to protect our grandparents’ fields; we had a method, which we followed precisely, a strategy and concrete aims. We had already been speaking and writing about the role that Palestinians must play in resisting the wall since construction first began near Jenin, in 2002, but no one was hearing us or understanding our message, so we wanted to put a live example on the ground. Once we managed to do that, in just one month, fifteen other villages were struggling in the same way.
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* Jody McIntyre is a journalist from the United Kingdom. His blog, Life on Wheels, can be found at jodymcintyre.wordpress.com. This abridged article is distributed by the Common Ground News Service (CGNews) with permission from the Electronic Intifada. The full version of the interview can be found at:http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11608.shtml
