RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) — Abdullah Abu Rahma has been arrested by Israeli soldiers eight times in the last five years, spending 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 nonviolent 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 Israeli 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 in December. Israel also has stepped up its campaign against the Palestinian-led international boycott movement, and the United States and other countries have adopted legislation to suppress the boycott.
Israel has come down hard on Palestinian attempts to seek redress at the International Criminal Court. In December, 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 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 under a court order.
The protests often saw Palestinian youths hurl rocks at Israeli security forces, who responded with tear gas and rubber-coated bullets. But Abu Rahma says he never threw stones and told others not to do so, partly out of concern they would hurt other protesters.
That didn't keep him from being arrested.
Over the years he was charged with entering a closed military zone — referring to land outside the village — and hindering the work of soldiers, who were overseeing the construction of the fence.
"I don't go to them, they come to us," he said.
In 2009 he was charged with stockpiling weapons after he collected spent tear gas canisters fired by Israeli soldiers and put them on display. He served a 16-month prison term after a military court convicted him of incitement and participation in illegal protests.