Nonviolent resistance is critical in beginning to unsettle an occupation that appears, at first, as unmovable as the boulders in Al-Walajeh’s roadblocks
November 10, 2007 10:38 am Palestinian Nonviolent Resistance, Israel's Separation Wall, Israeli-Palestinian conflict 
Jared Malsin, Walled in? openDemocracy, November 9, 2007
In towns and villages all over the West Bank, Palestinians demonstrate every week, usually on Fridays after the noon prayer. The spirit and persistence of these protests have generated a small international buzz about a nonviolent resurgence in Palestine, a return to the days of the First Intifada when a largely peaceful uprising brought renewed attention to the Palestinian cause in the late 1980s.
Hoping to gauge the alleged revival of nonviolent resistance in Palestine, I visited the small village of Al-Walajeh, four kilometres north of Bethlehem. Every Friday, Al-Walajeh’s residents gather in protest of the construction of the controversial wall around the West Bank. The planned route of a 30-foot high concrete section of the barrier will slice the village in half. Shireen Al-Araj, a member of Al-Walajeh’s municipal council, says the wall, which has already been raised in parts of the village as a barbed wire fence, will result in the annexation of much of the village’s land by Israel.
One blazing hot September day, the villagers, joined by eight Israeli anarchists, a young activist from Japan, and a few elderly women with Christian Peacemaker Teams, prayed, then marched on the construction site. They set about blocking the access road used by Israeli construction vehicles. Israeli soldiers watched from their post higher on the hillside, but held their fire. The protesters built mounds of rocks, sand, and tree branches, eventually setting one of the piles ablaze: a literal firewall against invading bulldozers and trucks.