On February 12, residents of the Palestinian village of Bilin attracted global attention by protesting dressed as blue, pointy-eared and tailed Na'vi from the blockbuster movie Avatar. Like the fictional Na'vi, the Bilin villagers are resisting occupation by a brutal military machine in the pay of corporate interests.
Since Israel's "separation barrier" — the apartheid wall — separated Bilin from its farmland, the village has been the site of protests every Friday. The prosts unite local Palestinian activists with anti-apartheid Israelis and foreign volunteers from the International Solidarity Movement (ISM).
The weekly protests won a victory with the announcement that the Israeli authorities would implement a two-and-a-half-year-old court order and reroute the wall away from the village, the January 29 Palestine Telegraph said.
However, a number of Bilin anti-wall activists have been jailed in a new round of Israeli army arrests of West Bank Palestinians this year.
A February 9 statement by the human rights group Addameer, the Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign and the National Lawyers Guild, said: "Since June 2009, Israeli authorities have arrested nearly three dozen villagers involved in anti-Wall protests from Bilin ... including 20 in the last month."
On February 7, ISM activists Ariadna Marti of Spain, and Bridget Chappell of Canberra, Australia, were arrested by Israeli immigration police in the West Bank town of Ramallah. They were released on US$800 bail and prohibited from returning to the West Bank.
Czech ISM activist Eva Novakova was arrested and deported in January.