Bil'in Tear-Gas Canister Garden: The Story Behind the Flowers

In the West Bank village of Bil'in, a mother turned dozens of spent tear-gas canisters into flowerpots and planted a garden with them. The woman most closely tied to the garden, Sabiha Abu Rahmah, lost her son Bassem in 2009 when a tear-gas canister fired by Israeli forces struck him in the chest during a protest. Photographs of the garden, taken in the autumn of 2013, travelled around the world as an image of grief turned into something living.

Flowers Planted in Spent Tear-Gas Canisters in Bilin

A woman in a white headscarf tends rows of seedlings growing from black canisters on a terraced hillside, with the barrier's fence line visible behind her.

Where Bil'in is and why it protests

Bil'in is a small Palestinian farming village about 12 kilometres west of Ramallah, with just over 2,100 residents in the 2017 Palestinian census. It lies roughly four kilometres east of the Green Line, the 1949 armistice line that separates Israel from the West Bank. When Israel built its separation barrier in the area in the mid-2000s, the route ran between the village and much of its farmland, cutting residents off from about 60 per cent of their land.

From early 2005, villagers, joined by Israeli and international activists, began marching to the barrier every Friday. The Bil'in Popular Committee Against the Wall framed the protests as unarmed popular resistance, often with creative stunts and costumes. Israeli forces regularly responded with tear gas and arrests, and serious injuries occurred on both sides over the years.

Close up, the gardener's hands press soil around a red flower in a canister. The metal tops that once held the gas now serve as rims for the pots.

The court case and the moved fence

The village took its case to Israel's High Court of Justice. On 4 September 2007 the court ordered the government to change the barrier's route near Bil'in, with Chief Justice Dorit Beinisch writing that the court was not convinced the existing route was needed for security reasons. The decision was not carried out quickly. Only in 2011 did Israel's Defence Ministry begin dismantling that section and rebuilding it along a new line, which gave villagers access to part of their land again.

The garden was reportedly planted at the spot where Bassem was killed, close to the old fence line. When the photos circulated in 2014, they were often described as showing land "reclaimed two years ago" through the courts. It is more accurate to say that the ruling came in 2007 and the barrier was moved from 2011.

A single canister planted with a red flower hangs from coils of razor wire against a pale sky, a deliberate contrast between barrier and bloom.

A garden in memory of Bassem Abu Rahmah

Bassem Abu Rahmah was one of the familiar faces of the Friday marches. On 17 April 2009 he was hit in the chest by a high-velocity tear-gas canister and died of his injuries. The Israeli human rights group B'Tselem said video footage showed he was not acting violently. Israel's military prosecutor closed the investigation in September 2013, citing a lack of evidence.

His sister Jawaher died at the turn of 2011, a day after inhaling tear gas at a protest. The cause of her death remains disputed: the Israeli army said there was no evidence tear gas killed her, while her family and activists maintain that it did.

According to the Israeli-Palestinian photo collective Activestills, writing in +972 Magazine, the garden was created by village residents as a memorial to Bassem and to other victims of the struggle over the land. Its centrepiece was a translucent photograph of Bassem mounted on spent shell casings. Activestills pointed out that many international picture stories in 2013 identified Sabiha only as "a Palestinian woman" and left out the memorial altogether.

Water is poured from a plastic bottle onto a canister hung on a metal stake. Below, a hand settles seedlings into a dense grid of canisters, some already flowering pink.

What the canisters are

The black cylinders are the spent bodies of tear-gas grenades and canisters, used by Israeli forces to disperse protesters. Tear gas is a chemical irritant that causes burning eyes, coughing and difficulty breathing. Although widely used for crowd control, the canisters themselves can cause serious injury when fired directly at people at close range, which is what happened to Bassem.

Villagers had been collecting spent rounds for years. In Bil'in and other protest villages, they have been displayed in heaps, turned into sculptures and, here, cleaned, filled with soil and planted with small flowering plants. The gesture turns an object associated with injury into a container for growth.

A man works the red soil behind a canister of red flowers fixed on a metal rod. Next, water streams through a canister, showing how holes in the old grenade make natural drainage for a plant pot.

The wider barrier

Israel describes the West Bank barrier as a security measure built after a wave of suicide bombings during the Second Intifada. Palestinians and many international bodies see it as a land grab, because most of its route runs inside the West Bank rather than along the Green Line. In 2004 the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion finding that the construction of the wall in occupied territory was contrary to international law; Israel rejected that view.

Older reports, including the 2014 picture stories about this garden, often said the barrier would stretch about 430 miles. Current figures are higher: the planned length is about 708 kilometres (440 miles), of which about 440 kilometres had been completed by 2012. Roughly 85 per cent of the route lies inside the West Bank.

A boy holds a pink flower in a canister while a young man fills pots from a blue basin. Behind them, rows of planted canisters stretch toward the fence.

Why the image resonated

Turning weapons into something peaceful is an ancient idea. The Book of Isaiah speaks of beating swords into ploughshares, and artists in Mozambique have made sculptures from guns handed in after the civil war. The Bil'in garden belongs to that tradition, but it is rooted in a specific place and loss. It does not ask viewers to forget what the canisters were used for; it asks them to see both things at once.

Bil'in's protests also reached a global audience through film. The documentary 5 Broken Cameras, made by villager Emad Burnat with Israeli filmmaker Guy Davidi from footage shot from 2005 onward, won a directing award at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award. The flower garden is a quieter companion to that story: one woman's daily work with water, soil and seedlings.

A woman in an embroidered sleeve waters a bed of canister pots, and a lone pink flower rises from a canister on a rod while unused shells lie scattered in the earth behind it.

Whatever one's view of the conflict, the photos show something simple and human: a mother caring for a garden in the place where violence touched her family, and choosing to make it grow.

Sources: photos via Bored Panda (2014); +972 Magazine / Activestills: What the press missed in Bil'in tear gas flower garden; Ynetnews: The Garden of Bil'in; Wikipedia: Bil'in; Wikipedia: Israeli West Bank barrier.

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