Palestinians took to the streets across the West Bank and Israel to commemorate Land Day at the weekend, in protest against ongoing Israeli confiscation of Palestinian land through settlement expansion and the construction of the separation wall.
Land Day marks the anniversary of the killing of six demonstrators by the Israeli security forces in 1976.
Palestinian citizens of Israel held demonstrations across the country to protest the expropriation of their lands by the Israeli government.
Israeli forces fired on unarmed demonstrators in the town of Sakhnin.
Rallies marking the killings spread from the interior of Israel to the occupied territories.
‘The land issue is the same, whether in the West Bank, Israel, Jerusalem, or Gaza,’ said Samer Jaber, who organised a 400 person demonstration in the town of Al-Khadr, near Bethlehem, where he says the Israeli separation wall will result in the de facto annexation of 90 per cent of the town’s land.
Jaber added: ‘It’s the same situation: annexation through changing the identity and demography of the land (through settlement building).
‘We need a new identity based on living together.’
Al-Khadr village held its Land Day march on Friday, beginning with a Muslim prayer service on the road leading to the construction site of the Israeli wall, and then marching to a barbed wire roadblock set up by Israeli soldiers to block the demonstration.
Israeli soldiers denied access to a member of Israeli Knesset, Dov Hanin, from the left-wing Hadash party, who attempted to travel to Al-Khadr to join the demonstration.
Hanin said in a statement: ‘I arrived on Friday morning at the Israeli military checkpoint near Al-Khadr.
‘I received an invitation from the popular committee in the town, yet I was surprised that when I told the troops I was a Knesset member, they refused to let me in.’
He added: ‘What I faced on Friday morning is part of the circumstances in the Palestinian territories which I know pretty well, and this enhances my belief that ending occupation is inevitable.’
In the village of Al-Ma’sara, south of Bethlehem, Palestinians demonstrated against the construction of the separation wall on the village’s land.
The Popular Committee for resisting the wall said that Israeli troops attacked demonstrators with clubs and rifle butts, injuring at least four people.
The main Land Day march was held in the city of Jaffa, on the Israeli coast, on Saturday.
Protests were also held in unrecognised Bedouin villages in the Negev desert.
In the city of Nablus, Israeli forces dispersed a demonstration at Huwwara checkpoint at noon using tear gas and sonic bombs.
Huwwara, which separates Nablus from nearby Ramallah, is known as one of the most constricting West Bank checkpoints, subjecting Palestinian travellers to long and sometimes humiliating searches.
Israeli soldiers forcibly blocked the protesters from reaching the checkpoint.
The soldiers detained a student named Alaa’ Deriyya and another young Palestinian man who could not be identified. Deriyya remains in custody while the other was released shortly after arrest.
Demonstrators raised posters with slogans calling for Palestinian unity and for the removal of Israeli military checkpoints.
Dalal Salamah, head of the union of Palestinian women, said in Nablus that the rally is a form peaceful resistance aimed at pressuring Israel to dismantle the checkpoints.
Meanwhile Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas on Saturday said that Israel is dividing the occupied Palestinian land and isolating Jerusalem.
He was addressing eleven heads of state of Arab countries at the opening of the 20th Arab League (AL) Summit, in the Syrian capital, Damascus.
He urged them and the international community to protect the Palestinian people and save the peace process.
Abbas sharply criticised Israel, saying it is wrecking peace negotiations with settlement construction, reported the Palestine Media Centre.
Abbas warned: ‘The coming couple of months are decisive. If we don’t reach a solution by the end of this year, it means the whole region will be on the verge of a new era of tension and loss of confidence in peace.’
He says that the international community ‘must assume its responsibility and save the peace process and realise that if Israel continues to undermine the negotiations, this will have catastrophic consequences’.
Abbas called for the international community to ‘lift (the peace process) out of the ruins created by Israeli policies so that we can reach our objective and have a peace deal before the end of the year.’
Abbas asked Arab countries to ‘think seriously of Arab and international protection for our people’.
He said: ‘Amid an ongoing Israeli escalation in the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem, we are seeking Arab and international protection of our people.
‘The success of negotiations is dependent on Israel’s fulfilment of its obligations according to the roadmap (peace plan), particularly an end to settlement activity and military aggression against the Palestinian people and the lifting of the blockade and roadblocks.’
He warned: ‘The last few months have witnessed unprecedented Israeli escalation in settlement expansion in Jerusalem and the West Bank.
‘It has become clear that the Israeli government is imposing on the ground the political solution that it wants.
‘It is no secret that the ongoing Israeli aggression is part of an Israeli policy that aims at dividing the Palestinian territories and people by separating the Gaza Strip from the West Bank to prevent the possibility of a peace agreement under the pretext of Palestinian divisions.
‘Jerusalem is facing the most vicious settlement campaign which is aimed at its Arab character through confiscation of lands, building settlements and destroying houses of (Arab) residents with the aim of isolating Jerusalem from the rest of the Palestinian lands.’
The Palestinian president said the Israeli measures were continuing despite the re-launch of US-sponsored peace negotiations in Annapolis in November.
‘Israel is continuing its aggression, its occupation, the construction of settlements and the Judaisation of Jerusalem,’ Abbas told the opening session of an Arab summit in Damascus.
‘The solution which Israel is designing consists of a group of cantons on a land separated by settlements, the separation wall and roadblocks,’ he said.
‘This type of solution only reinforces the occupation and colonisation and is aimed at preventing the creation of an independent Palestinian state,’ Abbas added.
‘Negotiations cannot continue under the Israeli bulldozers swallowing our land and building settlements and under the daily Israeli military operations,’ he said.
‘The parameters and plans of the solution that Israel is drawing on the ground would not leave more than a group of isolated enclaves of land torn apart by settlements and the wall of racial separation,’ Abbas added in his address to the summit in Damascus.
‘It is a solution that reinforces the occupation and the settlement process and which threatens to undermine the possibility of setting up the independent state of Palestine on the Palestinian people’s land, the land of Palestine,’ he stressed.
‘Israel is practicing collective punishments against the Palestinian people. It hasn’t stopped the ongoing arrests of Palestinians in the West Bank, keeping in jail more than 11,000 people,’ said Abbas.
Abbas called on Arab leaders to re-endorse a peace plan that they initially adopted in 2002 offering Israel normalisation with Arab states in return for its withdrawal from occupied lands.
‘Re-endorsing the plan must accompany a move by the international community to force Israel to respond favourably to this initiative,’ he said.
US President Bush has invited Abbas to the White House on April 24. Abbas is also scheduled to visit Moscow on April 20.
He urged the Quartet group of international mediators, who include the United States, to pressure Israel to meet the requirements of the US ‘roadmap’ peace plan, which include a settlement freeze. The requirements also call on the Palestinians to take action to stop militant violence.
