According to the notices received by villagers, the area is close to the train line to Jerusalem and next to the East Jerusalem settlement of Gilo, in which Israeli authorities approved the building of 1,100 new homes on Tuesday, sparking international condemnation.

The notification of the Israeli Ministry of Finance’s intention to purchase the lands said the acquisition was for military and security purposes.

Battir resident Nidal al-Zaghir said: the land confiscation “will be a great loss for the village, as they will lose many of their houses, water wells and agricultural lands.”

That could mean challenging Israel using boycotts, demonstrations and international diplomatic forums more aggressively—ideas that are gaining currency among young Palestinians. In a year when peaceful demonstrations have radically altered the political landscape of the Arab world, they increasingly embrace notions of nonviolent resistance.

Still, many observers say that tensions are building in the Palestinian areas—especially in the West Bank, where Jewish settlements continue to grow and chafe against Palestinian communities. Even peaceful confrontations, they worry, could escalate and set off another round of violence.
Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader, has stressed that the U.N. bid won’t substitute for negotiations or replace the existing framework for working toward a two-state solution laid out in the Oslo agreement that has guided Israeli-Palestinian relations for two decades. But many Palestinians, especially youths who make up the majority of the population, see the U.N. bid as something else: a sharp break with a peace process and the beginning of a new era.
They want their leadership to actively challenge Israel for sovereignty over the West Bank, though not necessarily through an armed struggle. “We’re hoping to have a state. Checkpoints should be dismantled. Palestinians will patrol where Israelis do now,” said Ahmed Aqtish, a 24-year-old mechanic.
Those sorts of soaring expectations almost certainly won’t be met in the coming months, though, and could cause problems for Mr. Abbas and the Palestinian leadership now that they have returned home from New York. Young Palestinians, long the foot soldiers of the Palestinian cause, have become disenchanted with their aging leadership.
That has grown as the protests across the Arab world have played out. Mr. Abbas’s Fatah movement, as well as the militant group Hamas that controls the Gaza Strip, are both losing support, according to Khalil Shikaki, head of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research. Quarterly polling that the center has conducted since March shows that young adults are “essentially abandoning Fatah and Hamas,” he said.
Young people have gotten behind Mr. Abbas’s statehood push, elevating his popularity for now. Mr. Abbas returned to cheering crowds in the West Bank on Sunday, and the Palestinian Authority called a public holiday and released children from schools to welcome him back.
Mr. Abbas and the Palestinian leadership began planning for, and talking up, the statehood bid months ago. On Friday he formally submitted a request for the U.N.’s security council to take up the issue. It could take weeks to come up for a vote at the council, where it has almost no chance of success. That’s because the U.S. has promised to veto the measure, saying the Palestinians should negotiate directly with Israel and not involve the U.N.
Mr. Abbas also could choose to ask the U.N.’s General Assembly to elevate the status of the Palestinians to that of an observers state, recognition that has a much better chance of being granted but that would have almost no immediate impact on the lives of Palestinians.
Mr. Abbas sees the bid as a way to pressure the Israelis in negotiations within the Oslo framework, a process that the current leadership started and has a huge stake in continuing. But for much of the younger generation, it has come to represent a defining moment, marking a sort of logical conclusion of the Oslo process. “They want him to put an end to Oslo,” said Mr. Shikaki. “The last thing Abbas wants to do is throw out Oslo.”
Yet even Mr. Abbas’s supporters say the U.N. move is born of a sense that time and support could be running out for the two-decade-old framework for negotiations and the Palestinian Authority that was created as part of that framework. “Our international situation is not sustainable,” said Ghassan Katib, a spokesman for the authority. “We’ve staked our reputations on a peace process that is going nowhere.”
Mr. Abbas may come under pressure to try a new direction that young Palestinians increasingly favor, nonviolent resistance, and advocate the sort of boycotts that were aimed at South Africa’s former apartheid government. Mr. Abbas mentioned nonviolent resistance in his speech to the U.N. on Friday.
Palestinian activists such as Mustafa Barghouti, a politician, have been working for years to rally support for a sustained campaign of nonviolent resistance. He believes support for nonviolence has also been bolstered by efforts to break the blockade that Israel has imposed on Gaza and a series of rallies in one Palestinian area that persuaded Israel to change the course of a security wall it constructed.
“We must make the cost of the occupation higher than the benefits,” for the Israelis, he said. Increasingly, Mr. Shikaki’s polling shows that young Palestinians are more impressed with what the Tahrir Square protests accomplished in Egypt and less enamored of the sort of violent struggle the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah has championed. “Tahrir seems to be winning out, and Hezbollah is out of favor,” said Mr. Shikaki.
Still, Mr. Shikaki worries that without meaningful negotiations, a sustained campaign of nonviolent confrontation could easily slip into another spasm of violence, given the underlying tensions in the West Bank. That could happen because of violence by Israeli or Palestinian extremists, undisciplined protesters or a miscalculation by Israeli soldiers confronting the sort of nonviolent tactics they aren’t used to handling.

by Bill Spindle

This past Saturday, Palestinian, Israeli, and international activists peacefully demonstrated in Al Walaja protesting the Israeli High Court’s decision to allow the construction of the separation barrier that would annex half of Al Walaja’s land to Israel.

Al Walaja is an agricultural village and most of the families there depend on these fields for their income. The annexation of Al Walaja land will therefore be devastating to its residents.

The demonstrators marched peacefully holding signs condemning the occupation and the apartheid system. Israeli soldiers presented a closed military zone order to the activists, but the order was outdated. They then presented a closed military zone order for August 28, which was a day after the demonstration.

As the demonstrators continued to march towards the illegal settlement of Har Gilo, the Israeli soldiers responded with force, assaulting Palestinian activists and arresting one Palestinian, two internationals, and four Israelis. The Israeli and international activists were later released at two am that night.

video and photos from ActiveStills

On Sunday, March 28, approximately 200 Palestinians, Christians and Muslim supporters along with international and Israeli solidarity activists, marched from the center of Bethlehem towards the Gilo checkpoint, a massive terminal checkpoint in the Annexation Wall dividing Bethlehem from Jerusalem. The demonstrators were demanding access to Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, where Christians traditionally hold a procession on the Sunday before Easter.

The demonstrators successfully and non-violently crossed the checkpoint by overwhelming the Israeli soldiers present, carrying signs expressing their right to enter Jerusalem, practice their religion freely, and in solidarity with the Palestinian residents of Jerusalem facing expulsion.

After crossing the checkpoint through the gate usually used by tourist buses and marching several meters into Jerusalem municipality, speeches were made in several languages, and the group turned to go back into Bethlehem. It was at this point that the Israeli military attacked the group, arresting 15 people, 4 Israelis, 1 international and 10 Palestinian residents of the West Bank including 2 members of the Al-Ma’asara popular committee and a member of the Bethlehem popular committee and staff member of Holy Land Trust, who, along with several NGO’s in Bethlehem including Holy Land Trust, organized the demonstration.

Though the 5 foreigners were released the same day, the 10 Palestinians arrested are still being held in Ofer military prison, near Ramallah. On Monday, dozens gathered to protest the arrest of these non-violent activists and their continued detention. Another demonstration at the prison is planned for Wednesday.

Bethlehem / Najib Farrag – Dozens of Palestinian journalists demonstrated on Wednesday morning at Bethlehem’s Church of Nativity in protest of the Israeli arrest of journalist Hassan Abdel Jawad.

The 53 year old is a member of the board of the Palestinian Journalists Union and also a local newspaper correspondent. Abdel Jawad is currently being held in the Israeli military prison Ofar, built on Ramallah lands.

His arrest came when six members of the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine political party were blindfolded, bound and taken away on Monday morning.

Among the demonstrators this morning was Bethlehem Mayor Dr. Victor Batarsa, several police officials, and Palestinian Legislative Council member, Issa Qaraqa’.

They called not only for the release of the journalist, but for all political prisoners.

Head of the Palestinian Journalists Union, Naim Toubassi, said that the arrest of Abdel Jawad is the latest proof of the Israeli “policy of repression and harassment, not only against political activists, but also against journalists who transmit the truth and exercise their right to freedom of opinion and expression.”

Toubassi commended the sacrifices made by Palestinian journalists in continuing to work in the face of “Israel’s continued aggression of decades, including all of the tools of repression, prosecution and punishment.” All journalists pay a high price for their work, he said, “including being killed, injured and imprisoned.”

Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights reads, “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

Yasin Hreimi was one of twenty six Palestinians exiled to Gaza as part of a deal brokered between Israelis and Palestinians at the end of a month long Israeli seige of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem in 2002. Nearly 200 Palestinian men, women, and children sought refuge in the Church of the Nativity during this seige. The seige was part of a much larger Israeli offensive dubbed “Operation Defensive Shield.”

After just one month in Gaza, Yasin’s son, Jalal, was arrested and sentenced to twelve years imprisonment for participating in anti-Occupation activities. Yasin’s grief over his being forced into exile and his son’s imprisonment was only intensified further when, in 2003, another of his sons, Walid, died in Gaza after Israel denied him permission to return to the West Bank for life-saving kidney treatment.

Several attempts were made to visit the imprisoned Jalal in Gaza by family and friends but all attempts were for not, as everyone was denied access to Jalal. Finally, as a result of a brokered prisoner release deal between the Israelis and the Palestinian Authority, Jalal was released on 26 December 2007 after serving six of the twelve years he was sentenced to. He was reunited later in Bethlehem with his daughter, Samaher, after negotiations to move her from Gaza where she had gone in hopes of visiting her father to Bethlehem. Samaher was trapped in Gaza due to having gone on her grandmother’s permit, who died in Gaza, thus nullifying the permit and leaving Samaher stranded in the virtual prison that is the Gaza Strip.

Negotiations are currently underway for the transfer of Yasin, Jalal’s father to Bethlehem as a part of another release of imprisoned Palestinians although these seem unlikely to be of any success. Yasin has resigned himself to exile in Gaza, but is happy his son and granddaughter have been reunited after all these years.

The story of the Al-Hreimi family is not unique by any stretch of the imagination. There are some 10,000 Palestinians currently imprisoned by the Israelis. Among those still held by Israel are almost 400 children and 120 women. Another 900 are called administrative detainees, imprisoned without facing charges or a trial date. The dire situation for Palestinian prisoners is only exacerbated by the use of the Gaza Strip as a large open-air prison, with over a million people trapped inside.