In Beit Ommar, a peaceful demonstration took place at the entrance of the town, which is located on Route 60. Before reaching the gates of the town, which were closed by the Israeli military to keep people from entering and exiting the town, about a dozen Israeli soldiers attacked the peaceful demonstration with teargas and metal bullets coated in rubber, frequently referred to as rubber bullets. The soldiers threw teargas in every direction, and many people were injured by inhaling the gas. Three activists were injured by rubber bullets.

About 150 activists joined today’s demonstration in Beit Ommar. During the demonstration, Israeli soldiers occupied two Palestinian houses and shot at activists from the rooftops. When soldiers occupy a home, it frightens the family, especially the children, and the soldiers lock the family members in one room while they occupy the house.

Soldiers shot about six teargas cans towards the Center for Freedom and Justice, where PSP activists were watching and filming from the roof, and several activists were injured. After a while, the military jeeps entered further into the town, numbering eight in total, and started shooting more rubber bullets and teargas at demonstrators and people’s homes. Demonstrators threw stones at the jeeps, and eventually forced them to return to the watchtower at the entrance of Beit Ommar. One Israeli soldier was injured during the demonstration. Israeli forces injured roughly 340 Palestinians in the West Bank and killed a 20 year old Palestinian man in Gaza during today’s demonstrations.

The weekly nonviolent protest in Beit Ommar will take place tomorrow, March 31st. It will be used to mark Land Day, and to show solidarity with the prisoners on hunger strikes.

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

9th September: PSP joined residents of the Al Ma’sara village in Bethlehem district for their weekly demonstration against the Israeli occupation. Around fifty Palestinian protesters – accompanied by Israeli and international activists – marched from the town and attempted to cross an Israeli-built road to access their fields.

The march was met by around 25 Isreali soldiers, who prevented the villagers from crossing the road to reach the Palestinian fields. Protesters chanted in support of Palestine’s Spetember bid for statehood at the UN, and demanded an end to the occupation. The entirely peaceful protest was then pushed back by the heavily armed soldiers, who arrested Muhammad Brijiyeh without any provocation.

The protest continued for a further 30 minutes, with demonstrators demanding Muhammad’s release. Their sit-in protest on the road was finally dispersed when the area was declared a closed military zone.

Muhammad was released several hours later without charge.

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.

This past Saturday, twenty-eight Israeli women visited Beit Ommar at the invitation of the Beit Ommar Women’s Committee. The event was organised to give the women a chance to eat together, mingle, and discuss the challenges that citizens of Beit Ommar face on a daily basis.

Iman Abu Maria started the discussion by illustrating the situation in Beit Ommar. She highlighted the problems caused by the five illegal settlements which surround Beit Ommar, including the regular settler assaults on Palestinian farmers cultivating their own land.

The issue of escalating violence from the Israeli military was also discussed, both in terms of the growing number of nighttime raids carried out in the town, and the increasingly violent repression of the town’s weekly peaceful protest against the illegal settlement of Karmei Tsur. Iman also drew attention to the case of Majde Za’aqiq, a local elementary school teacher and member of the popular committee, who remains in jail awaiting trial for fabricated charges of stone throwing (report here).

After Iman finished speaking, four members of the popular committee discussed the town’s plans for September. On September 17th, the popular committee plans to host a demonstration in remembrance of the Sabra and Shatila massacres. Part of this demonstration will involve releasing one thousand black balloons, each with a name of a Palestinian who was killed during the 1982 massacres.

The meeting was successful in attempting to demonstrate to the Israeli women the plight of the Palestinians in Beit Ommar. A positive discussion was held afterwards during which there was agreement that the occupation was unjust, and the cause of much suffering. The Israeli women departed with a promise to help the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, equality, and freedom – in any way they can.

The trees belong to several Palestinian farmers, including Mousa Hamdan Abu Loha, Azat Abu Latifa, Ibrahim Mahmoud Abu Loha, Ahmad Sobhia, and Mohammad Abed Al-Latif.

The land where the trees were destroyed were located alongside the Israeli settlement of Bat Ayn. Settlers from Bat Ayn were seen felling trees with chainsaws while soldiers operated the bulldozers. Settlers then piled the pieces of cut up trees into cars.

Al-Jab’a is a small village of around 900 people that is situated west of Bethlehem and north of Beit Ommar. Al-Jab’a lies on the Green Line, the dividing line between Israel and the West Bank. The village is surrounded by settlements, with Gush Etzion to the east, Betar Illit to the north, and Bat Ayn to the south. Israeli settlers, particularly from Bat Ayn, periodically harass the villagers of Al-Jab’a with impunity. Additionally, the main road connecting Al-Jab’a to the nearby village of Surif is blocked by the Israeli Authorities.

Al-Ma’asara
Later Friday, a small group of activists from Al-Ma’asara marched towards their village lands. In a symbolic protest, one activist set fire to an Israeli flag. He then forcibly attacked and arrested by Israeli soldiers. The remaining demonstrators, Palestinians, Israelis, and Internationals, sat down in the road to protest his arrest, insisting they would not leave until he was released. The soldiers agreed to a release, providing the group would back up 15 meters. While the activists complied, the soldiers did not keep their word (surprisingly), and drove away with the organizer. Israeli soldiers also began pushing the group further back, and eventually dispersed the demonstration.

The proprietors of the land have been identified as Nahalin residents Daoud Mahmood, Jameel Mahmood, A’ali Muhammad Taha and Hasan Muhammad A’ali Salah. Although they possess documents that prove their ownership, the Israeli military has refused to recognize them and claims that the land is owned by the Israeli state.

Members of the Palestine Solidarity Project arrived at 10:30 a.m. to find dozens of uprooted grape, fig and olive trees. The bulldozer was being accompanied and protected by Israeli civilians and military personnel. In addition, military vehicles and border police blocked the main path towards the lands, leaving the horrified residents of Nahalin impotent to do anything but observe from a distance the destructive advance of the machines.

Villagers and internationals eventually approached the soldiers blocking the path to inquire about the destruction of cultivated Palestinian lands, particularly during an alleged Israeli “construction freeze” and “peace negotiations” between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority. As usual, the occupation forces immediately declared the area a “closed military zone” and proceeded to threaten and attack the activists, threatening a man with a video camera while attempting to take his footage, as well as pushing and hitting another international activist attempting to document the destruction.