Democratic Palestine : 30 (ص 10)
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- Democratic Palestine : 30 (ص 10)
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a
Beir Zeit students commemorate a martyr of the uprising.
detention of children and youth at Ofra
detention center, east of Jerusalem, and
Dhahariya camp, also in the West Bank
(see box).
Throughout June and early July,
there were repeated confrontations
between students and the occupation
troops. On July 4th, the Unified Na-
tional Student Movement in the Gaza
Strip issued a call saluting the struggle
of Palestinian teachers and pupils,
demanding the release of all detained
students and condemning the Zionists’
disruption of education. The call also
set out a series of student activities.
In the West Bank, clashes were
especially intense in the Jerusalem,
Bethlehem, Hebron and Nablus areas.
On several occasions, Israeli soldiers
raided schools and beat students and
teachers alike. On July 12th, when
Nablus youth broke a curfew to
demonstrate, Israeli helicopters fired
on two schools. The biggest clash oc-
curred on June 25th, when 200 soldiers
surrounded Al Hussein school in
Hebron to quell the large student pro-
test against the demolition of a
Palestinian home in a nearby village.
(The house owner had been arrested on
charges of stabbing an Israeli settler.)
On this day, 25 students were treated
for tear gas inhalation and beating, and
50 were detained.
Schools . were again subject to
closures especially ‘after the June 15th
general strike in solidarity with detain-
ed students, and again in mid-July, just
before final exams were scheduled.
These closures were mainly a vain at-
tempt to stop the campaign of renam-
ing the schools, proclaimed by the
10
United National Leadership of the
Uprising. In many places, schools
received new, revolutionary names. In
Bethlehem alone, 12 schools were
renamed, becoming the School of the
Intifadeh, the School of the Palestinian
Revolution, etc.
The July 21st Israeli announcement
of the premature end of the school year
was met by militant protests
throughout the territories, converging
with protests of Israeli atrocities
against the citizens at large. In the se-
cond two weeks of July, seventeen
Palestinians were killed by the occupa-
tion troops, the heaviest death toll since
the April protests against the murder of
Abu Jihad. The bulk of the martyrs in
this round were 15-25 years of age.
As of this writing, the Zionist
authorities are delaying the opening of
the schools for the fall semester.
DUAL POWER
POPULAR COMMITTEES
BANNED
Parallel to the battle of the schools,
battles have been raging between the
masses and the occupiers in virtually all
fields. Though suffering heavy
casualties, the masses of the uprising
have imposed a state of dual power in
the occupied territories through their
persistence and creativity. It was first
and foremost this phenomenon that the
Zionist authorities sought to erase when
they banned the Palestinian popular
committees on August 18th and
specified a ten-year jail sentence for
membership in them. In an act of
desperation, the Israeli leadership has
virtually prohibited Palestinians from
engaging in community organizing. The
banning shows that even though the
civil disobedience campaign is not total,
it is sufficiently powerful to be deemed
an intolerable threat to the occupation.
In the strategic sense, the banning is
part of the Zionist war against every
seed of a future Palestinian state, a
question which has been brought on the
agenda of concrete possibilities by the
uprising. In the tactical sense, this ban
is intended to accomplish what murder,
mass beatings and arrests, curfews and
expulsions have failed to achieve, i.e.,
the end of the uprising.
The banning of the popular commit-
tees was preceded by a number of other
attacks on Palestinian civilian institu-
tions: the May banning of Shebibi (the
Palestinian youth movement); the June
closure of the Society for the Preserva-
tion of the Family in El Bireh; the July
31st arrest of Mustafa Tawfiq Abu
Zahara, head of the Jerusalem mer-
chants’ group, and of Feisal Husseini,
head of the Arab Studies Center, and
the closure of the center; the arrest of
dozens of journalists, and bans on
distribution of the Palestinian press, as
happened with AI Fajr in early August,
when it called for the resignation of the
appointed West Bank mayors, in line
with the calls of the United National
Leadership. The banning of the
popular committees was followed by
the closure of the Trade Union Federa-
tion in Nablus, which groups 45 unions.
Most immediately, the bannings were
the Israeli response to their failure to
win the battle of tax collection and ID
cards, i.e., their failure to break the
civil disobedience and self-sufficiency
campaigns.
THE WAR OF THE TAXES
The Israeli leadership had not an-
ticipated that Palestinian merchants
would form a pillar of the popular
resistance. Accordingly, they planned
their economic sanctions with a class
bias, hoping some strata would suc-
cumb to immediate economic interests
and drop out of the uprising. Mer-
chants did quite the reverse; not only
did they continue the commercial strike
in accordance with the program of the
United National Leadership; they
joined with other businesses in refusal
to pay taxes to the occupation. With
revenues from the territories cut in half,
the occupation troops launched a cam-
paign of tax raids in July. At the same
time, they extended into the West Bank - هو جزء من
- Democratic Palestine : 30
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