Democratic Palestine : 39 (ص 6)
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- Democratic Palestine : 39 (ص 6)
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Palestine - reunited in protest
Within hours of the Rishon Letz-
ion massacre, occupied Palestine was
in a turmoil of Palestinian rage and
continued Zionist aggression. In a
spontaneously organized general
strike, later extended to three days by
the United National Leadership, Pales-
tinian workers in Israel returned to the
territories in cars and buses bearing
black flags. The Gaza Strip exploded
despite the immediate imposition of a
curfew which it took the occupation
army all day to enforce. Seven more
Palestinians were killed as the army
confronted demonstrators in the West
Bank and Gaza Strip, bringing the
death toll to 14, equaling the highest
number killed on a single day previ-
ously in the intifada (the April 1988
protests of Abu Jihad’s assassination).
In the course of three days, 20
Palestinians were shot dead and over
800 wounded. Meanwhile, 12 Israeli
soldiers were injured by stones, four of
them seriously enough to require hos-
pitalization. According to an Israeli
army spokesman, the «sheer scope and
intensity of the rioting has not been
seen in at least the past six months»
(Associated Press, May 21st).
Palestinians living in the Zionist
state immediately declared a general
strike, while Palestinian communities
from the Galilee in the north to Naqab
villages in the south, and the Triangle,
Jaffa, Haifa, Ramle and Lydd, took to
the streets in protest. The Zionist
forces had to take on a nation-wide
intifada in what the Israeli media
termed unprecedentedly broad distur-
bances. Nazareth took on the appear-
ance of a West Bank town as masked
youth burned tires and threw stones at
Zionist police, vehicles and buildings.
Protests continued, day and night, for
three days, defying curfews, teargas
and rubber bullets, and causing Shamir
to warn that «Israeli Arabs» had «ex-
ceeded the bounds of the permissible»
(Guardian, May 23rd).
For the better part of a week, the
Israeli army and police were kept busy
with having to send reinforcements
into a number of places. Even the
guard force in prisons was beefed up
as Palestinian prisoners, who had been
planning hunger strikes to protest their
illegal detention, joined in the all-
6
Palestine protest. Not until May 27th
did the army begin to ease its curfew
in the Gaza Strip - the longest ever
imposed on the whole area. On the
same day, the United National Leader-
ship called for a general strike until
June 7th in continued protest of the
massacre, meanwhile marking the his-
torical Zionist aggressions of June - the
1967 occupation of the West Bank and
Gaza Strip, and the 1982 invasion of
I ebanon.
Palestinian militants in the occupied
territories staged several attacks in the
week following the massacre: a settler
was killed in Jerusalem on May 20th,
while a bomb in the city one week later
killed another Israeli and injured ten
others. In the days between, there was an
armed attack on an Israeli military patrol
in Hebron.
Spillover to Jordan
On May 22nd, Haaretz reported that
Israeli troops had been put on alert for
possible intervention against Palesti-
nians in Israel or Jerusalem, for the first
time since the intifada began (Interna-
tional Herald Tribune, May 23rd). Israeli
political and military leaders expressed
unease at the spillover of the intifada to
Palestinian communities adjacent to the
1967 occupied territories.
Indeed Jordan joined the intifada
for three days, with thousands upon
thousands demonstrating in the Palesti-
nian camps and major Jordanian cities.
Baqaa Camp near Amman and Irbid in
the north were the scenes of the biggest
protests against the massacre in Pales-
tine, and also the places where two
youths were killed, as the Jordanian sec-
urity forces tried to keep the protesters
within bounds. However, it was obvious
that the mass anger at the Zionists’
atrocities had linked up with the frustra-
tions of people who until a few months
ago had no outlet whatsoever for expres-
sing their political sentiments. There was
an attempt to storm the US embassy, and
cars, hotels and _ businesses were
attacked.
At the same time, groups linked to
the Jordanian intelligence, the com-
prador class, some Islamic forces, and
even the Israeli intelligence, were at
work. These groups share a common
interest in sabotaging the new democracy
as well as Palestinian-Jordanian relations
on the popular level. This posed a prob-
lem for the nationalist forces whose
interests lie in developing the new demo-
cracy and exhibiting more solidarity with
the intifada, not in promoting violence
for its own sake.
The government let out hints that it
was prepared to send the army into the
camps and cities, and as the protests sub-
sided, a week of mourning for the victims
of Zionist terror was declared, with black
flags hanging in every street of the Pales-
tinian camps in Jordan.
¥
Funeral in Hitteen Camp, near Amman, of Palestinian youth killed by the Jordanian police. - هو جزء من
- Democratic Palestine : 39
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