The appearance of Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasir Arafat before the United Nations General Assembly on November 13 has been followed by demonstrations of Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank of the Jordan River. Not since the upsurge in 1968 has there been such a widespread wave of protest against the Zionist occupation.
Demonstrations took place for nine consecutive days, with actions in every major town on the West Bank. Highschool students stood in the vanguard as entire student bodies turned out. Demonstrators waved Palestinian flags and chanted, “Palestine is Arab” and “Long live Arafat.”
The actions began November 13 in Nablus, where shopkeepers staged a general strike and hundreds of schoolchildren demonstrated in the main square.
“Israeli paratroopers and policemen wielding clubs charged the jeering, whistling crowds of children and scattered them into narrow side streets,” Terence Smith reported in the November 14 New York Times. Truckloads of paratroopers then raced through the town, “beating their long white riot batons on the fenders to frighten away bystanders....
“Whenever they found more than a few people standing together, the paratroopers screeched to a stop, leaped from the truck and charged toward the group with their batons swinging over their heads on rawhide thongs. At one point a soldier chased three young boys for more than a block before they escaped down a side street.”
Demonstrations were also reported in Ramallah, Jenin, A1 Birah, Halbul, East Jerusalem, Hebron, Bethlehem, Tulkarm, and Jericho. During a general strike in Hebron on November 17 barricades were erected in some streets. Barricades were set up in other towns as well, and a number of clashes with Israeli motorists occurred.
At a news conference in Algiers November 18 Arafat hailed the demonstrations, calling on the West Bank Palestinians to “continue and escalate your resistance and sacrifices” in the campaign for independence. “We are with you,” he said. “You have our complete support.”
Zionist authorities reacted by imposing stringent repressive measures. Curfews have been enforced by the Israeli occupation forces, and schools have been closed down in some areas. West Bank mayors and school principals have been told that they will be held responsible for demonstrations and that their schools will be shut if they fail to stop the protests.
By November 20, more than 500 Palestinians had been arrested, the London Economist reported. Many of those jailed have already received stiff fines and prison sentences.
About ten Palestinians had been killed and fifty wounded in thirty-six hours, PLO spokesman Shefiq al-Hout told a New York news conference November 18. One of those killed was a teenage Palestinian woman, murdered in Jenin on November 16. The Israelis claimed she was hit by a stone; actually she was crushed by an Israeli tank, the PLO spokesman said. Thousands attended the woman’s funeral, which turned into a demonstration against the Israeli occupation and was attacked by Israeli troops.
On November 18 the demonstrations spread for the first time to East Jerusalem, which Israel has formally annexed. Israeli riot police and soldiers attacked the protesters with clubs and used a water cannon to try to disperse the crowd.
“At the Ibrahimiya College in East Jerusalem,” the November 19 New York Times reported, “the police and soldiers beat the protesting students as they dragged them from the courtyard. Several students were bleeding as they were pushed into police vans.”
The Zionist forces were even more brutal at the Kalandria Vocational School near Jerusalem. More than 100 police and soldiers attacked after students demonstrated in the school yard waving the Palestinian flag and shouting slogans. The headmaster of the school reported: “Even the assistant headmaster, who was trying to calm the students, was caught and beaten over the head. We sent him to the hospital with a concussion.”
A militant demonstration by several hundred Palestinians in Jerusalem on November 22 was dispersed only after Israeli troops fired automatic weapons over the heads of the demonstrators. The demonstrators had started from the A1 Aksa mosque in the Old City of Jerusalem and marched through the streets, carrying Palestinian flags and anti-Zionist placards. More people joined along the way. They were halted by club-swinging troops and a water cannon at the Damascus Gate, where they were forced to scatter as the soldiers opened an attack. Thirty Palestinians were arrested.
The Israeli occupation authorities cracked down further on November 21, imposing harsh economic sanctions on the town of Ramallah. As punishment for a general strike by Ramallah’s merchants, the Israeli military issued an order cutting off trade between Ramallah and Jordan, where most of the town’s produce is sold.
Israeli authorities also deported five prominent Palestinians, among them Dr. Hanna Nasser, deputy mayor of Bethlehem and president of Bir Zeit College. He is a cousin of Kemal Nasser, a former official of the PLO who was murdered by Israeli commandos in Beirut last year.
The Palestinians in the West Bank received renewed support November 22, when the United Nations General Assembly formally recognized, by a vote of 89 to 8, their right to independence and sovereignty in Palestine and the right of the PLO to permanent UN observer status.
The Israeli regime can be expected to intensify its repression. The November 22 New York Times quoted “reliable sources” as saying that the government was planning even sterner reprisals if it considered them necessary, including closing all the bridges across the Jordan River.
Source: https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1974/IP1243.pdf#page=10&view=FitV,3