Arabs on both sides of the Green Line marked Land Day on Thursday, but with different methods and differing results.
One Palestinian was killed and 11 others were wounded in the West Bank, as Israel Defense Force troops sealed off the area, as well as the Gaza Strip, to any traffic coming in or out.
Inside the Green Line, however, all was relatively quiet as Israeli Arabs staged peaceful demonstrations in the northern, central and southern regions.
Land Day marks the day in 1976 when six Arabs were killed during demonstrations against the confiscation of Arab land in Galilee by Israeli authorities.
In this village about five miles northeast of Kfar Sava, a 3 p.m. rally in the town’s square attracted some 2,000 demonstrators who chanted nationalistic slogans and held up signs in Arabic and Hebrew calling for the creation of two separate states.
Knesset member Tawfik Toubi, a member of Israel’s Communist Party, joined 15 local village leaders, together with Islamic fundamentalists, in a show of solidarity with Palestinians in the administered territories.
One woman held up a sweater knitted with the black, white, red and green flag of the Palestine Liberation Organization, while all around her teen-agers held up two fingers in a victory salute.
ARABS ARE ‘LOYAL CITIZENS’
In only one other place inside Israel was the PLO flag reported seen: on a building off the road near Zeita, just north of Tulkarm.
“I think the Israeli Arabs, in principle, are loyal citizens, and they want to obey the law,” Police Minister Haim Bar-Lev told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “Secondly, the massive police presence has a deterring effect, no doubt about it.”
Bar-Lev said about 4,000 extra police officers were concentrated around Israeli Arab villages inside the Green Line, the border separating pre-1967 Israel from the West Bank.
On both sides of the line, Arabs observed a general strike that closed shops all day. Israel Radio broadcast a list of a handful of Israeli villages where the strike was not being observed.
Published reports said that in the West Bank village of Yatta, near Hebron, about 500 Palestinians marched on City Hall, which had stayed open in defiance of the strike call.
Reports said city guards opened fire and wounded at least two protesters.
A tour of some Israeli Arab villages Thursday morning found almost no trace of any commemoration of the day, except for the shuttered store fronts.
In Taiba, a village listed Monday by Police Commissioner David Kraus as one of the hot spots that would be monitored, Mayor Rafek Hagyihia stood in his second-floor office surrounded by 18 men, talking on a two-way radio.
“All is quiet,” he told a television reporter in Hebrew. “Do you want to take a picture of the quiet?”
Hagyihia said he had received cooperation from all the village leaders to maintain calm among Taiba’s 22,000 residents.
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