West Bank unrest strains limits of Israel's patience

Ehab Barghouti would not have been at the demonstration at all if his father Asdal had had his way.

Asdal found his son, 14, on the road from their village of Beit Rima and ordered him into the car. "I told him: 'You shouldn't go, you're too young.'

He told me: 'I want to resist.' I said: 'Do you want me to see you on TV?"' But when Asdal stopped at a local garage and went in to talk to the mechanic, Ehab made his escape.

A few hours later he was unconscious in intensive care in Ramallah's main hospital, a rubber-coated steel bullet having penetrated his skull.

He had been standing among a crowd of youths, well inside the nearby village of Nabi Saleh, on a hillside carpeted with the first daisies and wild flowers of spring.

Many of the youths were throwing stones at an unfinished house 25m away which had been occupied by armed Israeli Border Police some 15 minutes earlier.

Shortly after 2.30pm a shot rang out, and Ehab dropped face down on the ground before being carried vomiting and bleeding from the wound above his right eye by four older men to relative safety back up the hill.

Even if freshly promised "proximity talks" between Israelis and Palestinians get under way, they are unlikely to halt the weekly protests that will take place after noon prayers.

The Palestinian Authority did not start the weekly protests that have now spread to more than half a dozen West Bank villages. It is not leading them.

But a supportive Palestinian cabinet statement appeared to adopt their model last month, applauding that: "Peaceful and popular efforts have regained international recognition of the just Palestinian cause and revealed the void Israeli excuses for the construction of settlements and the wall."

For something is happening in these villages nestling among the rocky hills and olive groves between Ramallah and Nablus.

The Israeli military does not accept the classification of the protests as non-violent; most usually end in confrontations between stone-throwing Palestinian youths and armed police and troops. But for the six years of such protests none of the Palestinians, in contrast to the security forces, have carried weapons.

If these are the first stirrings of a new uprising, then they are closer to the beginnings in 1987 of the first intifada, the so-called "war of stones", than the second, with its bloody record of suicide bombings between 2000 and around 2005.

Some commentators have dubbed the protests - and the apparent endorsement of them by the internationally respected Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad - as the "white" intifada.

Either way the protests, and the Palestinian Authority's refusal to condemn them, have provoked a strong reaction from Israel's security establishment. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported this week Israel had warned the PA if it did not "contain" the protests it would lose co-operation with Israel.

An unnamed Israeli security official was earlier quoted in the same paper as having told diplomats the protests constituted an "existential" threat to Israel.

The march last week of perhaps 100 men, children and a few women started from the middle of the village. They began their descent along the street chanting slogans like "National Unity: Fatah, Hamas, PFLP".

They followed the road round to the left, past the petrol station and were still a good 800m from the main road (Route 465) separating Nabi Saleh from the Israeli settlement of Halamish when the first tear gas canisters - along, say the protesters, with rubber bullets - were fired by the Israeli forces who had long taken up a position on a hilltop to the right. Some marchers scrambled down the hillside to the right, others retreated back towards the village, while others continued to move forward.

There was perhaps an hour of cat-and-mouse between the youths from Tamimi and the Israeli forces controlling the exits from Nabi Saleh, the former throwing stones that fell short of any target and the latter firing rubber bullets and tear gas canisters (aluminium and rubber) that hit and injured a few protesters before the forces began to advance into the village itself.

Three Jeeps advanced slowly up the road behind a white truck carrying a water cannon spraying "skunk", a foul-smelling substance that leaves its odour for a week in the clothes of anyone who comes into direct contact with it.

Taking refuge with perhaps a dozen protesters in the back room of the petrol station you could hear the loud explosion of a stun grenade - and the firing of tear gas and rubber bullets to cover the front Jeep as it was pelted with stones - before it began to move slowly back down the road again.

It seemed all over. But then the forces took over two houses, one the green building from which Ehab Barghouti, still in a coma yesterday, was shot.

According to the Israeli human rights agency B'tselem, the regulation minimum range for firing rubber bullets is 40m and such bullets must be fired only at legs and not fired at children. Secondly, it is far from clear why the security forces occupied the house at all.

According to Ramzi Tamimi, 33, one of the men who took the inert Ehab back up the hill: "As long as the soldiers stay away from the village and stay at the entrances, nothing happens. They deliberately come to make friction with us."

And beyond this is the fact the entire protest took place on Palestinian land, land that if the putative peace talks ever had an outcome, would be part of a Palestinian state.

For the stated, and of course never reached, destination of the march was a spring a few metres on the other side of Route 465, on what had long been Tamimi land.

But the Halamish residents now control the land - and the spring - to the extent that when the villagers tried to cultivate their olive trees last November, they say they were driven away by armed, stone-throwing settlers.

The military says that "rock-throwing is considered a serious offence, placing others at significant risk". But in Nabi Saleh the protesters were still marching peacefully and not throwing stones when the military started firing tear gas.

The military has also sought to move against another notable aspect of the protests, the supportive presence of the left-wing Israeli activists who now regularly join them. The registration numbers of cars entering the West Bank through checkpoints are checked against those of known Israeli participants.

For Ayed Morrar, a Palestinian veteran of unarmed protest in the West Bank, the presence of Israelis is positive. "It's good for our people, and good for them," he says.

Arguing the Palestinians needs the international community on its side, he said: "We want to show we are not against Israelis. We are against the occupation."

- INDEPENDENT