Wednesday, 21 September 2011
“Tens of thousands of Palestinians are taking part in rallies across the West Bank,” said Adnan Damiri, spokesman for the Palestinian security services told AFP.
Abbas’s Palestinian Authority, which exercises limited self-rule in the Israeli-occupied West Bank under 1990s interim peace deals, gave school children and civil servants the day off to attend events in Ramallah, Bethlehem, Nablus and Hebron.
“We are asking for the most simple of rights, a state like other nations,” said Sabrina Hussein, 50, carrying the green, red, black and white Palestinian national flag at the main demonstration in Ramallah.
A large mockup of a blue chair, symbolizing a seat at the U.N., and giant Palestinian flags hanging from buildings provided a backdrop for the Ramallah rally, where overflow crowds of thousands packed its Manara and Clock squares.
The main venues were far removed from Israeli military checkpoints on the perimeter of the cities and there were no reports of any violence. Palestinian leaders have pledged that demonstrations for statehood would be peaceful.
Later in the day in New York, U.S. President Barack Obama was due to meet Abbas to urge him to drop plans to ask the U.N. Security Council to recognize a Palestinian state. Washington says statehood should be achieved through peace talks.
The Palestinian initiative will not go without a response from Israel, but I don’t think that any more details should be given 
Abbas has said he will present U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon with a membership application on Friday. The move requires Security Council approval and the United States, one of five veto-wielding permanent members, says it will block it.
At the Ramallah rally, Amina Abdel Jabbar al-Kiswany, a head teacher, said the U.N. bid was a step on the road to statehood, not a solution to the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which direct negotiations have failed to resolve, according to Reuters.
“It's a cry of desperation,” Kiswany said.
In the thick of the crowd, a masked men tried to set a U.S. flag on fire but was dissuaded by another participant who tried to grab it away from him. In the end, the Stars and Stripes was tossed into the crowd, where a man picked it up and walked away with it.
U.S.-brokered peace talks collapsed a year ago after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refused to extend a 10-month limited moratorium on construction in Jewish settlements in areas Palestinians want for a state.
Netanyahu has called the Palestinian demand of a halt to settlement building an unacceptable precondition and urged Abbas to return to negotiations.
The Israeli leader was due to meet Obama, with whom he has had a strained relationship, later in the day on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly.
Palestinians hope to establish a state in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza Strip, territories captured by Israel in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.
The Palestinian Authority has held sway only in the West Bank since Hamas Islamists opposed to his peace efforts with Israel seized Gaza in a brief civil war in 2007.
We are asking for the most simple of rights, a state like other nations Hamas has dismissed the U.N. bid as a waste of time and there were no rallies in the Mediterranean enclave, where Palestinians argue that Abbas should be devoting his energies to bridging the internal political divide.
Israel cites historical and biblical links to the West Bank, which it calls Judea and Samaria, and to Jerusalem. It claims all of the city as its capital, a status that is not recognized internationally.
Israel’s foreign minister warned on Wednesday that Israel will respond to the Palestinian bid for U.N. membership, as his deputy called for the Jewish state to answer by annexing large settlement blocs.
“The Palestinian initiative will not go without a response from Israel, but I don’t think that any more details should be given,” Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman told Israel’s army radio in a phone interview from New York.
“We must see how things evolve with the process in which the Palestinians are engaged, we have sufficient tools to respond,” he added, according to AFP.
Lieberman, who heads the ultra-nationalist Israel Beitenu party, which is a key part Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition, also rejected the notion of any new freeze on settlement building.
An initial 10-month freeze on new settlement construction in the West Bank, expired shortly after the re-launch of peace talks with the Palestinians in September 2010, but Israel has not taken steps to renew the measure which was harshly criticized by the right.
“There will not be a freeze for even a day,” Lieberman declared as international diplomats sought to find a way to head off a looming diplomatic storm that the membership campaign is likely to unleash.
We would have preferred this to be done as part of an accord, but the Palestinians -- by going to the U.N. -- have violated all the agreements, which no longer bind us Lieberman denied a report in the Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot that he would threaten to topple Netanyahu’s government if the premier failed to take sufficiently stringent measures in response to the Palestinian campaign, such as freezing money transfers or annexing settlements.
“All of that is completely false,” he said.
But Lieberman’s deputy Danny Ayalon told Israeli public radio that the government should move to annex the largest blocs of settlements, which are home to most of the 300,000-strong settler community in the West Bank.
“In any case, it’s clear to the whole world that these blocs will be part of the state of Israel,” he said.
“We would have preferred this to be done as part of an accord, but the Palestinians -- by going to the U.N. -- have violated all the agreements, which no longer bind us,” he said.
“Annexing the blocs would allow us to avoid having problems with the international community every time we build the smallest building,” he said.
Ayalon said he did not expect the Palestinians, who are due to submit their membership request on Friday, would gain Security Council approval, predicting a majority would vote against or abstain, allowing the United States to avoid casting its veto to block the move.
“Thanks to the efforts made by the Americans, I don’t think the United States will have to use its veto to block the Palestinian initiatives,” he said.
http://english.alarabiya.net/articles/2011/09/21
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