Around 100 demonstrators waving Palestinian flags and wearing fluorescent jackets reading, “We are going to Jerusalem,” broke through near the Qalandiya military checkpoint, onlookers said. A truck was used to pull down the concrete slabs making up the wall, an organizer said.
Early reports said the demonstration was planned by the “popular committees” local groups organized to oppose the construction of the wall.
Last Friday, protesters in the village of Ni’lin also managed to tear down a section of the wall. Residents of the village, like those in many towns along the route of the wall, participate in weekly demonstrations against the barrier and the associated annexation of their land.
Intended to be 709 kilometers in length, Israel had completed 413 kilometers of the wall by June 2009, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
The barrier, in reality a network of walls, fences, watchtowers and checkpoints, snakes through the interior of the West Bank, looping around Israeli settlements and fragmenting Palestinian communities.
The International Court of Justice ruled that the wall is illegal under international law in 2004. Israel maintains the barrier is for its security.
By Mary Rizzo • Nov 9th, 2009 at 16:11 •
A group of Palestinians from the popular committees and Fatah movement tore down a part of the Apartheid Wall separating occupied East Jerusaelm from the rest of the West Bank.
On Monday 9 November a hundred Palestinians waving Palestinain flags and wearing florecent jackets saying “WE ARE GOING TO JERUSALEM” took down a piece of the concrete wall near the Kalandia airport.
The following leaflet was distributed by a group of Palestinians who tore down the Wall near Jerusalem:
On 9 November 1989 the world witnessed the moment of the demolition of the Berlin Wall.
Similarly, at this moment, twenty years later, a group of Palestinians have demolished part of the Apartheid Wall around Jerusalem.
Jerusalem, that bleeds every day… Jerusalem whose children are homeless under the rain. These young boys and girls who were promised by the martyr president Yaser Arafat that they would raise the Palestinian flag on the churches and mosques of Jerusalem. Mosques and churches who’s sanctity is defiled while we passively wait for salvation unaware that the responsibility lies with each and every one of us.
Al-Quds Educational Television is a small, public service, non-profit channel based in Ramallah, which gives Palestinians the chance to show their own stories, to their own communities.
It is under constant threat of financial ruin, Israeli repression and falling foul of the Palestinain factions it criticises.
This film meets some of the characters both on and behind the screens at the station, and explores the stories they want to tell the world about life in the West Bank.
JERUSALEM (AFP) – Israel’s Education Ministry has recalled all copies of a history textbook because of a passage alleging “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians during the 1948 war, a newspaper reported on Monday.
Israel’s Haaretz newspaper said the secondary school textbook was removed from shelves because it sought to present both Israeli and Arab perspectives on the departure of some 750,000 Palestinians during the fighting that erupted after the creation of the Jewish state.
The Palestinians have always said they were violently expelled by Jewish forces while Israel has maintained they were ordered to flee by invading Arab states or alarmed by inflammatory Arab radio reports.
The fate of the refugees and their descendants, who now number some 4.6 million and are scattered across the region, has been one of the most divisive issues in the decades-old Middle East conflict.
The textbook in question, for 11th and 12th graders, contained both versions of the events side-by-side, but according to Haaretz the ministry took issue with the Palestinian version.
It quoted the passage in question as saying: “The Palestinians and the Arab countries contended that most of the refugees were civilians who were attacked and expelled from their homes by armed Jewish forces, which instituted a policy of ethnic cleansing.”
Haaretz said the textbooks would be reissued after “corrections” are made.
The education ministry could not immediately be reached for comment.
Since assuming office in March, Israel’s right-wing government has sought to reinforce Israel’s Jewish identity, including by instituting a plan to change traffic signs to display only Hebrew place names.
Israel’s former dovish Education Minister Yuli Tamir sparked controversy in December 2006 when she said school textbooks should show Israel’s borders prior to the 1967 Six Day war, during which it conquered Egypt’s Sinai, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights and the West Bank including east Jerusalem.
Israel returned the Sinai under a peace treaty with Egypt in 1979 and annexed the Golan and east Jerusalem. The Palestinians have demanded the occupied West Bank, east Jerusalem and Gaza as their future state.
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