In recent years, motions supporting the Zionist state of Israel have been passed with very little trouble. Very little is known of the internal nature of Israel especially concerning the status and rights of its Palestinian citizens.

In this article, Salient attempts to examine some of the lesser known features of this war-torn and controversial country. It relates to events which happened 2 months ago and yet received no coverage in our press or media.

In the past months a mass uprising has taken place among Palestinian Arabs in the Israel-occupied West Bank and Galilee. Nearly 700,000 Palestinians have joined in this struggle, the most powerful and sustained protest against the occupation of their land since the Zionist victory in 1948.

The leading force of the mobilisation has been young Arabs who have rejected the collaboration of the traditional, conservative Palestinian leadership with Israel. In January, Arab students at the Bir Zeit college, near Allamah, went on strike in support of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO). Teachers at the college backed the students and issued a statement demanding the release of West Bank Arabs imprisoned in Israeli jails without being charged or tried.

Militant mass demonstrations then spread throughout the West Bank region and into areas inside Israel's pre-1967 borders. The explosion of Palestinian dissent was touched off by the US veto of a pro-Palestinian resolution in the UN Security Council. On January 27, thousands of Palestinian students and workers marched in Jerusalem raising slogans supporting the PLO and condemning the US veto and the continuing Zionist colonisation. Israeli police attacked the demonstrators with clubs and rubber bullets and dozens of Palestinian youths were arrested.

The same day in Nablus, hundreds of students from the city's three high schools protested in the streets and were joined by many Palestinian workers. When Israeli police attempted to disperse them with fire hoses and swinging batons, the demonstrators broke into small groups and fought back with stones. In Ramallah, students did a mass leafleting with Fateh material, urging Palestinians to intensify their [unclear: resistence] to Israeli occupation, and in Hebron angry demonstrators burned a military car in the public square.

Following that, demonstrations became almost a daily feature, erupting in every major town on the West Bank, including Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nablus, Jericho, Jenin, Bir Zeit, Hebron, Al Bira, Halhoul, Tulkarn and Beit Sahur.

On February 25 and 26, hundreds of Palestinian students were arrested in Nablus. The student strikes closed schools in the city and surrounding areas and all business activity was brought to a halt. Political prisoners, meanwhile, throughout Israel, began a hunger strike to protest the inhuman treatment they receive in Israeli jails. The prisoners demanded an end to administrative detention under which Palestinian activists are often held for as long as a year or more without charges or a trial.

Brutal Israeli Response

The response from Israeli authorities to the protests has demonstrated, in dramatic fashion, the brutal nature of Israeli colonisation. The mass upsurge among the Palestinians has been met with mass arrests, beatings and terror tactics, with troops breaking into Arab houses and shooting above demonstrating crowds. The Zionist authorities have also threatened to arrest people, to fire them from their jobs, and even to blow up their houses to stop them participating in the revolt.

On March 7, Israeli troops stormed into the Kadri Touqun school in Nablus, dragging pupils from their desks and beating them. Seventy-two students were injured because they dared to chant slogans against the Zionist occupation. The Palestinian population responded at once. Nablus was paralysed by protest strikes, and the entire town council resigned in protest.

An even more brutal attack occurred on March 10, resulting in the immediate resignation of the mayors and city councils of Ramallah. Al Bira and Bir Zeit. In the village square of Bir Zeit, 12 miles north of Jerusalem, 200 students of the local college demonstrated peacefully, chanting pro-PLO slogans. Suddenly they were attacked by a detachment of Israeli soldiers. Twenty-five chased the students into the college dormitory, smashing windows, overturning furniture, clubbing and beating the students. Of the many students injured, 14 required hospitalisation, while 5 were arrested and fined the equivalent of a year's tuition.

In the small town of Anabta, the same brutality. Here, "reporters saw Israeli soldiers drag youths from their homes... and beat them with batons after the youngsters blocked the road" (AAP Reuter cable in the March 13 Sydney Morning Herald).

As demonstrations continued, the Israeli occupation forces imposed 24 hour curfews on Ramallah, Al Bira, Hebron and Halhoul. According to New York Times correspondent, Terence Smith, in Ramallah, "Soldiers fired bursts of machine gun fire into the air to clear the streets quickly." On March 17, when an Israeli soldier opened fire on a crowd that had built a street barricade and stoned an Israeli military vehicle, an 11 year old boy was killed and two other teenagers wounded. A few days later, a 45 year old man in the village of Salfit, who was arrested after a violent clash between villagers and Israeli soldiers, died of a heart attack after being beaten by soliders. "Security forces were under orders to put down disturbances with a mailed fist," reported a UPI dispatch in The Australian on March 19.

How The West Bank Was Won

Since 1967, when Israel annexed the West Bank, the Zionist authorities have gradually "integrated" the region into the Israeli economy. The West Bank has provided Israeli business with a new market for its manufactured goods and a source of cheap labor and, for a few years at least, helped slow the stagnation in the Israeli economy.

Today Arab workers from the West Bank are concentrated in the most menial and poorly paid jobs in Israel, and earn on an average only 40 per cent of that earned by the average Israeli worker. To justify this discrimination, the Zionists rely on racist ideology. Dirty, back-breaking, un-skilled work is "Arab work, fit only for Palestinians to do". As well as pay discrimination, Arab workers in the West Bank do not receive unemployment benefits or other rights enjoyed by Israeli workers, such as health and welfare benefits.

Israel's rule in the occupied territories denies Palestinian Arabs the most basic democratic rights. They have no right to organise. All committees, parties, trade unions or other Palestinian organisation is completeley prohibited in the occupied territories. It is forbidden for Palestinians to demonstrate or to go on strike. But the repression of Palestinian opposition does not stop there. Dr Israel Shahak, chairman of the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights, points, for example, to the Israeli practice of "collective punishments". In a recent statement, he explains: "The facts are well known: when the occupation authorities arrest a suspect, even before he is put on trial, sometimes even before he is officially 'indicted', an order is issued to destroy the house in which the suspect lived. Sometimes it is the house of his family, sometimes not. Sometimes 'refinements' are introduced. All the inhabitants of the village are forcibly concentrated on a nearby hill, so as to watch the 'educative show'. It must be stressed that such an act is fundamentally barbaric. People who, even in the eyes of the authorities, are innocent are outsted. Children, old people, women, sick, cripples, and all of them together are thrown onto the street regardless of weather... Aside from that punishment, there is a whole set of different collective punishments. Does one want to punish the area of Hebron? Grapes are not allowed to be transported on the roads during harvest time, until the 'notables' finally fall on their knees before the military governor. Does one want to punish the city of Ramallah? The sale of mutton is forbidden in that town for two months, or the municipality is not allowed to receive contributions from natives of Ramallah a abroad and sent for purposes of municipal development. Does one want to punish the town of El-Bireh? An order is issued to take pictures of Palestinian folklore off the walls of the city hall and to hid them in a cellar. I could go on indefinitely and give innumerable examples of this kind."

Confiscation of Arab land

The most distinctive feature of Israeli colonialism is the confiscation of Arab land; and it was this practice that led to the 24 hour general strike on March 30. The strike was called by the Committee for the Defence of Arab Land to protest an Israeli Government decision to appropriate 5,000 acres of land in Galilee cultivated and used by Arabs for generations. This land grab forms part of the Israeli Government's declared plan to "Judaize" Galilee. The Zionist authorities are anxious to reinforce their territorial control over the area by establishing and expanding exclusively Jewish settlements and Jewish-owned agricultural and industrial projects, the "problem" as the Israeli government sees it is that Galilee is predominantly Palestinian. They want to alter the population balance, reducing the number of Arabs to a minority, in order to entrench their colonial administration. This racist policy is deeply resented by the Palestinians.

The general strike was clearly successful, despite the intimidation of Zionist authorities and employers. According to a World Cable Service despatch: "The strike in Galilee was effective and Nazareth was almost shut down" (The Australian, April 1). In many areas of the West Bank shops and schools were closed, whole 40 percent (the official estimate) of West Bank Palestinians employed in Israel stayed away from work, despite threats that they would be fired or would possibly lose their job permits to work in Israel.

The Zionist authorities sent hundreds of troops, police and units of its notorious Border Guard into the occupied territories in reply to the Palestinian strike. Six Arabs were killed and more, than 50 hospitalised as Israeli army and police moved in to break up Palestinian demonstrations. Los Angeles Times reporter, William Drummond, observed: "Many of the old assumptions about the nature of Arab-Jewish relations inside Israel's pre-1967 borders died as Israel unleashed the fury of its soldiers and other security forces on people who are considered to be full citizens of the Jewish State. The idea that Israeli's 518,000 Arabs are basically docile and want to remain outside the wider Arab-Israeli conflict appears now to be quite untenable."

Another eye witness, ERic Silver of the London Guardian, watched the pretence of Israel's "humane" administration crumble: "At Kfar kana, two miles north of Nazareth, the main road was blocked with rocks and burning tyres. I saw the border police use clubs and tear gas to break up a march of schoolgirls chanting "We will save Galilee with our blood". One border policeman was armed with a combined club and whip, with which he flicked a young man on the forehead when he refused to go home. It immediately drew blood, but seemed to cause as much shock as pain.

"The road leading to the three villages under curfew was closed to reporters. But we were able to talk to 15 men from Dir Hanna who had brought out the morning's wounded. One man, Amin Halifah, had a cut scalp and arm. He said the police had dragged him from his bed early that morning.

"Hussein Diab, 34, a member of the village council, disputed the official version of events in Dir Hanna. 'About a dozen of us met last night with the council chairman,' he said, 'and decided to support the strike, but without violence. We telephoned this decision to the police and asked them [unclear: o] keep away.

"At about 11 o'clock, 30 jeeps and three or four armoured cars came into the village. About 20 youngsters were in the street, and the police began shouting at them. A fight broke out and continued till 1 am, when everybody went home.

"At six in the morning, the police came again and took people from their beds to prison. The police were shouting, and the people threw stones at them. The police fired with their guns."

Perhaps the most telling comment of all came from the Palestinian who tossed his blood-soaked jacket inside a reporter's car window, explaining: "This is what the Israeli Government gives us."