Is a new form of Palestinian resistance being born? Graham Usher looks at walls, tents and court rulings in The Hague and Jerusalem Two futures this week were charted for the Israel-Palestinian conflict. One was fought in the Ein Beit Ilma refugee camp in Nablus, the other in a tent pitched beside four-metre high concrete pillars that, once erected, will constitute part of the wall Israel wants to build in and around occupied East Jerusalem. On Tuesday the Israeli army invaded Nablus, the latest in a relentless tide of assaults aimed at dredging the city of Palestinian militias. The quarries this time were Amjad Hanani and Yamen Faraj, local military leaders of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The first was killed in a ferocious gun-battle that also left an Israeli soldier, Moran Vardi, dead. In revenge the army pursued Faraj to a four-story apartment block, flanked by helicopter gun-ships. These rocketed the building and killed him. They also killed 50-year old Nablus University professor, Dr Khaled Salah, and his 16-year old son, Mohamed. According to his daughter Diana, her father was shot in the chest after shouting to the soldiers that he was about to evacuate his family from the building. Mohamed was hit by another spray of bullets a few minutes later. Both bled to death due to the army preventing ambulances and doctors from reaching the apartment. The army "regretted" the deaths of the civilians, said a spokeswoman. The tent houses an array of Palestinian political and religious leaders protesting the wall. Several have committed to an open-ended hunger strike, including Sheikh Taysir Tammami, Archmandite Attallah Hanna and Palestinian Knesset member, Azmi Bishara. Bishara and the other strikers see the tent as a model for "peaceful, popular and civil resistance on all fronts". The aim is to emphasise and "preserve the Arab identity, culture and heritage in Jerusalem" and draw international attention to a construction that, once built, will "forcibly divide Palestinians from their families and isolate them from their lands and livelihoods". The tent has been set up to coincide with a ruling on the legality of the wall by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, scheduled to be issued on Friday. Palestinians are confident the ICJ will deem the wall illegal under international humanitarian law and call on Israel to cease its construction. They will then use the ruling as a basis for a new UN resolution demanding that Israel comply with it. Israel has said it will ignore the judgement. It is instead flexing its enormous lobbying power to persuade Egypt, Jordan, the US and Europe not to support any new Palestinian inspired resolution. The ICJ ruling and the tent protest has been given a tailwind by another court decision. On 30 June Israel's Supreme Court ruled that 30 kilometres of a 40- kilometre stretch of the wall in north-west Jerusalem must be rerouted due to the "severe and acute injury" it inflicts on the lives, lands and livelihoods of 35,000 Palestinians whose villages lay across its path. It accepted that Israel, where security reasons compelled, had the right to build the wall on occupied Palestinian territory. But, it added, "only a separation fence built on the basis of law will grant security to the state and its citizens. There is no security without law." Ariel Sharon has said he will abide by the Supreme Court ruling. In fact he believes it will deliver a "suitable judicial response to the false charges being brought against us in the International Court in The Hague". Bishara says this is one scenario, but it is not the only one. "The Supreme Court decision is an advance on the one hand and a retreat on the other. Yes, it ordered the wall be rerouted while recognising Israel's right to build it inside the West Bank. But the decision also gives us hope that resistance can bear fruit." For Palestinians the greatest potential prize of the High Court's decision is the impact it may have on the wall in East Jerusalem. If built as mapped, this will bar, or massively restrict, 200,000 Palestinians from reaching their families, lands, businesses, schools, universities, hospitals and Muslim and Christian holy sites in East Jerusalem. "It will strangle the last remaining lifelines between Jerusalem, its neighbourhoods, its hinterland of villages and between Jerusalem and the rest of the 1967 occupied territories," says Bishara. This is why he and other Palestinians are looking to the ICJ ruling. Together with Israel's Supreme Court verdict and the popular Palestinian-Israeli protests that may bloom in its wake, it offers the hope of returning the Palestinians' struggle to the one terrain where they are stronger than Sharon: which is not amid the ruin and carnage of a refugee camp in Nablus, but "on the basis of law".
