JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israeli police dispersed crowds of Palestinians yesterday as they held celebrations in Jerusalem marking the start of the city’s tenure as the Arab League’s “capital of Arab culture” for 2009.
Israel captured Arab East Jerusalem in 1967 and annexed it and parts of the West Bank, declaring the combined municipality, including Jewish-populated western areas, to be its capital.
The United Nations and Western powers do not recognise that move by Israel, while Palestinians seeking their own state want it to have its capital at Jerusalem.
A police spokesman said some 20 Palestinians were detained at eight events in and around Arab areas of Jerusalem, but there were no reports of violence. About one in three of the 750,000 residents of the Israeli municipality of Jerusalem is Arab.
In the neighbourhood of Ras al-Amud, police confiscated a torch, brought in from Syria, which was to have been lit at an inauguration rally at sundown, spokesman Shmulik Ben-Ruby said.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas urged Israel, where Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu is poised to form a new, right-wing government sceptical of plans for a Palestinian state, to reverse its longstanding policies on Jerusalem.
“Without halting settlements in Jerusalem and in all the occupied land, there will be no opportunity to start serious and productive negotiations, in which case we will drown in the same cycle, that cycle that sowed the loss of trust, the despair and frustration, and paved the way for violence and hatred,” Abbas said in a speech in nearby Bethlehem.
Palestinians in Jerusalem, who mostly hold permits allowing them freedom of movement to Israel but not citizenship, complain of their increasing isolation from those in the West Bank due to Israel’s construction of settlements and a barrier of walls and fences that separate East Jerusalem from its hinterland.
Israel has been concerned by a handful of attacks over the past year, notably using bulldozers and other vehicles, by Arabs from Jerusalem against Israelis in the west of the city.
