QALQILYA, West Bank, 30 December 2004 — Palestinian presidential election favorite Mahmoud Abbas called for the tearing down of Israel’s West Bank wall yesterday, warning that it would never deliver security. “If we are to coexist with the Israelis, this wall must disappear,” he told supporters while on the campaign trail in the town of Qalqiliya. “The Berlin Wall was the last racist wall and it fell. We hope to see this wall fall and that peace and security can take its place.”
The citizens of Qalqiliya have been totally encircled by a combination of towering slabs of concrete and electronic fencing, ruled illegal by the UN’s highest legal body. Abbas had traveled to Qalqiliya after addressing a crowd of some 8,000 supporters in the nearby town of Tulkarm where the wall also came in for fierce attack.
“Neither settlements, nor the wall will bring peace and security,” Abbas said during his speech in a football stadium, situated barely 500 meters from the blocks of concrete which make up the barrier in Tulkarm. “We say to our neighbors (the Israelis) that no matter how many walls and obstacles you build, they will not bring you peace and security.”
The wall — a montage of concrete, razor wire and electric fencing — is being built across the West Bank in what Israel says is a bid to prevent attacks on its territory by Palestinian militants. The Palestinians, however, regard its route, often jutting deep into their territory, as proof of its real intent to appropriate land and prejudge the borders of their promised future state.
The UN’s International Court of Justice ruled in July that parts of the wall built on the Palestinian side of the internationally-recognized border between Israel and the West Bank are illegal. Israel vowed to ignore the nonbinding verdict but has modified its route after rulings from its own Supreme Court.
Abbas, who is standing for the dominant Fatah faction in the Jan. 9 contest to succeed Yasser Arafat as head of the Palestinian Authority, also reiterated his vision of an independent state on all the land occupied by Israel since 1967, with east Jerusalem as its capital.
Before his appearance at the stadium, Abbas also paid a visit to the local refugee camp where he met the parents of “martyrs” of the conflict with Israel and with members of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed offshoot of Fatah. Abbas was accorded a hero’s welcome in the camp, and was carried briefly on the shoulders of one of the refugees.
A Palestinian group said it would back a leading proponent of nonviolence running in the election. The endorsement of human rights activist Mustafa Barghouthi by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine highlighted a political shift after Arafat’s death in which other militants have decided to back Abbas.
“We call on all members of the PFLP and the Palestinian people to support and vote for Mustafa Barghouthi,” senior PFLP leader Rabah Muhana told a news conference in Gaza. The PFLP, which has about 2 percent support in opinion polls, is a radical group in the umbrella Palestine Liberation Organization led by Abbas and opposes peace-making with Israel in contrast with Fatah, the PLO’s mainstream faction.
Barghouthi, running a distant second to Abbas in the election race, is a prominent critic of Israeli Army crackdowns in occupied territory but, like Abbas, wants a halt to bloodshed and talks on a Palestinian state coexisting alongside Israel. Muhana said the PFLP and Barghouthi had agreed on key issues such as stressing a “right of return” of refugees to what is now Israel and rejecting any peace based on 1990s interim deals that did not require full Israeli withdrawal from occupied areas.
Asked about being linked with a group that has killed Israelis in suicide bombings and assassinated an Israeli Cabinet minister, Barghouthi said he disagreed with some PFLP views but its move would foster Palestinian unity after Arafat. “We will give maximum effort to strengthen the popular (nonviolent) nature of the struggle (for statehood). We will seek to unite the vision of struggle through dialogue. “(The PFLP endorsement) can be the start of a new democratic Palestinian coalition,” he told Reuters.
Political analyst Hani Habib said the PFLP move would improve Barghouthi’s showing by attracting a number of undecided voters, although not enough to upset Abbas. It could also raise fear in Fatah, he said, that Islamists might back an independent like Barghouthi “to at least prevent Abbas from achieving a big victory” that he needs for a popular mandate to rein in militants so he can negotiate with Israel.
The Fatah-affiliated Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades say its gunmen will vote for Abbas “to give him a chance” because he wants to root out corruption and carry out democratic reform. But the Brigades, like Hamas and the PFLP, have resisted Abbas’ calls for a truce with Israel, although violence has abated markedly in most areas since Arafat died in November.
