JERUSALEM – If pro-Palestinian calls for a so-called Global March to Jerusalem are heeded, thousands of Arabs from the West Bank, Gaza, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria could converge on Israel’s borders.

The date of the march, March 30, marks Land Day, which commemorates the deaths of six Arab Israelis killed in 1976 during protests against Israeli government land policies.

While last year’s Land Day commemorations were held without incident, rallies two months later to mark the anniversary of what the Palestinians call the Nakba – the “catastrophe” of Israel’s founding in 1948 – brought thousands of Arabs from Lebanon, Syria and Gaza to march on Israel’s borders, and 13 marchers were killed.

A month later, on June 5, hundreds of Syrian protesters stormed the border with Israel on Naksa Day, the anniversary of the 1967 Six-Day War, and there were more casualties.

“The IDF is prepared for any eventuality and will do whatever is necessary to protect Israeli borders and residents,” the Israel Defense Forces’ spokesman said this week when asked how the IDF is preparing for Land Day.

Citing senior defense officials, Haaretz reported that the IDF is prepared for “relatively serious events.” The Israeli daily added that the most current intelligence assessments believe that the demonstrations Friday will be “limited.”

Marwan Barghouti

Preparations for Land Day security have used last year’s Nakba and Naksa day rallies as models, according to reports. Security forces have updated their knowledge of non-lethal crowd dispersal methods, while border troops have gone on higher alert and additional IDF troops have been moved to the borders.

Israeli officials reportedly were most concerned about the Lebanese border and asked the Lebanese government to rein in protesters. The main Lebanese demonstration is planned for the Beaufort Castle, which is several miles north of the Israeli city of Metullah, rather than the border with Israel, the Lebanese branch of the Global March to Jerusalem announced last week.

The number of demonstrators at Beaufort will be limited to 5,000, according to the Lebanese Daily Star newspaper, citing organizers of the march.

March general coordinator Ribhi Halloum told reporters earlier in the week that the march would be peaceful.

“The aim of the Al Quds march is to express a message of protest and condemnation against the policy of Israeli occupation in the occupied Palestinian territories,” he said, using the Arabic name for Jerusalem.

“We will under no circumstances agree to violence or a violation of the borders. We will maintain the policy of nonviolent protest we have agreed to uphold.”

Land Day events also will be held inside Israel’s borders under the auspices of the Higher Arab Monitoring Committee with the banner “Save the lands and prevent the Judaization of Jerusalem.”

Israeli police have been cautioned to keep out of Arab villages in Israel in order to maintain calm.

Meanwhile, jailed Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti, who is serving five life sentences in an Israeli prison for his role in five murders during the second intifada, called on Palestinians to launch a popular resistance campaign against Israel.

His statement, issued in advance of Land Day, called on the Palestinian Authority to stop all coordination with Israel in the economic and security realms and to stop peace negotiations.

Israel and the Palestinian Authority currently are not engaged in negotiations.

(JTA)

The Global March to Jerusalem (GMJ) on March 30 (a date which commemorates what’s known as Palestinian Land Day), is a high-profile provocation involving groups of international “activists” who intend to set out from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt and converge upon Israel’s borders demanding the “right” to reach Jerusalem.

Concurrently, they also plan to “besiege Israeli embassies over the world”

The broader aims of GMJ, according to the project’s official website, are as follows:

 “[To] end the Apartheid, ethnic cleansing and [racist]…Judaisation policies affecting the people, land and sanctity of Jerusalem… [which] is a crime not only against Palestinians but against all humanity”

The site further claims that their efforts “will ward off Israel’s threat to world peace through the ‘Judaization’ of the holy City”.

The organizers are a conglomerate of individuals and groups representing the ‘red-green alliance.

The Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, the government of Iran, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Western Islamists, the extreme left, and radical NGOs have united with the aim of engineering a PR disaster for Israel and advancing their long-term assault on the legitimacy of the Jewish state.

However, the broader goal of GMJ needs to be understood, and certainly shouldn’t come as a surprise to those who understand the malevolence of those involved in such delegitimization campaigns.

One of the organizers of the march wrote the following in an email to a fellow activist about their intentions:

 “The point is that how do we build a movement that compels the governments of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon & Syria to let us in (which is easy) & then let us march across the borders into Palestine, challenging the Israeli army…Imagine a situation where we have more than a million people streaming in from four borders & Israel fails to stop the human tide. Once we have broken this mental barrier, then it’s all over. Next time we will have 5 million who will be marching in & it will only grow from there. This is exactly the nightmare situation for Israel.  Thus [we] will undermine the Israeli state, like no other strategy & then it will all begin to unravel & the Zionist edifice which is unraveling as we speak, will soon fall. It’s a matter of time now, as we well know.”

Unlike other such campaigns in the past, such as the “Nakba Day” protests on Israel’s borders last May, GMJ doesn’t even attempt to maintain the veneer of fighting for Palestinian rights

Obviously Israel, like any other sovereign country, can’t permit mass infiltration of its borders, especially by terrorists and other enemies committed to its destruction. The results are therefore likely to be even graver than the violent consequences of the organized Syrian attempt to infiltrate Israel’s northern borders in June 2011 – an event which marked the 44th anniversary of the Arab “downfall” in the Six Day War, known as “Naksa Day”.

The GMJ event also needs to be seen in the context of the recent International Conference for the Defense of Jerusalem in Qatar (Feb 26-27), where Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, addressing attendees during the first day of the conference, called on Muslims to go to Jerusalem and confront Israel’s accelerated efforts to “Judaize the city”. Abbas reportedly even claimed that Israel intended to destroy the Aksa Mosque.

As with the 2nd Palestinian Intifada, which claimed over 1000 Israeli lives between 2000 and 2004, and which was largely precipitated by calls from Palestinian leaders to defend the Al-Aqsa mosque (which they claimed was under Israeli attack), the cynical exploitation of issues relating to Jerusalem always has the capacity to incite Palestinians, and provoke riots, violence and bloodshed.

Such potentially dangerous conflagrations clearly represent scenarios the march’s organizers are counting on.

Major-General Amir Eshel, head of strategic planning for the IDF, was named the next chief of the Israel Air Force on Sunday.

Eshel was appointed by IDF chief Benny Gantz, over Binyamin Netanyahu’s choice Brigadier General Yohanan Locker. Eshel succeeds Major-General Ido Nehushtan.

Last month Eshel voiced concern that a nuclear-armed Iran could deter Israel from confronting Iranian-backed enemies Hezbollah and Hamas on its borders.

Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas’s statement last Saturday that “Israeli intransigence” was behind the collapse of the recently convened Israel-Palestinian talks in Jordan may provide a moment of truth for President Obama.

According to The New York Times’s Ethan Bronner, citing senior officials from both sides, Israeli negotiators told their Palestinian counterparts that their guiding principle for future borders in a two state solution would include existing settlement blocs as part of Israel. The Palestinians summarily rejected this. Significantly, a Palestinian spokesman said that “Our starting point is the 1967 borders with minor swaps and theirs is the wall and settlements.” (The wall refers to the separation barrier Israel has been building for a number of years.)

President Obama famously said last spring that he favored final borders based on the 1967 lines with mutual swaps – by which he said he meant to include the major Jewish population centers in the West Bank. Mr. Obama’s formulation, which he claims to have been initially misunderstood, caused a very public confrontation with Prime Minister Netanyahu.

The Palestinian position now pushes things beyond the debate over what President Obama really meant. In the here and now, the Palestinian focus on the 1967 lines with “minor changes” is plainly inconsistent with the notion that “swaps” would include tradeoffs for large population centers.

The question is thus whether President Obama is prepared to take the next step and tell the Palestinians that America stands for Israel’s retaining the major settlement blocs. At the very least, he should declare who he thinks is at fault for the breakdown in the talks.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas declared peace talks with Israel over on Wednesday, ending a series of low-level meetings that brought no tangible results despite pressure from the United States, the European Union and the talks’ Jordanian hosts.

The final meeting of five held in Amman between PA representative Saeb Erekat and Israeli representative Yitzhak Molcho broke down over the issue of borders, with the PA insisting on exchanging solid proposals and Israel presenting only maps of areas to be negotiated over in higher-level talks. Palestinians have demanded that the 1967 cease-fire line be considered the border between Israel and a Palestinian state, while Israel has insisted on deviations from that line.

Even before the meeting on Wednesday, PA and Israeli officials declared the talks fruitless, with each side trying to portray the other as the recalcitrant one.

American and European leaders had urged both sides to find common ground on borders, security arrangements and other issues that could set the stage for higher-level negotiations. EU foreign policy chief Catherin Ashton, currently visiting Israel and the PA, stressed European hopes for progress.

Jordan’s King Abdullah II even intimated that failure in the Amman talks would mean worse relations between his kingdom and Israel – possibly including freezing diplomatic ties – in an attempt to pressure Jerusalem.

An official in Jerusalem was quoted as saying that Israel hoped to continue talks with the Palestinians, while Abbas said he would consult with the Arab League on further steps. “We hope that the Palestinians aren’t looking for an excuse to walk away from the table,” the official said.

A senior military official voiced concern that a nuclear-armed Iran could deter Israel from confronting Iranian-backed enemies Hezbollah and Hamas on its borders.

IDF Military planning division chief Maj. Gen. Amir Eshel said Tuesday that a nuclear would create a dramatic change in Israel’s strategic posture, because if we are forced to do things in Gaza or Lebanon under an Iranian nuclear umbrella , it might be different.”

Israeli envoy, Yitzhak Molho, and Palestinian representative, Saeb Erekat, met in Amman, Jordan on Monday in attempts to restart a dialogue that had been dormant for over a year. No official comment was released by either delegation upon the meeting’s conclusion.

Both parties have consented to bringing comprehensive proposals on territory and security to the Quartet by January 26. But the Palestinians have insisted that Israel renew a settlement freeze and commit to a solution based on pre-1967 borders in order for the negotiations to continue. For its part, Israel continues to call for negotiations without preconditions.