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HEBRON, West Bank, June 5 — Conflicting ideologies and internal divisions came to the forefront today as Israelis and Palestinians marked the 40th anniversary of the start of the Six-Day War in June 1967.
Israeli peace advocates protested against four decades of occupation in Hebron, a tense and conservative Palestinian city with a biblical past, and tried to drown out a small counterdemonstration of local Jewish settlers with their chants.
In Gaza, fighting between the rival Palestinian factions, Hamas and Fatah, flared up again, two weeks after the sides had declared a cease-fire.
Several fighters were reported injured in what news reports described as a gun battle lasting up to three hours near the sensitive Karni commercial crossing on the Gaza-Israel border. The crossing is controlled by the elite Presidential Guard loyal to the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, and is the only entry and exit point for cargo in and out of the Gaza Strip.
In the West Bank city of Ramallah, Mr. Abbas delivered a televised speech on the occasion of the anniversary of the war, which ended in a stunning military victory for Israel and a sobering defeat for the Arab armies. He said that ending the occupation and establishing an independent Palestinian state would erase the memory of the defeat.
But he warned that the Palestinians were “on the verge of civil war,” and that the internecine fighting “is equal to the danger of occupation, or even more.”
In six days of war in 1967, Israel conquered the West Bank and the eastern half of Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Gaza Strip from Egypt. Israel unilaterally withdrew its troops from Gaza and removed all the Jewish settlements there in the summer of 2005. Israel, citing security reasons, has largely isolated Gaza, strictly controlling the traffic of people and goods between Gaza, Israel and the West Bank — a policy which Palestinians say has led to further impoverishment.
Mr. Abbas’s remarks reflected a sense of growing despair in the Palestinian territories, and particularly in the Gaza Strip, after two weeks of fierce internal clashes in May left about 50 dead. Hamas and Fatah formed a Palestinian unity government in mid-March, in large part to avoid civil war, but their security forces and military wings remain engaged in bitter power struggle.
In early June, MEMRI, the Washington-based Middle East Media Research Institute, published translated excerpts from articles by Palestinian columnists breaking a political taboo by pointing out one positive aspect of Israeli occupation.
One journalist quoted by MEMRI, Majed Azzam, wrote in the Hamas-affiliated weekly Al Risala in Gaza that Palestinians “should have the courage to acknowledge the truth” that the only thing that “prevents the chaos and turmoil in Gaza from spreading to the West Bank is the presence of the Israeli occupation.”
Another Palestinian writer, Bassem al-Nabris, a poet from Khan Younis in the Gaza Strip, wrote on the Arabic news Web site Elaph that if there was a referendum in the Gaza Strip on the question of whether people would like the Israeli occupation to return, “half the population would vote ‘yes.’ ”
“But in practice,” Mr. Nabris continued, “I believe that the number of those in favor is at least 70 percent, if not more.”
“If the occupation returns,” he added, “at least there will be no civil war, and the occupier will have a moral and legal obligation to provide the occupied people with employment and food, which they now lack.”
In an illustration of Gaza’s near-isolation, the Israeli military announced today that it was upholding its ban that prevents students from Gaza from studying in Israel. The announcement was made in the Supreme Court in Jerusalem in response to a petition by Gisha, the Legal Center for the Freedom of Movement.
Gisha had petitioned the court on behalf of Wisam Madhoon, a 28-year-old Gaza resident, who has not been able to reach his admissions interview for a doctoral program in environmental studies at Tel Aviv University, even though the Israeli Army does not argue that his entrance into Israel would constitute any threat.
Israeli institutions of higher education had asked the defense minister to be permitted to accept all students who meet academic criteria, regardless of nationality, according to Gisha. There are no doctoral studies in Gaza.
Fatah and many Israelis on political center and left are in favor of ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by means of a negotiated two-state solution. The Israeli nationalist right wing opposes giving up territory won in 1967, while Hamas refuses to recognize Israel’s right to exist.
More than 250,000 Jews now live in West Bank settlements that are considered illegal by the Palestinians and the international community. At least 180,000 live in Jewish neighborhoods built after 1967 in the eastern half of Jerusalem.
Hebron is of particular significance to religious Jews as the burial place of the biblical patriarchs. It is also the only Palestinian city with a Jewish settlement at its heart, with about 500 Jews, and another 250 transient yeshiva students, living amid 160,000 Palestinian residents. About 7,000 Jews live in the settlement of Kiryat Arba, adjacent to Hebron.
Close to 300 Israeli anti-occupation protesters from the Peace Now movement arrived here this morning in bullet-proof buses, with an army escort, and took up position at one end of a dusty parking lot below the Tomb of the Patriarchs, a shrine holy to both Jews and Muslims. They shouted “Hebron settlers, a bone in the throat,” and other slogans that rhymed in Hebrew calling for their removal, while about 30 settlers demonstrated behind police barricades at the other end of the lot. Scores of police and security forces separated the two.
Israel’s military authorities had at first refused Peace Now permission to demonstrate in Hebron, arguing that it could lead to disturbances by the settlers that might endanger the lives of the demonstrators, as well as the police and soldiers protecting them. A High Court judge overturned the army ruling on Monday.
“We were limited to 150 people, but we brought double,” said Yariv Oppenheimer, the secretary general of Peace Now. “To us, that’s a success.”
David Wilder, a spokesman for the Jewish community of Hebron, called the return of Jews to Hebron a “miracle” and termed the Peace Now demonstration a “desecration.”
“They are coming and saying it would have been preferable if we had lost the war,” he said, adding that “it was a war of survival.”
The Palestinians have largely deserted their homes and stores around the area of Jewish settlement in central Hebron. A few women and children peeked out of windows in the upper floors of a building by the parking lot, while Israeli Army snipers stood guard on the roof.
Anam Bader Abu Mayaleh, 45, a Palestinian woman who passed by the parking lot before the demonstrators arrived, said the Israelis have been “controlling us for 40 years — if you throw a stone, you go to jail.” She described the settlers as “evil oppressors.”
Mrs. Abu Mayaleh’s 22-year-old son, the eldest of 12 children, is currently in an Israeli jail awaiting trial after being caught in Jerusalem without a permit from the Israeli authorities. Her 15-year-old son was shot and injured by an Israeli soldier about five years ago, she said, and suffers from a lack of concentration.
As she spoke, a steady stream of children walked by holding pails, on their way to collect free soup. The soup is distributed to the poor on Tuesdays and Fridays at the Ibrahimi Mosque, inside the Tomb of the Patriarchs, Mrs. Abu Mayaleh said.
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