Palestinian leaders vote to go for UN recognition (AP)

RAMALLAH, West Bank – The West Bank Palestinian leadership on Sunday formally decided to press ahead with efforts in September to win U.N. recognition of a state in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem, in what could be a blow to efforts to restart Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

The leadership, made up of the Palestine Liberation Organization's decision-making body and officials of the Palestinian Authority, the self-rule government in the West Bank, said in a statement that the goal was to bring a state of Palestine into the family of nations of the world.

It approved the approach in principle, according to the statement, without adding operative steps about how to follow on from recognition.

The idea of asking the U.N. General Assembly to recognize a Palestinian state inside the cease-fire lines that held until the 1967 Mideast War is a reflection of Palestinian frustration with stalemated peace talks with Israel.

In recent weeks, however, Palestinian leaders have been giving signs of backing away from the initiative and toward softening their position over the renewal of peace negotiations, as both the U.N. initiative and their drive to set up a unity government with the rival Hamas in Gaza have foundered.

Some Palestinians believe that contrary to the notion that U.N. recognition would stymie peace talks, such world status would force Israel to make concessions when negotiations resume.

Recognition of a Palestinian state by the U.N. General Assembly would carry considerable diplomatic weight but would not carry legal clout. Only the U.N. Security Council can add a nation to the world body, and the U.S. government has repeatedly expressed its opposition to the move, while stopping short of saying it would veto such a resolution.

Israel has denounced the Palestinian U.N. initiative, charging that it torpedoes efforts to reach a negotiated solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

President Barack Obama has offered a formula under which a Palestinian state would be set up with borders based on the pre-1967 war cease-fire lines that delineate the West Bank, with agreed upon swaps of territory between the two sides. Previous Israeli governments have agreed to the concept, but that did not result in a peace accord.

The current Israeli leadership, under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has reacted coolly to the Obama proposal. Netanyahu has rejected an Israeli withdrawal from all of the West Bank and wants to retain Israeli control of east Jerusalem, claimed by the Palestinians as their capital. Israel pulled out of Gaza unilaterally in 2005.

Palestinians have been insisting that peace negotiations can be resumed only if Israel stops all construction in its West Bank settlements and Jewish neighborhoods in east Jerusalem, also considered settlements by the Palestinians and much of the world.

That would go well beyond a 10-month moratorium on new housing starts in the West Bank that Netanyahu imposed as an incentive to restart the talks. The negotiations resumed nine months later, last September, but were halted when the moratorium ended and was not renewed.

Now Israel rejects preconditions for peace talks and says that all issues, including the future of the settlements, should be on the negotiating table.

The Palestinians would be assured of a comfortable majority in favor of recognition of their state at the General Assembly session in September, as about 100 nations have already recognized a Palestinian state in one form or another. A U.N. vote would boost Palestinian prestige and further isolate Israel, but the path from there to an end to Israel's occupation of the West Bank, and from there to an actual independent Palestinian state, is difficult to chart.

The settlements in their already existing form are one of the main sticking points. About 300,000 Israelis live in more than 100 communities scattered across the territory. Israeli military posts and checkpoints dot the West Bank to protect them, limiting Palestinian access and freedom of movement.

The largest settlements are closest to the cease-fire line, virtual suburbs of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. The smaller ones, in the heart of the West Bank, are home to some of the most strident Israeli nationalist and religious hard-liners who believe either that Israel must keep control of the West Bank for security reasons or that it is the biblical Land of Israel that belongs to the Jews — or both.

Even Netanyahu, who backed unbridled settlement activity for decades, has indicated in public that the settlements farthest from Israel proper would not be part of Israel in a peace deal, while the largest ones would be incorporated into the Jewish state. He has taken no steps toward implementing that idea, and if he did, it would cost him the support of most of his backers from hard-line and Orthodox Jewish parties, including his own Likud, and likely bring down his government.

Conflicting signals have been emanating from Ramallah, the seat of the West Bank government headed by President Mahmoud Abbas. While frustrated over the stalemate in contacts with Israel, officials close to Abbas have begun signaling that they would ease their demands for a settlement construction freeze in order to facilitate resumption of peace negotiations because of difficulties with the U.N, initiative. Not only the U.S., but also some European nations have expressed reservations, declaring that the way to Mideast peace is through negotiations, not unilateral steps at the U.N.

Also, Abbas' efforts to patch up a rift with Hamas have run aground. The Islamic group overran Gaza in 2007 and expelled forces loyal to Abbas. Several weeks ago the two sides, with Egyptian mediation, announced a framework for reconciliation that was to lead to a joint government, ending the split. Such a unified government would be key to a push for a state.

Since the announcement, however, no further agreements have been announced. The two sides have failed to agree on a prime minister, and there is no sign of progress toward integrating their security forces, as Hamas insists on maintaining control of Gaza even after a unity government takes office.

In another development Sunday, Israel started dismantling a section of its West Bank separation barrier near the town of Bilin, scene of weekly demonstrations against the barrier by Palestinian villagers as well as Israeli and international activists. Israel is moving the section closer to the cease-fire line, in accordance with an Israeli Supreme Court decision, returning much of the town's land to its farmers. Israel built the barrier to keep Palestinian suicide bombers out.

___

Associated Press writer Mark Lavie in Jerusalem contributed to this report.

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Palestinian PM gets Fatah nomination

A May 31, 2011 file photo shows Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad at his office in the West Bank city of Ramallah.Salam Fayyad is the incumbent prime minister of the Palestinian AuthorityOfficial: Fatah is to discuss candidacy of Fayyad and others with Hamas in Cairo TuesdayHamas is unlikely to support himHe is a U.S.-educated former IMF official

(CNN) -- Fatah has nominated incumbent Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad to head the interim Palestinian government, a party official told CNN.

The secular Palestinian nationalist party nominated Fayyad during a Saturday night meeting of its central committee in Ramallah, said Nabil Shaath, a senior Fatah official.

Fatah and Palestinian rival faction Hamas are trying to hammer out a power-sharing government after a sometimes violent rivalry that has left Fatah in control of the West Bank and Hamas running Gaza.

Fayyad and other potential candidates are scheduled to be discussed in a meeting with Hamas in Cairo on Tuesday, said an official who spoke on condition of anonymity. He did not want to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue.

"It is the right of Fatah party to nominate and elect any candidate it desires, but it is also the right of Hamas to approve the candidate nominations," Hamas spokeman, Sami Abu Zuhri, told CNN. Hamas is an Islamist faction with a militant wing.

Fayyad is not a member of either of the formal rival factions, which are working to form a new transitional reconciliation government.

Fayyad is reviled by many in Hamas who consider him a lackey for the United States and Israel. He's also resented by many old-guard Fatah officials for the policy control he exerts.

A former International Monetary Fund official, Fayyad was educated in the United States.

His exclusion from a future government would likely contribute to pressure on American and European governments to curtail the hundreds of millions of dollars given to the Palestinian Authority every year.

He suffered a heart attack while visiting Texas last month for his son's college graduation, the Palestinian Authority said at the time.

CNN Jerusalem bureau chief Kevin Flower contributed to this report.

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Arab League backs Palestinian statehood bid (AP)

CAIRO – The Arab League has endorsed a Palestinian bid to seek recognition at the United Nations of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders.

The League says it will prepare documents to support the bid at the next General Assembly meeting in September in New York. Egypt's official MENA news agency says the announcement came after an Arab ministerial meeting in Qatar late on Saturday.

The move pits the League against the United States and Israel, which oppose the Palestinian bid. The idea for the Palestinian push came after the collapse of the latest Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

The Palestinians now hope for a U.N. recognition this fall of a state that would include the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem — territories occupied by Israel since the 1967 Mideast war.

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Palestinian refugees call for third intifada during deadly clashes at Israel-Lebanon border (The Christian Science Monitor)

Maroun er Ras, Lebanon – At least six people were killed and scores wounded Sunday when Israeli troops opened fire on a massive crowd of Palestinian refugees who gathered on Lebanon’s southern border with Israel to demand a return to the homes they were forced to leave 63 years ago.

Another four Palestinians were reportedly killed when they infiltrated the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights from Syria during another demonstration to mark the anniversary of the "nakba," or "catastrophe," as many Palestinians call the day Israel was founded in 1948.

Security on both sides of the Lebanon-Israel border was tight as an estimated 50,000 Palestinians were bussed from refugee camps all over Lebanon to the tiny hill village of Maroun er Ras which overlooks the border with Israel.

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The huge turnout defied the expectations of the organizers, who had predicted some 20,000, and spurred calls for a peaceful “third intifada.” But it is too soon to tell whether a fresh mass uprising will gain traction.

“This is a peaceful message to Israel and the world, God willing, this will be the beginning of a peaceful third intifada,” says Mahmoud Zeidan, a Palestinian organizer from the Ain al-Hilweh camp in the southern Lebanese town of Sidon.

With the narrow winding road leading to Maroun er Ras blocked by parked buses, entire families – from toddlers to stooped and wrinkled old men – began climbing the steep northern slopes of the hill to reach the village. Colorfully dressed Palestinians steadily walked up the verdant flower-speckled hillside in narrow winding columns, red, green and black Palestinian flags fluttering in the spring breeze.

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The atmosphere on the climb up the hill to Maroun er Ras and the view of the border was cheerful and friendly, almost like a picnic outing. But on the southern side of the hill overlooking the border, the situation quickly grew tense.

Hundreds of Palestinians scrambled down the rocky slope to reach the frontier fence. A crowd of some 300 to 400 reached the fence itself and began hurling stones at Israeli soldiers.

Lebanese soldiers belatedly attempted to stop the numbers growing at the fence and formed a line across a dirt track about 400 yards from the border. Short bursts of machine gun fire and individual rifle shots broke out as Israeli soldiers shot at the crowd.

Casualties were stretchered from the border to a handful of ambulances parked nearby. As the casualties increased, dozens more ambulances began to arrive on the scene. The silhouettes of Israeli troops could be spotted on the ramparts of a border outpost watching the scene.

Inside the outpost, a tank revved its engines and emitted a thick cloud of smoke, partly obscuring the position.

Checked by the thin line of Lebanese soldiers, Palestinian tempers raged as the young men attempted to push through to reach the border. A group of supporters of the Islamic Jihad militant group chanted “God is greater” and “We will liberate Palestine with the Kalashnikov.”

Every few minutes, the surging crowd of Palestinians gained sufficient momentum to push past the angry Lebanese soldiers, cheering and whooping as they dashed toward the border fence to join their comrades.

The scattered machine-gun fire and casualties did little to deter the Palestinian demonstrators. If anything, each fusillade appeared to galvanize them further.

“The Israeli shooting against peaceful demonstrators on our southern border is a blatant, intolerable aggression and we call on the international community and UNIFIL to hold Israel accountable for the crime,” said Saad Hariri, the Lebanese caretaker prime minister. UNIFIL is the term for the UN peacekeeping force deployed in south Lebanon.

By early evening, the Shiite militant group, Hezbollah, had placed its cadres on full alert.

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Palestinian Border Protests: The Arab Spring Model for Confronting Israel (Time.com)

After more than 100 Palestinians breached Israel's border with Syria on Sunday, knocking down a fence and striding into a village in the Golan Heights, overmatched Israeli security forces scrambled to glean what they could from the protesters who had just, without so much as a sidearm, penetrated farther into the country than any army in a generation.

Under close questioning, the infiltrators closed the intelligence gap with a shrug and one word: Facebook. The operation that had caught Israel's vaunted military and intelligence complex flat-footed was announced, nursed and triggered on the social networking site that has figured in every uprising around the Arab World - and is helping young Palestinians change the terms of their fight against Israel. (See pictures of tempers flaring across the Middle East.)

The headlines Sunday were all about the violence of the day: at least four people were shot dead by Israeli forces on the Syrian fence line, and as many as 10 were killed either by Israeli or Lebanese army gunfire at a similar demonstration on the nearby frontier with southern Lebanon. The death toll, along with the accounts of stone-throwing and tear gas, comport with the familiar narrative of the conflict, one constructed over years of Israel describing efforts to defend itself. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu encouraged that narrative on Sunday, arguing that the protesters were undermining the very existence of the State of Israel.

But those closer to events found in the day the makings of a new narrative. The Palestinians in Syria, Lebanon and the occupied Palestinian enclaves of Gaza and the West Bank approached Israeli gun positions on Sunday without arms of their own. If some teenagers threw rocks, a protest leader said they had apparently failed to attend the workshops on nonviolence the organizers arranged in what they call a new paradigm for the conflict. The aim, which appears to be building support, aims to re-cast the Palestinian-Israel conflict on the same terms that brought down dictatorships in Egypt and Tunisia.

Massive non-violent protests are aimed at winning international sympathy for the Palestinian perspective, and as a result, forcing Israel to pull out of territories its army has occupied since 1967. As the dust settled Sunday, senior Israeli officers acknowledged their vulnerability to the approach, which dovetails with the strategy of Palestinian leaders to ask the UN General Assembly to recognize a Palestininian state in September. (See "A New Palestinian Movement: Young, Networked, Nonviolent.")

"What we saw today was the promo for what we might see in September on the day the United Nations declares a state: Thousands of Palestinians marching toward Israeli checkpoints, Israeli settlements and the fence along the West Bank and Gaza Palestinians coming with their bare hands to demonstrate," a senior Israeli officer tells TIME. "This is a huge problem. Well have to study what happened today to do better."

Sundays protests marked the anniversary of Israels 1948 declaration of statehood, a day known as Nakba, or the catastrophe, to Palestinians who lost their land to the Jewish state. The day is routinely occasion for protests, and Israel had prepared for unrest. But in the Golan Heights, high ground Israel took from Syria in 1967, only 30 to 40 soldiers were on duty where hundreds of Palestinians began arriving by bus and marching toward the fence. Troops were ordered to shoot to maim. Four protesters were killed, and at least 100 scrambled into Majdal Shams, a Druze village so close to the Syrian frontier it's known for the shouting hill where families separated by the fence gather to exchange news by hollering across no-mans land.

Less clear was how the protesters navigated the Syrian security which usually maintains strict control over the border area. Israeli officials interpreted protesters' apparent ease of access to a military zone as evidence of sponsorship by the battered government of President Bashar al-Assad. With street protests threatening his regime in cities across Syria, the reasoning goes, al-Assad found in the Nakba protests a perfect opportunity to shift the focus to Israel.

But Fadi Quran, a Ramallah organizer in the Palestinian youth movement that promoted the marches, says his contacts in Syria were actually terrified of the Bashar government, which took steps to prevent some from traveling to the protests from refugee camps near Damascus where they have lived since fleeing their homes in what is now northern Israel. (See pictures of young Palestinians in the age of the wall.)

Governments of other neighboring states that host large Palestinian populations, apparently were aware of the protest plans, and responded according to their own interests. Egypt and Jordan, which have treaties with Israel, impeded the demonstrations. Those who are hostile, including Lebanon, eased their way into military zones. But Damascus appeared to be pre-occupied with its own domestic unrest, according to Quran. "I honestly think to a very large extent they took the Syrian government by surprise," he tells TIME.

Demonstrators also gathered in Gaza and on the West Bank. Even there, on a march toward the Qalandia check-point near Ramallah, Quran insists no stones were thrown until Israeli troops fired tear gas, and then only by adolescents. But the overall make-up of the crowd, featuring older women and men as well as students, was a change from previous years, according to Shawan Jabarin of the human rights advocacy group Al Haq.

"They say the Arab Spring gives people encouragement and makes people feel they can make a difference," says Jabarin. "The consciousness of the people, you feel it's something different." (See "Palestinians Mark Nakba with Violent Protests.")

Also encouraging people into the streets: The complete breakdown of peace talks with Israel. If Palestinians needed any additional reminder, the resignation of former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell as President Obamas special envoy for peace was announced two days before Nakba Day.

"We have to come up with an improvement in non-lethal weapons, no doubt," says an aide to an Israeli cabinet minister. "But if we have a new approach to peace talks then we won't have to deal with non-lethal weapons in September."

For their part, Palestinian protesters feel they've found a winning formula. The main political factions, Hamas and Fatah, were forced into their embrace by the same non-violent youth movement that now summons ordinary Palestinians to unite in shaming Israel into concessions.

"They understand the path to freedom is going to be long," Quran says "but were going to continue training in nonviolence, and were going to continue marching in nonviolence until it is very clear in the international media who is violating human rights."

- With reporting by Aaron J. Klein

See TIME's special report "The Middle East in Revolt."

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Palestinian teen's funeral turns violent

Palestinian youth throw stones during clashes with Israeli police on May 13, 2011, in Issawiya, East Jerusalem.NEW: Israeli police arrest four PalestiniansNEW: Several people are treated for tear gas inhalation, medical official says Witnesses say clashes erupt during funeral procession for Palestinian teen Israeli police are bracing for violent clashes as Palestinians mark ''Nakba Day''

Jerusalem (CNN) -- A funeral procession for a Palestinian teenager who died from a gunshot wound turned violent Saturday when participants clashed with Israeli police, witnesses said.

Scattered clashes between Palestinians and Israeli security forces began Friday in various locations throughout East Jerusalem, which Palestinians want named as the capital of a Palestinian state.

Palestinians hurled stones; Israelis fired tear gas. Israeli police arrested four Palestinians, said police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld.

Several people were treated for tear gas inhalation, said a Palestinian Medical Authority official. One person was injured in a beating.

Both sides were bracing for more violence as Palestinians prepared for "Nakba Day" on Sunday. Nakba, meaning catastrophe in Arabic, marks the period when more than 700,000 Palestinians were forced or fled their homes during the fighting following the creation of Israel in 1948.

Milady Ayahs, 17, was participating in a protest Friday when Israeli police shot him, his family said. He died early Saturday, according to police and his family. The incident is under investigation.

Initial reports were that no live ammunition was used by police who responded to the protests, Rosenfeld said. He said Ayahs was taken to the hospital with what appeared to be a gunshot wound to the shoulder.

Rosenfeld said police asked to perform an autopsy on Ayahs to aid the investigation, but the family declined.

Hundreds of Palestinians joined the funeral procession that began at Ayahs' family home near Jerusalem's Old City and was winding its way toward a burial ground when a number of procession-goers threw rocks at Jewish settlers and police, who in turn threw tear gas at the procession-goers.

Despite the violence, the procession continued to the al-Aqsa mosque, considered the third holiest site in Islam, where Ayash was buried.

Tensions in the streets were rising with thousands of Israeli police deployed in anticipation of increased tension surrounding Nakba Day.

At the mosque, young men in the funeral procession draped Palestinian flags on the roof -- a rare, strong political statement, according to witnesses.

CNN's Kevin Flower and Kareem Khadder contributed to this report.

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