Protesters, police clash outside Damascus Gate

Several hundred Palestinians clashed with police officers outside Jerusalem’s Damascus Gate Monday night during a demonstration against the Israeli government’s plan to relocate Bedouin residents of southern Israel from unrecognized villages.

The “Bill on the Arrangement of Bedouin Settlement in the Negev,” also known as the Prawer-Begin Plan, drawn up by former Likud minister Benny Begin and approved by the cabinet in January, calls for the country to officially recognize and register the vast majority of Bedouin settlements throughout the south of Israel and to compensate the residents of 35 unrecognized villages who are to be moved off state-owned land.

Protests also took place in Jaffa and Beersheba on Monday against the government’s implementation of the plan.

Protesters at the scene in Jerusalem claimed police attacked them and that several dozen were injured in the melee. At least three demonstrators were arrested.

Just before midnight, amid the skirmish outside the Damascus Gate, several hundred Israelis took part in an annual Tisha B’Av Walk, marking the Jewish day of mourning which began earlier in the evening. Participants in the event, organized by the right-wing organization Women in Green, circumambulate the Old City walls, passing the Muslim Quarter’s Damascus, Herod’s and Lions Gate.

Each year a number of far-right wing members of Knesset participate; this year two deputy ministers, MKs Danny Danon (Likud) and Eli Ben Dahan (Jewish Home) turned out.

Organizer Nadia Matar said that due to the coincidence of the Ninth of Av and Ramadan (which happens three or four times every 33 years), the police only granted the Women in Green demonstration a permit for 11:30 p.m., so as to prevent possible conflict with Muslim worshipers.

Neither the police nor the Women in Green foresaw the demonstration, but there were no reports of clashes between the two groups.

“It’s one great disgrace,” Matar told The Times of Israel. “It’s a shame that Ramadan comes before Tisha B’Av in Jerusalem, the Jewish capital.”

She remarked, however, that her organization, which in 2014 will mark 20 years of walking to the Western Wall on Tisha B’Av, “will ask to go up to the Temple Mount for next year’s protest.”