JERUSALEM — Adopting a tactic more commonly employed by Jewish settlers who establish wildcat outposts in the West Bank, scores of Palestinian activists erected tents on Friday in a hotly contested piece of Israeli-occupied West Bank territory known as E1 and said they intended to stay put.
The Palestinians claim E1, just east of Jerusalem, as part of a future state. The protest comes six weeks afterIsrael announced that it was moving forward with plans for thousands of settlement homes in E1, stirring international outrage.
Israeli military authorities arrived Friday and handed the protesters notices warning them that they were illegally trespassing and that they had to leave, according to a police spokesman, Micky Rosenfeld. Mr. Rosenfeld said he expected movement “at some point,” with the protesters either leaving voluntarily or by force.
But the protesters said that they had anticipated such action by Israeli security forces and that their lawyers had already gone to the Israeli Supreme Court to argue for a delay in any evacuation until the state details the grounds for such a move. Protest leaders said the court had given the state six days to respond.
About 200 activists began pitching tents on a hill in the barren, stony territory on Friday morning, and issued a statement announcing the establishment of a village named Bab al-Shams (Arabic for “gate of the sun”), after the title of a novel by a Lebanese writer, Elias Khoury, that portrays Palestinian yearnings through a metaphorical story of love for the land.
Israeli plans to build in E1 have been vehemently opposed for years by international players, including the United States, who say construction there would partially separate the northern and southern West Bank, harming the prospects of a viable contiguous Palestinian state in that territory. Israel announced its intention as a countermeasure after the United Nations General Assembly voted in November to upgrade the Palestinians’ status to that of a nonmember observer state.
Israel wants to create contiguity between East Jerusalem, which it has annexed, and the large urban settlement of Maale Adumim that lies beyond E1, and says that the future of the West Bank has to be settled in negotiations. In the meantime, critics say, Israel continues to establish facts on the ground.
“We are here as a response to the settlers and to the Israeli policy of settlement expansion,” said Muhammad Khatib, a veteran member of the grass-roots Palestinian Popular Struggle Coordination Committee and a resident of Bilin. That West Bank village became a symbol of Palestinian defiance after it held weekly protests and won a ruling in the Israeli Supreme Court in 2007 forcing Israel to reroute its West Bank barrier so as to take in less of the village’s agricultural land.
“Now I am one of the people of Bab al-Shams,” said Mr. Khatib, speaking by telephone from the protest site. “We want to stay here forever.”
Mr. Khatib said that the police were stopping people and supplies from entering the site, but that the campers had come prepared. He added that if the Israeli security forces came to evict the protesters, “we will resist in our nonviolent way.”
Israel says that most of the E1 area is Israeli land. Protest leaders said they had set up their encampment on a parcel of land owned by a Palestinian family from A-Tur, a neighborhood of East Jerusalem. They added that the landowners had given their full permission for the encampment and had joined the activists at the site.
About 25 tents were set up Friday, including one serving as a clinic and one for the “village administration,” according to Abir Kopty, a spokeswoman for the coordination committee, who also spoke by phone from the encampment.
“We call this a village, not an outpost,” Ms. Kopty said, “because there is a huge difference between Palestinians living on their own land and settlers building illegally on our occupied land.”
Hanan Ashrawi, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s executive committee, said in a statement: “This initiative is a highly creative and legitimate nonviolent tool to protect our land from Israeli colonial plans. We have the right to live anywhere in our state, and we call upon the international community to support such initiatives.”