President Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority organised demonstrations across the West Bank and Gaza Strip yesterday, sending a message to Israel's incoming prime minister, Mr Ehud Barak, to halt the expansion of Jewish settlements and to accelerate the withdrawal from occupied territory.
Fears that the protests would prompt widespread violence proved largely unfounded. A Palestinian driver was killed by an Israeli soldier at a West Bank roadblock. The soldier claimed that the driver, Mr Ala Abu Shah, a labourer from Dhahiriya near Hebron, was trying to run him over. A second man was lightly wounded; both men were in their early 20s.
There were clashes between demonstrators and Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip and in at least two hotspots in the West Bank.
But both the Israeli and Palestinian security forces worked to keep a lid on the protests, to avoid a descent into full-scale, prolonged, Intifada-style confrontation.
The so-called "day of rage" protests were inspired by the Palestinian Authority, which published advertisements in yesterday's daily papers urging the public to demonstrate, and which rented buses to ferry demonstrators to key locations. The aim, said Mr Arafat's head of Jerusalem affairs, Mr Faisal Husseini, was "to send a warning to Mr Barak that he must do something to stop these [settlement] activities, or the whole atmosphere will be poisoned". While Mr Barak negotiates with potential coalition partners following his election victory on May 17th, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu remains Prime Minister of Israel, and settler activists have been using these final weeks of his sympathetic administration to erect new outposts in the West Bank and try to establish a stronger presence on disputed territory in East Jerusalem.
The Palestinians are watching Mr Barak's coalition negotiations with some dismay, especially with regard to the possibility of Mr Netanyahu's beaten Likud remaining in government as a junior partner, with its interim leader, Mr Ariel Sharon, either retaining the Foreign Ministry or taking another prominent job.
They are also worried that Mr Barak may be tempted to postpone intensive peace talks with them until he has engineered an accord with Syria that would enable him to withdraw the Israeli army from south Lebanon, where it is fighting a losing battle with Hizbullah, and where its militia ally, the South Lebanon Army, appears to be collapsing.
Mr Barak has indicated that he intends to honour the Wye accord - stalled by Mr Netanyahu, which provides for the handover of further occupied West Bank land - and to move ahead with Mr Arafat toward a permanent peace deal. Yesterday's protests were designed to ensure that he builds a coalition with a similar desire for progress, and that the Palestinian issue tops his priorities.