Independence Day That's Not

The 11th Palestinian Independence Day had all the right ingredients: cheering crowds, boy scouts and military parades.

But for many Palestinians, Monday's celebration was a painful reminder of what they are missing: a state of their own.

"With the way things are going with Israel, I doubt we will achieve real independence," said Samira Freij, a 30-year-old housewife who attended the central event, a rally of 3,000 people in the West Bank town of Ramallah.

The mood was also dampened by the delay of an Israeli troop pullback from 5 percent of the West Bank, originally scheduled for Monday. The two sides disagreed over the pullback, with the Palestinians saying the areas Israel offered to hand over were too sparsely populated and failed to connect the isolated enclaves already under Palestinian control.

Palestinians have been marking Nov. 15 since the Palestine National Council, their parliament-in-exile, unilaterally declared statehood in the West Bank and Gaza Strip on that day in 1988.

Over the years, as the Palestinians took control of some of the land, the celebrations became more elaborate. Since the creation of the Palestinian Authority in 1994, Independence Day has been a national holiday, with schools, government offices and many businesses closed.

In an Independence Day march in Ramallah on Monday, some 3,000 Palestinians followed military jeeps and bagpipe-playing scouts. Children waved plastic Palestinian flags and members of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah political faction shot bullets into the air from nearby rooftops.

Israel and the Palestinians agree that the final status of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Jerusalem should be determined by September 2000.

But in a speech broadcast on national TV and radio, Arafat said that since the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, the declaration of independence has already become a political and geographic reality.

"All the difficulties, no matter how big, and the challenges, no matter how great, have not bent the determination of our people as they take the long journey towards full independence and the independent state with Jerusalem as its capital," Arafat said.