Sara Roy Discusses “The Crisis Within: The Struggle for Palestinian Society”

By Jane Adas


	Sara Roy at Princeton (Staff Photo J. Adas).

AT AN APRIL 11 lecture sponsored by the Transregional Institute of Princeton University, Sara Roy spoke about “The Crisis Within: The Struggle for Palestinian Society.” According to Dr. Roy, a senior research scholar at Harvard University’s Center for Middle East Studies and the author of The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-Development, Palestinian society is deeply troubled and under assault. The situation is not new, she pointed out, but exists now on an unprecedented scale, reaching levels of unemployment and poverty not seen before.

Roy disagreed with the view that Palestine’s economic problems are a result of the al-Aqsa intifada and Israel’s reoccupation of the territories. Rather, she argued, they are due to the structures and terms of the Oslo peace process, which strengthened the occupation in a different form. The Oslo agreements privileged security for Israelis over Palestinian rights, Roy explained. Consequently, President Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority expanded its security system—with, Roy noted, the blessings of Israel and the U.S. Palestinians had hoped the peace process would produce democratic and inclusive institutions. Instead, she maintained, they felt continuously betrayed.

Roy identified Israel’s closure of the territories as the single most damaging measure undertaken during the Oslo years. Israeli checkpoints, physical barriers and settler roads within Gaza and the West Bank have cost the Palestinian economy 5 percent annually, she told her audience, which means it has contracted by half, and as much as 75 percent in the refugee camps. After the al-Aqsa intifada, she noted, territorial dismemberment accelerated. As an Israeli soldier at a checkpoint told Roy, “Soon Palestinians will need a passport to get from Nablus to the outlying villages.”

At the same time, she said, Israel’s increased destruction of both public and private Palestinian physical assets—homes, businesses, roads, agricultural lands and crops—has led to devastating economic and social problems, and its separation barrier only increases pressures on an already compromised economy.

One of Israel’s key achievements, according to Roy, has been the compartmentalization of Palestinian society. “Security” for Israel has led to increased separation and isolation for Palestinians, with the enforced decentralization weakening national structures and collective identity. Palestinians are forced to rely on local initiatives, especially in the areas of health and education. The extended family is the “ultimate safety net” and remains cohesive, Roy noted, but is strained by the internal refugee problem that Israel has created through the building of the security barrier, settler and soldier harassment, and the creation of buffer zones that have been emptied of people and buildings.

A whole generation of Palestinians has grown up knowing nothing but violence, Roy pointed out. They are traumatized, undereducated, and have little respect for authority. It is no exaggeration, she asserted, to say that every Palestinian suffers from some degree of depression.

Under these conditions, where an ordinary and routine way of life is impossible, people focus increasingly on survival and locality. A young Palestinian mother asked Roy, “How would you feel if you were unable to feed your child, unable to work even as a slave in Israel? Don’t the Israelis understand that under these conditions we are willing to die?”

Roy described Palestinian society as remarkably resilient, but warned that the situation cannot go on indefinitely. Yet without major changes in the Israeli and U.S. governments, Roy concluded, she fears there is little hope for change.

“Handling Hamas”


(L-r) Professor Kamal Abdelfattah, Asli Bali and Ambassador Edmund Hull discussed “Handling Hamas” (Staff Photo J. Adas)

“Handling Hamas” was the topic of an April 25 panel discussion held by the Global Issues Forum at Princeton University. The discussants were Ambassador Edmund J. Hull, diplomat-in-residence of the Woodrow Wilson School; Professor Kamal Abdelfattah of Birzeit University; and doctoral candidate Asli Bali of the Princeton Committee on Palestine.

Hull addressed the questions of how Hamas’ victory would affect U.S. policies regarding the Palestinians, the peace process, and the U.S. program of promoting democracy in the Middle East. Citing Assistant Secretary of State David Welsh, Hull said Hamas’ refusal to accept the three conditions imposed by the U.S.—recognizing Israel’s right to exist, renouncing violence, and respecting previous agreements—led to Washington’s decision to scale back assistance to Palestinians and to have no official contacts with a Hamas-led government.

As for the peace process, Hull maintained that the U.S. is still committed to the road map, but that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will probably prefer unilateralism, and the U.S. likely will follow Israel’s lead. The Hamas victory gave Washington pause in its grand design to promote democracy in the region, and Hull saw the U.S. as now seeming to ease off on that project.

Assuring the audience that democracy will come to the Middle East—and will come with Islamic parties, just as there are Christian parties in the West—Abdelfattah predicted that it is Israel’s position which will determine the near and far future. Palestinians were grateful for U.S. interference in their electoral process, he said, because the U.S. was opposed to postponing elections and pushed to allow East Jerusalemites to be able to vote.

The main reason Palestinians support Hamas, according to Abdelfattah, was that after years of the peace process under Fatah produced no results, people want a peaceful solution based on serious negotiations. They also were fed up with corruption under Fatah. While corruption exists everywhere in the world and in many places is much worse, in a small society under occupation, like Palestine, Abdelfattah explained, it is very visible. People notice when a new chauffeur-driven Mercedes zips through checkpoints with VIP plates from Israel, he said.

Palestinians also want to build a civil society and have a good judicial system—neither possible, Abdelfattah acknowledged, under the Fatah-led Authority.

And, he added, Palestinians want to improve their economic situation—but this is more difficult, as Israel is withholding $600 million to $700 million a year of Palestinian tax money. Nevertheless, Abdelfattah said, Palestinians are patient. He did not believe there will be a Palestinian civil war, and expressed the hope that Hamas is negotiating with Europe through back channels to find a way to ease the situation.

The peace process did not end with the election of Hamas, stated Asli Bali, but with Ariel Sharon’s election in 2001—or, earlier, with his Temple Mount visit in 2000. Fatah lost control, in her opinion, because Palestinians viewed it as a discredited quisling government that was mandated to provide security for its master, Israel. When Fatah was unable to stop Palestinian opposition to occupation, it came under increased pressure from its second master, the international community. Bali described the Hamas win—the only example in the region (other than Israel) of competitive elections replacing a governing party—as a democratic victory. Citing a Shikaki poll that found that only 1 percent of Palestinians want an Islamic state, she said the Hamas victory instead represents an attempt to generate new possibilities and a new domestic focus.

As for the three U.S. demands on Hamas, Bali pointed out that Palestinians have never been able to mount a threat to Israel, but that Israel has prevented the creation of a Palestinian state as called for in U.N. resolutions. If moderation prevails and—most importantly, Bali emphasized—with reciprocity and mutual recognition of a border, Hamas could recognize an Israel that did not have ultimate designs on the whole area. Indeed, Bali noted, in 2004 Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, since assassinated by Israel, called for a long-term hudna (truce) and, with one exception in August of 2005, Hamas has stuck to it. Reciprocity would mean that Israel would cease targeted assassinations and control settler violence against Palestinians. As for signed agreements, Bali asserted that Hamas and Israel mirror each other: neither one supports direct negotiations.

“An Iraqi Doctor Speaks Out”


	Dr. Entisar Ariabi (Staff Photo J. Adas).

Dr. Entisar Mohammad Ariabi is a pharmacist at Baghdad’s Yarmook Teaching Hospital and also is involved in providing emergency medical relief to families in villages and towns attacked by occupation forces. On a U.S. tour sponsored by Code Pink, she spoke at Rutgers University March 27 as a “Witness to the Invasion.” Saying she was speaking as a member of civil society, not as a politician, Dr. Ariabi recalled that when the bombing began, she gave her own children medicine to calm them, but it didn’t help. In her work at the hospital and in the field, she said, she looks around and sees only blood.

The Iraqi pharmacist showed a series of horrific slides of wounded children and civilians: a 16-year-old boy paralyzed after being shot in his family car by a frightened U.S. soldier; a man carrying a dead girl whose feet had been blown off by a U.S. missile strike; a woman holding a photograph of her husband and three children, killed in their car by an American tank early in the war. The woman’s visa to come to the U.S. was declined because she no longer has enough family members in Iraq to ensure that she returns.

While it is impossible to know the exact number of Iraqi casualties, Ariabi said, in Baghdad alone, an average of 1,600 people are killed and 16,000 to 20,000 injured per month. Because the hospital where Ariabi works has facilities for only 40 corpses, American soldiers built a large new room out of mud to accommodate the overflow.

Many hospitals and ambulances carrying civilians have been hit by air strikes, Ariabi reported. A new hospital, built with German funds and stocked with donated equipment, was completely destroyed. Showing a slide of the staff, now operating out of a tent, she called the reconstruction of hospitals a “mission unaccomplished”—although, she noted, Americans have spent money painting some hospitals.

Many patients die on the way to hospitals because of U.S. checkpoints, she explained. Others die for lack of medicine, anesthesia, and IV fluid. When hospital staff ask for medicine instead of paint, she said, they’re told that is the responsibility of the health minister.

According to Ariabi, more than 250 professors, both Sunni and Shi’i, have been killed since the invasion. It is as though the occupation wants to destroy anything intellectual, she said, and Iraqi civilization itself. Noting that the U.S. has arrested and jailed without charges some 14,000 to 20,000 Iraqis, she accused the U.S. of building jails and morgues instead of schools and hospitals.

When asked what would happen after U.S. troops leave, Ariabi responded that when U.S. soldiers go on attack, they are totally surrounded by the Iraqi national guard, who are protecting U.S. soldiers. She believes U.S. troops should have left a long time ago, she said, and should leave Iraq to the Iraqis and the U.N.

Iraqis don’t hate the American people, Ariabi assured the audience. But after the horrible way U.S. soldiers have treated Iraqis, she explained, their attitude is changing, to the point where Iraqis no longer want to accept American aid. “How can Americans think their soldiers are noble?” Iraqis ask, she said. “Why did Americans re-elect Bush? Don’t they see what is happening in the media?”

But, of course, Americans can’t see what their mainstream media fail to report.

Jane Adas is a free-lance writer based in the New York City metropolitan area.