“The Game Is Clear”: Israel Dismantling Palestinian Society, Culture

All photos by Michael J. Keating

Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat (far left) with delegation members (l-r) Edward Peck, Delinda C. Hanley, Andrew I. Killgore and J. Brady Kiesling.

OUR ARRIVAL in Palestine coincided with the outbreak of a crisis for the Palestinian Authority—a crisis which illustrated Israel’s success in removing the anchors of Palestinian social order, thereby further threatening the security of all Palestinians.

On the morning following the July 16 outbreak of violence in Gaza (see Rachelle Marshall’s article on p. 6 of this issue), chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat received our delegation in the conference room of the Palestine Liberation Organization Negotiations Affairs Department. Clearly a man with much on his mind, he was the first—but not the last—person we met on our trip to warn us that “Israel’s goal is to destroy the Palestinian National Authority and its security forces.”

With each passing day, it became more apparent that Israel’s strategy is twofold: not only to dismantle Palestinian society, but also to eliminate any moderate Palestinian who could serve as a “partner for peace.”

“I am Israel’s real enemy,” Erekat explained, “because I am committed to working for peace.”

Militias and warlords are taking over in Jenin and Nablus, as well as in Gaza, he informed us, and ”the Israelis won’t touch them.” Soon, he warned, the militias will gain strength in Jericho, where Erekat lives—and from where he cannot leave without Israeli permission—and in Ramallah, where he works. Israel would like nothing better than for the “forces of darkness,” as Erekat described them, to take it upon themselves to kill him, sparing Israel the trouble—and providing yet another opportunity for Israel to bemoan the lack of a negotiating partner.

Israel has assassinated scores of Palestinian leaders over the years—most recently Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in Gaza City, during a truce observed only by the Palestinians. Those it does not murder it isolates and imprisons. The ultimate symbol of isolation, of course, is Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, confined to a single building in his demolished Ramallah compound.

Others are in real rather than virtual prisons, however. On the day of our meeting with Arafat, Rawya al-Shawa, speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council, told us the PLC had maintained contact with its Israeli counterpart, the Knesset, until Israel’s kidnapping of Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti from his Ramallah home and his subsequent imprisonment, trial and conviction.

What was Barghouti’s crime? According to al-Shawa, it was that he had initiated a dialogue with the Israelis. The PLC speaker went on to describe Barghouti as “one of the most important and enthusiastic people in the peace process, a man of peace and dialogue who set no preconditions on talking to any Israeli.”

In fact, al-Shawa said, he had been one of Barghouti’s critics, teasingly calling him a “member of [Israel’s] Labor Party.”

Despite Barghouti’s disappointment with the Labor Party and former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, however, al-Shawa said the West Bank Fatah leader still supported the peace process and is against the idea of the elimination of Israel.

Yet no Israeli protested Barghouti’s detention, al-Shawa told us, and the Knesset has denied his request to visit Barghouti in prison in Beersheva.

Israel wants to incarcerate those working for peace, the Palestinian legislator said. In fact, he concluded, in order to escalate violence in the region, Israel needs suicide bombers more than peaceniks—Palestinian or Israeli.

Later that day, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Abdullah Abdullah told us that all Israelis who had planned to go to Jericho to attend a June meeting on the Geneva Initiative were denied entry to the trench-surrounded West Bank city—thus giving the lie to Israel’s claim that it has “no Palestinian partner.” (We later learned that their own government now bans Israelis from entering other West Bank cities such as Qalqilya, where they used to shop and trade.)

Turning to the destabilization of Palestinian society, the deputy minister cited some of the tactics Israel has used to destroy Palestinian institutions: “isolate a besieged president for three years, and destroy the political infrastructure.”

All West Bank police headquarters have been destroyed, Abdullah noted, resulting in increasing lawlessness throughout the society. He described Israel’s aim as being “to humiliate, demonize, starve to death, prevent us from reaching school, hospital, work, etc.—to deprive Palestinians of the necessary elements to be a human being.”

But, he vowed, Palestinians are a “people determined to defend as much as they can their own physical and national existence.”

Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs Majdi Khalidi agreed with his colleagues that Israel’s policy of weakening the Palestinian Authority and its security forces “encourages forces of extremism instead of reform. The street has started listening to the extremists,” Khalidi noted. “Young people want to be important members of society,” he explained, “and they see that as a way to do it.”

The roots of the problem in Gaza, Khalidi added, are the continuing Israeli occupation and the fact that people see scant hope of a solution. While the first intifada led to the Oslo process, there has been no such result of the current uprising—thus increasing Palestinians’ frustration with their leadership.

In addition to soaring poverty and unemployment, Palestinians experience only the continued theft and destruction of their land, and no concommitant return of occupied West Bank territory. Israel is seen as above the law, Khalidi noted, with its continuing settlement policy—under both Labor and Likud governments—the construction of its separation wall, collective punishment and home demolitions.

According to Local Authorities Minister Jamal Shubaki, who spent 10 years in Israeli prisons, the growing popularity of radical organizations such as Hamas is fueled by “the power of anger and despair.” Palestinian Legislative Council member Mohammad Hourani, also a former prisoner, agreed that “Palestinians’ loss of hope in the future will strengthen extremist parties.”

That seems to be exactly what Prime Minister Ariel Sharon wants. As Bethlehem Mayor Hanna Nasser noted, former Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas was very positive for peace. And what did Sharon give him? Nasser asked. “A big fat zero.”

“The game is clear,” according to Israeli Knesset member Azmi Bishara. “Sharon is designing a non-viable Palestinian West Bank so Palestinians will be pressured to go to Jordan.” If all goes according to plan, he explained, “the pressure will spill over to the east, not to Israel.”

The predictions of Western aid workers we met were, if anything, even more dire. The Gaza Strip is the model, said Dr. Thomas Neu of American Near East Refugee Aid (ANERA). Israel is turning the West Bank into the “Nablus Strip,” the “Jenin Strip,” the “Hebron Strip,” etc.

Another international worker concurred, saying Israel is encouraging complete social breakdown by “removing people who keep the lid on things, then standing by and watching. That’s why they killed Sheikh Yassin,” he explained, “because they wanted the young fanatics to take over.”

A Ramallah attorney spoke of the difficulty of advocating reforms in the current environment. Washington’s demands for reforms make Palestinians suspicious that such calls from domstic groups are made in the service of Israel, he noted. “When we demand reforms,” the bar association member said, “people use it against us to delay all our reforms and ambitions.”

Sharon is sowing the seeds of terror, ANERA’s Neu warned, by using tactics which “radicalize the community forever” and destroying the possibility of a separate Palestinian state.

The Palestinians we met expressed the same concerns on a more personal level.

“What will happen when there is no generation that remembers pre-1967?” worried the director of the Hebron’s Palestinian Child’s Home Club. “Children will not differentiate between the occupation and America if the U.S. does not change its policy.”

“If Palestinians have no jobs,” observed Economy, Trade and Industry Minister Mahir al-Masri, “Israel will have a poor, hungry neighbor—and that is not good for peace.

“It’s a very volatile situation,” he warned, “and time is not in our or Israel’s favor. We cannot sit and wait. If nothing is done in the very near future, we may not be able to contain, control or absorb the anger and danger.”

Nor is it only a question of danger, however, but of lives and opportunities lost. “We could have built a democratic state,” lamented Ramallah attorney Mohammed Ayoub, “but nobody has helped us.”

—JM

SIDEBAR

A Reunion in Jerusalem


Joyce Nasir at the American Colony Hotel.

Labib and Joyce Nasir had been our neighbors when my wife and I lived at the American Consulate in East (Arab) Jerusalem in the late 1950s. Labib had been head of the YMCA for East Jerusalem and the West Bank, while I was the American consul, just out of the Arab Language and Area Studies in Beirut.

The Y building located on Nablus Road—the road from the Old City’s Damascus Gate all the way to Nablus—was not impressive. It was a substitute, after all, for the towered structure which lay just across the street from Jewish Jerusalem’s King David Hotel. An apartment in the Old City Y was home to the Nasirs. My wife, Marjorie, and I were happy to have such neighbors.

Now Joyce was living alone, Labib having passed away. Their son, Peter, who had succeeded his father as chief of the Y, had died of asbestosis, contracted while working as a builder as a young man in Kuwait.

Joyce’s grandson, Labib Nasir, had visited us at the Grand Park Hotel in Ramallah, where our group of nine retired American diplomats was staying while being escorted around the Israeli-occupied West Bank. The handsome and personable young man was now employed by MIFTAH (the Key), the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue, headed by the brilliant Dr. Hanan Ashrawi, former Minister of Information of the Palestine Authority, and Palestinian spokeswoman during the Madrid talks.

Seeing the still-healthy Joyce Nasir at the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem and her grandson in relatively prosperous Ramallah made it possible to believe for a moment that not much had changed in the West Bank. But this testifies only to the indestructibility of one Palestinian family. Joyce, now about 80 years of age, still retains her apartment at the Old City Y. In the nearly 40 years since Israel occupied the West Bank, the enormous Ma’ale Adumim settlement, with its 30,000 Jewish residents, continued to grow just east of Jerusalem, and housing for the Jewish population had gradually grown elsewhere in the city.

Joyce and I met at the famous American Colony Hotel, also on Nablus Road, which had remained a Palestinian oasis in a majority Israeli Jewish city. Here, 40 years earlier, Bertha Spafford Vester, as head of the American Colony, had been the grande dame of Jerusalem. Joyce and I indulgently remembered her and others from Nablus Road, like the distinguished Anwar Nusseibeh, former Jordanian minister of defense and father of Sari Nusseibeh, the current president of Al Quds (Jerusalem) University.

We recalled the last time we had seen each other. Marjorie and I had stayed at the Y and had eaten only food produced in the West Bank, out of sympathy for the plight of the occupied Palestinians. I asked Joyce how—really—the situation was for her.

“We live,” she replied.—AIK