JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1995, Pages 60, 75-77

Journey Through the "New Middle East": Fall 1994

Palestinian Birth Pains in Gaza

By Richard Curtiss

It took less than an hour to drive in the early morning from Amman down the winding highway to the Jordan River border with Israel. The previous night there had been a prolonged and spectacular display of lightning west of the Jordanian capital, and it soon was clear that it had been accompanied by torrential rain in the Jordan valley. Some of the three-and-one-half-hour passage through the Jordanian and Israeli borders was spent wading around huge puddles that, in a valley well below sea level, had no place further down to go.

At last, with all seven seats in an Israeli service taxi filled, we were off for the 25-minute drive back up into the mountains to Jerusalem. Since the driver was Israeli, we bypassed Jericho, although Palestinian drivers, like the service taxi driver on my return, pass through it. Palestinians joke that to get a license from the new Palestinian National Authority to drive in Jericho, you need only demonstrate that you can drive in first and second gear. There is not space enough in Jericho, they say, to shift into third.

In Jerusalem there was no possibility of filling a service taxi because the Israelis had closed the border with Gaza. Finally, at almost three times the regular fare, I became the sole passenger in a service taxi for a 11-1/2-hour descent through the mountains and coastal plain, and another rainstorm, to Gaza. Availing himself of the rare opportunity to educate an Arabic-speaking American, the driver pointed out historical landmarks on the heavily traveled Jerusalem-Tel Aviv road.

First was Deir Yassin, once a village of Muslim stone cutters who had declared themselves "neutral" in the fighting that broke out after the 1947 U.N. Security Council vote to partition Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. Unfortunately for its inhabitants, however, Deir Yassin overlooked a strategically narrow defile through which the Jerusalem road passes.

Therefore, on April 9, 1948, two Jewish extremist groups, Irgun Zvei Leumi, commanded by Menachem Begin, and LEHI (the Stern Gang), led by a triumvirate that included Yitzhak Shamir, attacked the village under cover of artillery fire provided by the Jewish mainstream Haganah militia, forerunner of the Israel Defense Forces. As villagers took refuge in their homes, hand grenades were systematically thrown into each house. Men, women and children who survived the grenades were shot or knifed to death inside or in front of their homes and their bodies thrown into the quarry from which the village had drawn its livelihood. Only a cemetery marks the site of the former village, which first was looted and then leveled by the attackers.

Next was Kastel, a hilltop strongpoint captured by Palestinians in April 1948 in a battle in which their leader, Abdul Qadir al Husseini, father of Faisal al Husseini, the current PLO representative in East Jerusalem, was killed. Kastel was retaken by the Haganah only a few hours later, after Husseini's followers left their newly won prize to attend their leader's funeral.

To this day in ditches along the road there are overturned armored cars, meticulously repainted but left where they landed in 1948 by the Israelis as a memorial to their epic battle with Jordan's Arab Legion for control of the Jerusalem road. Where the road enters the coastal plain is the Latrun Monastery, site of a major 1948 battle in which Jewish militiamen, some of them just off the ships that had brought them from war-ravaged Europe to Palestine, seized the towns of Ramle and Lydda and expelled their occupants, adding the residents of both towns to the estimated total of 750,000 to 800,000 Palestinian refugees who never were allowed to return to their homes within Israel's pre-1967 borders.

Nearby is the site of biblical Emmaus where, according to the Gospel of Luke, the resurrected Jesus broke bread with two of his disciples. When in 1967 Israeli forces seized Amwas, the Palestinian village still standing on the site, they forced out the occupants, razed their houses to the ground with bulldozers, and planted pine trees to conceal the devastation. Today Emmaus/Amwas is the site of "Canada Forest," named in honor of the Jewish community of Canada who donated funds to help the Israelis plant trees to "make the desert bloom."

My East Jerusalem Palestinian driver had warned me he would not be allowed to travel beyond the Erez crossing point. At Erez, an Israeli soldier informed the driver with a malicious smile that his passenger would have to carry his suitcases through the concrete barriers and 50 yards of mud and pouring rain to the Gaza taxis on the other side. When I demurred, the soldier demanded to know why I wanted to enter Gaza anyway.

"Because I have a hotel reservation there," I said, handing him my American passport. Reluctantly, the soldier allowed the Jerusalem taxi to pass through the series of barriers before making its U-turn.

As I dismounted, a battered unmarked Gaza taxi appeared in a swirl of mud and I jumped in. As we raced away the driver, in shouted colloquial Arabic, began to relate the bizarre series of events that had led to the border closing. Each time I asked him to slow his torrent of words, he slowed the car instead, and talked faster—and louder.

Though I tried to concentrate on his words, I was distracted by his driving. Twice as he sought to beat other drivers through crowded intersections he managed only to snarl all the traffic into hopeless gridlock, from which no one seemed willing to back away. I tried not to recall that I had seen such angry driving in Beirut before 1975 and Tehran before 1979—in each case just before those societies self-destructed.

Only that night in the Marna House hotel did I learn the full story of what was happening in Gaza. The previous day 32-year-old Islamic Jihad leader Hani Abed had been killed by a car bomb that detonated in the parking lot of Gaza's College of Technology, where he taught chemistry. Gazans of all political pursuasions immediately concluded that Abed was killed by Israeli agents in fulfillment of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's vow to respond in kind to the Islamic extremists who were killing Israelis. Nevertheless, Gaza's Islamist leaders vented their anger on Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority for not providing sufficient protection for all Palestinians in the territory now under his security jurisdiction.

What I did not know was that on the day I entered Gaza, so did Yasser Arafat, on his way home from the economic conference in Casablanca and a side visit to Tunis. He proceeded directly to a memorial service for Hani Abed at Gaza's Omari mosque, where Islamist leaders were haranguing a huge crowd. As Arafat tried to enter, he was jeered by some of the mourners and his trademark keffiyah headdress was jostled from his head before he was whisked away by his security guards.

While all this was happening, I was settling into my hotel in a part of Gaza where the storm had knocked out the electricity. When darkness fell without the electricity being restored, the hotel started up its own noisy generator outside my room. The spartan quarters, single-entree menu and communal dining table brought back mixed memories of Middle East hotels of two generations earlier.

In the morning, however, the sun was shining, the city electricity was restored, and I learned that a delegation of leaders of both Islamic Jihad and its larger and less militant sister organization, Hamas, had visited Arafat after the mosque incident to offer their apologies. Unfortunately, it also was Friday, with everything shut down and little chance of talking with anyone at the UNRWA office, which had offered to drive me around, or Palestinian National Authority headquarters.

However, breakfast at the communal table with an interesting and articulate assortment of international relief workers, educators and technical experts was just as informative. A walk along the beautiful beach, which had been off-limits to residents during the years of curfews and restrictions, and a return along the street on the cliffs above revealed even more Palestinian soldiers, policemen and plainclothesmen in strongpoints and guard posts than when I visited a year earlier and the same positions bristled with heavily armed Israelis.

The agreement with Israel permitted the Palestinian National Authority to bring 7,000 police and military personnel into Gaza and 2,000 into Jericho. Additional local police are being recruited, and twice I saw squads of husky Gazans, still in their civilian clothes, being drilled bysmartly uniformed Palestinian soldiers.

Stopping by a particularly thick gathering of military personnel outside the beachfront headquarters of the brand-new Palestinian Broadcasting Authority, which Yasser Arafat is using as a temporary office, I asked if he was inside. Yes, I was told, and he would emerge shortly on his way to the mosque if I wanted to photograph him.

While I waited over a cup of coffee at an outdoor cafe where television cameramen already had set up camp, a young Palestinian officer took the only remaining seat at my table. As he casually removed a compact automatic rifle from the back of his belt to use as a paperweight to keep the sea breeze from blowing away the newspaper spread out before him, he answered my questions.

He had been born in Sidon, Lebanon, of Palestinian parents and had served the PLO in Tunis and Jordan before returning with Arafat to the homeland he had never seen. When a sudden stirring at the broadcasting authority gate interrupted the conversation, the officer loped back to take his place among Arafat's flak-jacketed security guards. I finished my coffee but when I tried to settle for it before taking my pictures, the waiter informed me the officer had paid for it as he left.

That Gaza remains an hospitable place for foreigners again was demonstrated a few steps down the road at Cliff House, another hotel that had been recommended to me. It has a few rooms ranged around a spacious restaurant with big windows overlooking the beach. The solicitous young man managing the dining room that day was visiting from New Jersey and, perhaps, trying to decide whether the time was ripe for his own personal "return" to Palestine.

Later in the day there were more protest demonstrations over the death of Hani Abed, but they didn't come my way. It was only after dark that I noticed a bustle as trucks and work crews moved rapidly but silently through the streets around the hotel. They were affixing to walls and utility posts photographs of Yasser Arafat and of Turkish Prime Minister Tansu Ciller, scheduled to arrive the next day.

Men in the trucks also were stringing garlands of little paper Palestinian and Turkish flags across the streets, and posting larger written messages of welcome in Turkish. Because a previously scheduled visit by Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was aborted when the Israelis would not allow her to enter Gaza without first being checked in by Israeli officials, Turkey's first woman prime minister would also be the first prime minister to visit Yasser Arafat on Palestinian soil.

Compared with past years, and even with a year earlier after Yasser Arafat's White House handshake with Yitzhak Rabin, the atmosphere in Gaza seemed relaxed—despite the Islamist demonstrations. Children greet a foreign visitor politely but don't pursue him or stare. If asked for a picture they line up enthusiastically. Most forget to make the "V" signs of resistance to Israeli occupation that were universal only months ago.

A Gaza-born former university teacher with whom I spoke early the next day reinforced this view of people slowly emerging psychologically from the profound dislocation and shock associated with the six-year intifada and its daily bloodletting, days and even weeks of curfew, personal betrayals by informers, and the incredible personal hardships and sacrifices that accompanied all of these phenomena.

The people are ready for peace, the teacher said. But they are increasingly suspicious of why the foreign donors who had promised to pump $700 million into the Palestinian economy before the end of 1994 have failed to act. He estimated that Gazan support for Hamas still was no more than 20 to 30 percent, despite Arafat's inability to crank up the promised aid. Popular support for Arafat will increase dramatically, he predicted, if the reconstruction money materializes and begins to create jobs. "People need to feel a change in the economy," he said. "To be honest, the economic situation has deteriorated even since Abu Ammar's [Arafat's] arrival."

The reasons for the deterioration are obvious. Of Gaza's present estimated 850,000 inhabitants, 70,000 worked in Israel prior to the intifada, which began in Gaza in December 1987 and then spread to the rest of the occupied territories. By January 1991, just before the beginning of the Gulf war, the number of Gazans working in Israel had shrunk to 56,000. In early 1993, the number had fallen to 35,000 out of a work force of 140,000. Since the massacre of Muslims at prayer in Hebron by West Bank settler Baruch Goldstein, and subsequent slayings of Israeli civilians and soldiers, Gaza has been closed off for long periods, and workers permitted to enter Israel never have exceeded 20,000 per day.

After my early morning conversation I was taken by public information officer Hussam F. Manna' of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) to see housing construction projects now underway, mostly with international funding allocated before the peace agreement was signed. Of the 635,099 officially registered refugees in the Gaza Strip, 346,443 still live in camps. Just constructing adequate housing for such a population would create far more employment for Gazans than all the construction jobs in Israel ever provided them.

Also just beginning are internationally funded projects to provide an infrastructure of electricity, water, sewage disposal, paved streets and sidewalks. Nothing had been done in any of these fields during the past 27 years of Israeli occupation, and not a great deal had been done during the preceding 19 years of Egyptian occupation. These infrastructure projects will help immensely with both living standards and employment. So will plans to give Gaza direct access to European and Middle East markets, although these programs are dependent upon Israeli cooperation, which so far has not been forthcoming.

Without UNRWA, which spends 60 percent of its budget on 154 schools for 109,000 refugee children, the masses of Palestinian refugees who crowded into this area after their 1948 expulsion might have starved. It is certain that their children would have grown up illiterate. Instead, the children and now grandchildren of those refugees have been taking the professional and technical skills made possible by UNRWA training to many parts of the world. In the oil-producing countries of the Gulf, Palestinians played a major role in national development before the people of the area began returning from abroad with advanced degrees of their own.

Although some skilled Gazans have returned since the 1991 Gulf war, most will not. Their ancestral roots were not in the squalid refugee camps of Gaza, but the Palestinian Arab towns and villages of present-day Israel's coastal plain. There is no incentive to return to the camps, and no possibility of returning to their original homes.

However, guided by my UNRWA host, I could see for myself that a new era has begun in Gaza. For one thing, with $2 million in cleanup funds made available largely by Japan, virtually all of the political graffiti had been covered with white paint on walls facing the streets throughout the Gaza Strip. Trash and garbage also has been removed, although construction rubble accumulated over decades remains to be collected.

This year all schools are functioning continously for the first time since the beginning of the intifada. There also has been a cosmopolitan insertion into UNRWA schools of 2,500 children of incoming PNA personnel from schools in Kuwait, Jordan, Lebanon, Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt and Sudan.

UNRWA, which is moving its headquarters for Palestinian refugees throughout the Middle East to Gaza, had a budget of $70 million for field operations in 1994, plus an emergency budget of $9.1 million. It now has on the drawing board $71 million in short-term project proposals, and another $255 million in long-term proposals to assist in the implementation of the agreement between Israel and the PLO.

Getting these projects started, along with those to be funded by the $2.4 billion pledged by international donors over the first few years of autonomy, is crucial not only to the long-term economic and social health of the incipient Palestinian state, but also to its immediate political prospects.

This makes the reluctance of the U.S., and the international institutions in which it has a major voice, to meet their pledges puzzling. U.S. economic aid to Israel moves in the first month of each fiscal year in one annual payment, without the "bookkeeping" requirements being levied on the Palestinians.

A check with U.S. diplomats along my route confirmed my impression that U.S. Middle East policy-making and implementation is concentrated in the hands of Dennis Ross, a State Department political appointee held over from the Bush administration who performed essentially the same function, but with more direct supervision, under Secretary of State James Baker. This makes inexplicable U.S. reluctance to follow through on Clinton administration financial pledges to the Palestinians—which are absolutely essential to the success of the peace process—unless either Ross or Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin are in fact hoping to see Yasser Arafat fail.

This troubling scenario, in which Israel and its supporters inside the Clinton administration would then say that the Palestinians have demonstrated that they are incapable of self-government, first was suggested to me by Israeli peace activist Israel Shahak. After seeing Gazans still waiting in vain for fulfillment of international financial pledges made after the Rabin-Arafat handshake, it seemed less far-fetched.

Driving through the Gaza Strip made it clear that, after job creation, the next problem facing Arafat is the continued presence of 4,500 Jewish settlers who are squatting on more than 30 percent of the Gaza Strip and consuming 60 percent of its limited water supply. This overuse is allowing seawater to seep into the underground fresh-water supply, which already is somewhat polluted by brackish water coming in through the aquifers that underlie the West Bank and Israel.

How bad the water is had been made clear to me the previous night. Forgetting for a moment that I was in a Gaza hotel rather than at home, I started to use tap water instead of bottled water to brush my teeth. To me, it was almost indistinguishable from sea water.

Driving along a road skirting the Israeli settlement of Netzarim, our UNRWA car slowed for two separate roadblocks, manned night and day seven days a week by Israeli soldiers. Although their efforts are supplemented by still more Israeli soldiers who participate with Palestinian soldiers in joint motorized patrols on the roads used by the settlers to pass to and from Israel, no one involved is secure. Only six days after my visit, a suicide bomber on a bicycle managed to kill three Israeli soldiers at Netzarim. Israeli guards there have been the victims of other fatal drive-by shootings before and since my visit.

Yet, I was told, this settlement just outside Gaza city, which is the focus of much of Israel's remaining security force in Gaza and also the focus of much of the tension between Arafat supporters and Gaza's Islamists, actually is home to only nine Israeli families, totaling perhaps 40 people.

Surprisingly, the last Gaza professional with whom I spoke seemed less worried about the settlers than about political machinations in Jerusalem and Western capitals. "Now everybody is against King Hussein because of Jerusalem," he told me. "When the king said his arrangement with Israel for custodianship of the Holy Places would end when and if the Palestinians and Israel reach agreement on the final status of Jerusalem, I began to lose faith in the Declaration of Principles. I fear that the Israelis once again are toying with the idea of the 'Jordan Option'—turning over the West Bank to Jordan instead of allowing the creation of a Palestinian state."

When I noted that this theory might explain the obstacles being raised in Washington and other Western capitals to the disbursement to Arafat's Palestinian Authority of the promised international donor funds, my Gazan interlocutor looked dismayed.

"I thought that Rabin was smarter than that," he said. "Surely he understands that if the Palestinians wanted to go with Jordan, they would never have supported Arafat. If Rabin chooses this option, it will reverse the whole peace process. Then there will be no stability in the Arab world, and even less in Israel."

My final stop was back at Yasser Arafat's office, outside of which a company of his "Force 17" bodyguard and a smartly uniformed military band was lined up to welcome Turkish Prime Minister Ciller, who had completed a visit to Israel and was scheduled to continue on to Egypt. When I commented on the professional appearance of both the police and soldiers, my UNRWA host agreed.

"They've shown remarkable discipline and leniency," he said. "The problem is that every day the Islamists push a little further. Sooner or later the Palestinian police will have to draw a line."

Then he added, presciently in view of the Nov. 18 killing of 13 Islamists at the hands of Palestinian forces less than two weeks after my visit: "I fear that if Arafat's forces don't draw that line soon, the results will be very serious and bloody."

Unfortunately, as the band and its colorfully dressed bagpipers entertained the waiting spectators, and members of the Palestinian cabinet bustled in and out of Arafat's office between chats with journalists, the sun suddenly faded and gale winds from the sea literally began rolling up the red carpet so carefully laid down where the Turkish prime minister was to review the presidential honor guard.

Suddenly, with a flash of lightning and the rumble of thunder, the skies opened and rain poured down. As the honor guard reassembled under a protective shed, the band retreated into Arafat's office and the spectators rushed for their cars and bicycles.

My UNRWA host drove me to a service taxi which, after assembling five other rain-drenched passengers, took off through Gaza's traffic gridlock. At the Erez border crossing the Israeli guards predictably insisted we walk, carrying our bags in the pouring rain, through the maze of concrete barriers before climbing back into exactly the same Gaza service taxi on the other side and heading for Jerusalem.

When Tansu Ciller arrived in rain-swept Gaza, I read in the next day's newspaper, a muted welcoming ceremony took place inside the small presidential office. Nevertheless the Turkish prime minister, who carefully referred to her host as "the president of Palestine," called upon the world to make aid to his country its top priority, and pledged $50 million in support from financially pressed Turkey.

Gaza's uncertain weather may be a metaphor for the future of Palestine. With Yasser Arafat's public agreement to settle for less than one-fourth of the original mandate of Palestine, the world is presented with an opportunity to stabilize the Middle East that would have been unthinkable only two years ago. But if Israel, and its American backers who have seized control of Clinton administration Middle East policy, try to wring further advantages out of an agreement already so heavily weighted in Israel's favor, all accomplishments up to now will be rendered meaningless.

If the Israelis accept the existence of a Palestinian state, agree that Jerusalem can be that state's as well as its own capital, and withdraw the 120,000 settlers from the West Bank and Gaza (surely preferable for Israelis to the alternative of letting all the Palestinian refugees return to their homes in Israel), there will be real peace. If not, Israel once again will become an island of four to five million Jews in a hostile sea of 200 million angry, betrayed Arabs.

Surely, as the last Gazan with whom I had spoken put it, "Rabin is smarter than that."