-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Year 2000: Palestinian Frustration
at Boiling Point
by our correspondent Mouin Rabbani, 29 december 2000
October 12th. Two Israeli soldiers, almost certainly
undercover agents, are lynched by a furious mob in
Ramallah. Within hours Israeli helicopter gunships
and missile frigates, observing the time-honoured
dictum of a face for an eye, a mouth for a tooth,
attack targets in 10 Palestinian cities.
Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are
certainly no strangers to Israel's trigger happy
military. But unlike their compatriots in Lebanon,
they had largely been spared its fondness for aerial
bombardment, until the current uprising.
Even when carried out by precision-guided missiles
launched from highly computerised helicopters, as ever
courtesy of Uncle Sam, such bombardments can have a terrorising
effect. Even more
so when one of the intended targets is just up the hill, you
live in an area where Israeli
military decrees forbade the construction of bomb shelters and,
like my daughter Dalia,
you are all of five years old.
While I had always considered the Oslo agreement a charade which
would ultimately
produce more violence, I hadn't quite expected to be comforting
a child, pleading that
she doesn't want to die, quite so soon. Nor had I expected that
Dalia and her classmates
would the following week be receiving instruction, not in drawing
geometric figures,
but rather on how to react – and not to react – in case of an
attack on their school.
"You have to lie down on your stomach like this," Dalia explained.
"Because if you stand
up like this you'll be shot, and killed." By the time the school
administration requested
the Palestinian police to post armed guards at the entrance,
in case Jewish settlers or the
army that protects them got any ideas, it seemed almost normal.
Deaf International Ears
Unnecessarily surprised as I may have been, the
remarkable aspect is not that it has come to this, but
that those most familiar with the situation refused to
believe it would. As Palestinian complaints that their
individual and collective interests were being
trampled underfoot grew ever louder during the past
decade, they seemed to be falling upon increasingly
deaf ears. Ears solely attuned to the latest developments in
what is known as the peace
process, whose progress, formerly meagre, had finally become
microscopic. It was as
if the conditions of Palestinian existence are considered perfectly
normal, even natural.
For Palestinians there is nothing quite as galling, or as indicative
of the
continuing Israeli control over the details of their lives, as
the permit system
which regulates their movement. My friend Ismail, for example,
hails from the
Nusseirat refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. He has lived in the
West Bank town of
Ramallah since 1995. But because his identity card states that
he is from the
Palestinian controlled township of Nusseirat, he needs an Israeli
permit to reside
in the Palestinian controlled town of Ramallah, where he is considered
a
temporary visitor. Before his permit expires, typically within
a few days or
weeks, he must return to Gaza and apply for a new one, a process
which can take
months. (Franz this reminds me very much of the Apartied system
in South Africa
which mandated all blacks to have their their permits first to
confirm that they are
blacks and second to tell them where they can and cannot go.
Ironically this is
happening in the very land that these people were born and grown
for generations)
Ramallah Prison
Like many others, he refuses to let his life be dominated by
such bureaucratic niceties.
Instead, he chose to remain in his own home after his permit
expired. In doing so, he
became a fugitive, who was liable to be fined, imprisoned, or
both if caught. The
redeployment of Israeli forces to the edges of Ramallah shortly
after he arrived here
meant he was free to roam its streets again. But it also meant
Ramallah had become his
prison. If he tried to leave it, he was certain to encounter
an Israeli military check point,
and trouble.
Ismail
is one of the lucky ones. It took him only four years to
change his identity card to reflect his status as a Ramallah resident,
and make his presence here legal. Even this, however, had limited
value. It did not entitle him to leave the country, and he was
refused an exit permit to attend a journalism course in Copenhagen
for reasons which will never be disclosed. ( Just like in Soviet
Union and Eastern europe )Similarly, when he went to Gaza after
an enforced absence of several years to visit his mother and
relatives, his wife, daughter, and work in Ramallah had to wait
several weeks to see him
again. His confidence that his West Bank residency gave him an
automatic right to
return to the West Bank had obviously been misplaced.
Escape Route
Indeed, Ismail is one of the lucky ones. For every one like him
there are thousands who
have never left the Gaza Strip, all 365 square kilometres of
it. Others who insist on
travelling to the West Bank but don't receive permits to do so,
go first to the Egyptian
capital Cairo – if they can - then fly to the Jordanian capital,
Amman, from where they
cross the Israeli-controlled border with the West Bank at Jericho.
Once there, they try
to slip unnoticed into a Ramallah taxi. It's a trick that often
works, but only once.
Another friend from Gaza, Wafa, was so concerned she would lose
her only
opportunity to obtain a degree in journalism, at Birzeit University
near
Ramallah, that she had to forgo her father's funeral as it was
held a mere 90
kilometres away.
Scenes like this have helped me understand what is taking place
in Palestine these past
several months. For Palestinians, the Oslo agreements were supposed
to put an end to
such indignities. Instead, their main achievement has been to
refine and
institutionalise such practices to the point of apartheid. That's
always been the
danger lurking within Oslo; that its failure to meet the basic
human needs of Palestinians
would lead to a new and more violent confrontation which could
set back the cause of
peace by a generation. A costly charade indeed.