The Playing Fields of Terrorism

...And at the clinic the head doctor said that while, in general, the health of the refugees was good, such social problems as teenage pregnancy were devastating...

...When Mrs...

...It was endemic to the region, she believed...

...It was almost dark when, on the edge of the town, an Israeli officer stopped the bus...

...Much of the anger stemmed from the inability to go home...

...Dreary as it might be, Baqa'a was Paradise Lost...

...The roster listed seven doctors and 186 teachers on duty, and reported 240 cases treated the day before at the clinic...

...As testimony to the far-reaching adaptability of bureaucracy, his desk had an in-box, a black rotary telephone, and several neat stacks of paper...

...Wheidi and I stopped at the house where, a week before, Margaret Thatcher had paid a visit during her own tour at Baqa'a...

...Vice President George Bush conducted a political barnstorm through Jordan, Israel, and Egypt, as though each were a primary state on Super Tuesday...

...The school resembled a field warehouse, and the girls had their heads covered with flowing, Arabic headdresses...

...Moreover, her students had neither pencils nor paper, which disappeared from the supply trucks after the 1982 war in Lebanon...

...The Israel that she found along the Mediterranean coast, however, did not mesh with her Zionist ideals...

...The only jobs were in clearing the land...

...While talking with the camp administrators, he motioned for me to sit in a wooden chair against the long wall in his office...

...Whoever controls the West Bank controls this high ground, with its natural defenses as stubborn as those at Gallipoli...

...Anyone wishing to live at Ofra had to pass a trial year and then receive community approval...

...Leaving Ariel to the northwest, we drove to the point where from the hills of the West Bank it is possible to look across the entire width of Israel to the sea...

...Until 1967, Jordanian troops were entrenched around three-quarters of the city in siege lines...

...Just as Israel is an American dream, similar to those that pushed West, settled the frontier, so, too, are the colonies," he said...

...It's necessary to begin your journey early (via taxi) to reach the Jordanian security point, where you must board a bus, the only vehicle authorized to make the crossing...

...Idealistically, he could see a negotiated peace over the West Bank, agreed to by Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinians, in which control was returned to Jordan...

...An Uzi machine gun hung casually from his shoulder...

...She spoke about the United States with an ambivalence that I heard often in the Middle East...

...she asked...

...Those who don't find work in one of the local factories or in an adjacent industrial park will commute to Tel Aviv...

...Nevertheless, geopolitics have invested it with the rituals of Berlin...

...an Egyptian policeman opened fire with a machine gun on Israelis sunbathing at Taba, the disputed beach on the Gulf of Aqaba, and more than a month passed before official condolences were received in Jerusalem...

...Our first stop was a hilltop churchyard that overlooked the spires of the old city...

...Seventy-one sanitation workers picked up the garbage, and there were seventy-six water points with 242 taps...

...A striking woman in her forties, with coiffed black hair and an elegant bearing, she spoke about the Palestinians from the perspective of an Arab who has lived in the United States...

...As a consequence, the stalemate on the West Bank is now in its twenty-first year...

...Partition Plan designated the West Bank for a Palestinian state, but the Arabs rejected such a compromise...

...When the first families arrived, Ofra was a tent camp...

...The customs house, dedicated to King Hussein, was more a turnpike reststop than security checkpoint...

...Like so much else in Jordan, the $85 million Queen Alya International airport was paid for with Saudi petrodollars...

...All agreed that Israel had a biblical, moral, and political right to settle the West Bank...

...But most of these families maintained a camp residence, because it was temporary, because one day they would be going home...

...Ayshed Diab, spoke excellent English, something she was trying to pass along to various sixth-grade classes...

...more than 7,000 families have moved from refugee camps into new public housing...

...Nor would the Israeli military ever mount a large-scale action against its own people...

...Only a few of the thousands that passed through hercharge would ever go on to a university...

...and the local administration has introduced a number of social services, including day care, job training, and programs for the elderly and sick...

...It dismayed him that the only Palestinians Americans recognized were those who seized airplanes...

...In addition, Arab neighborhoods encircled those of Israelis, a position that continued even after the city was annexed...

...The occupation of Judea and Samaria presented Israel with a colonial mission: that of governing 900,000 Palestinians...

...Nor was there THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1987 23 any urgency to finding solutions to the problems...

...By any measure—except perhaps that of hearts and minds—conditions have improved on the West Bank since 1967: fifty percent of the villages now have running water, as opposed to twenty percent...

...Rather than interpret actions that, in history, may read like the intrigue that preceded Sarajevo, I decided to visit the land that, in my mind, lies at the heart of the Middle East conflict: the West Bank and Jordan Valley...

...On leaving, I asked if Palestinians and Israelis ever got together informally, away from the headlines, and talked Royal Jordanian flight #132 avoided a direct route to Amman, which would have meant flying over Israel, and flew a long arc over the dry riverbeds of southern Turkey and Syria...

...Each month 3,200 rations of dry milk were issued to children under the age of three...

...Alfattah Wheidi, in a tin shack, seated behind a plain wooden desk...

...The guidebook described the crossing as "time-consuming and unpleasant" and went on at length about the Orwellian ritual necessary to go fifty miles between the ancient, sister cities: "The bridge closes at 1 p.m...

...The main gate is a dusty intersection where trucks, buses, Mercedes taxis, and pushcarts jostle with the pedestrians drawn to such commotion...

...It implied that the land was barren prior to the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and the immigration of the Jews...

...24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1987 quietly about the land they divided...

...infant mortality is down...

...Behind cement walls, wire, and halyards of fluttering laundry, as if part of some landlocked fleet, rows of cinder-block houses give shape to a restricted town...

...You cannot cross over in a taxi or your own car...

...Israel refers to the two administrative districts of the West Bank by their biblical names, Judea and Samaria...

...Just as it would be unfair to sum up Israel as a country that occasionally launched strafing missions against Palestinian camps', so too is it unfair only to equate Palestinians with acts of terror...

...Nobody in the United States dreamed of spending their life where they were born...

...Across the parking lot an older bus, jammed with Palestinians, pulled up to a second frontier point...

...The principal, Mrs...

...The briefing compared the Israeli colonial record with that of Jordan's...

...From the churchyard these houses resembled the condominiums that dot the Washington Beltway, although their placement re-enacted a crusader investment...

...On a map their borders—once the U.N...

...It was up to us whether or not to proceed...

...This is Baqa'a—a Palestinian refugee camp...

...From the northern border to the south is a day's drive along a tortuous two-lane road...

...While I was there and after: Israel launched an air raid against the Palestinian Liberation Organization in Tunisia, in retaliation for Israeli yachtsmenkilled on Cyprus...

...When I complimented his English, he said that he had lived in the United States from 1964 to 1972, first attending Xavier University in Ohio and later earning a doctorate in psychology from the University of California...

...To my surprise, as an American I was welcome at Palestinian refugee camps and Israeli settlements, and was free to cross the Jordan at the Allenby Bridge...

...Several years ago it was another windswept barren hillside with more rocks than trees at the top...

...The river is no wider than a mountain stream, and the bridge, despite its aura, is a drab overpass of expressway proportions...

...Images of Vietnam's strategic hamlets come to mind, only these are equipped with air conditioning and two-car garages...

...The open sewer festered under the high sun...

...She cited the example of Jerusalem, which Israel annexed after the 1967 war...

...In an earlier time she might have been found leading wagons through the Cumberland Gap...

...N ear the Allon Road east of Nablus is an early settlement, Ofra, which in the 1970s was established on the grounds of an abandoned army camp...

...Inside, seated behind a wooden desk, a Jordanian officer struggled to make sense of passports not written in languages he understood...

...Israelis had been forbidden to enter their holiest shrines, which were allowed to fall into disrepair...

...After his death cut short a promising political career, she served in the Jordanian government until she resigned over a difference in policy—by all accounts, an act of considerable courage...

...It had given this family with nine children, living in several concrete rooms, fleeting celebrity status...

...She suspected supplies were short because of cuts in American aid, but all she knew for sure was that her students had to learn by repetition...

...Appropriately, at the throat or jugular vein is Jerusalem...

...She remembered the time she and her husband were invited to watch the launch at Cape Kennedy of Apollo 9. As they stood waiting for the lift-off, she pointed out to her husband that the Indian and Pakistani ambassadors, also invited to the occasion, were clearly enjoying each other's company...

...Nevertheless, it would be misleading to etch Baqa'a in terms that evoke Calcutta or the slums of Rio...

...He saw the 900,000 West Bank Arabs being squeezed into smaller quarters, as Israelis took more of the land...

...A 1947 U.N...

...From what he said, it was clear that he admired much about the United States...

...From the checkpoint the road to Jerusalem raced across dry farmland north of the Dead Sea and, outside Jericho, passed a ghost village, which turned out to have been a refugee camp until 1967...

...Occupied by Israel since 1967, the West Bank is a kaleidoscope of Palestinian villages and, lately, Jewish settlements...

...And the grand concourse—Jordan's gateway arch—had more portraits of King Hussein than arriving passengers...

...The road had none of the fortifications or tensions of, for example, the passage through the demilitarized zone at Panmunjom...

...What's left for us to concede...

...Machine guns were drawn...

...The last bus leaves the security point (on both sides) at 11 a.m...

...It further offended her, whenshe lived in Tel Aviv, that these biblical lands were off-limits to Israelis...

...What does Zionism have to do with living in a high-rise overlooking the water...

...With a flick of his head, he ordered two Arabs, dressed in blue smocks, to unload the baggage...

...In 1984 he was elected to parliament, representing a district on the East Bank...

...W e rode home through Ramallah, an Arab town fifteen miles north of Jerusalem...

...The civil service comprises 300 Israelis and 1200 Arabs, who enforce a hodgepodge of Jordanian, international, and military law...

...Passengers for Amman, before boarding, were asked to point to their luggage, which was scattered beside the boarding stairs...

...That the United States had offered only token opposition, he said, implied approval of the venture...

...At sunrise, the bus descended one of the wadis, or dried river beds, that slope into the Jordan Valley...

...What then," he asked, "is the point of no return...

...Most of his constituents were Palestinian...

...Adjacent was a large blackboard that kept the camp's daily ledger...

...The refugees were free to come and go as they pleased, and many commuted to Amman...

...Escorted by a squadron of flies and several small, darting boys, one of whom wore a Houston Astros T-shirt, we walked to a school, a soup kitchen, and a clinic...

...Ariel, where we stopped for lunch, is a linchpin in this defense...

...Only Orthodox Jews were admitted, and everyone shared in the chores, be they farming or child care...

...Nevertheless, the West Bank remains the tar-baby of Israeli politics...

...At public meetings whenever she spoke on the issue, she was reminded of the Holocaust...

...Twenty-one miles from both the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea, it sits abreast the Patriarch's Road, a major thoroughfare...

...2, the schoolgirls lined up for morning exercises, frolicked at recess, and filed reluctantly, like all students, into their classrooms...

...she asked...

...Each night settlers huddled together behind the wire...

...The Arab claim to the city "was not even up for negotiation...

...Nor could she imagine any Israeli government forcibly removing the settlers as part of any peace plan...

...rr he crossing from Amman to Jerusalem began at first light when a small bus, the kind rental car agencies use at airports, made the rounds of the hotels...

...The unused baggage carousels gave the impression that only ghost flights had landed...

...What's mine is mine, and what's yours is negotiable," is how she summarized the various Israeli peace initiatives...

...Imet Fawzi Daoud, a member of Jor- dan's parliament, in the lobby of the Amra Forum Hotel, located off what in Amman is called the Seventh Circle...

...Later we passed a vacant lot where goals for soccer were set up at either end...

...In the Kissinger shuttle missions and at Camp David, the U.S...

...When we reached the town center, Ramallah had the eerie look of Northern Ireland or Soweto...

...E ven though it is difficult to think of the Middle East as a tourist attraction, something called Diplomatic Services advertises "Israel Beyond Tourism" and operates briefing trips of the occupied territories...

...It reminded me of the Austro-Hungarian Balkan policy at the turn of the century, the preference to "muddle through"—even if a small act of violence, an assassination, perhaps, eventually has larger consequences...

...Only then was it loaded into the fuselage...

...The white prefabricated townhouses and their picket roofs glistened in the morning sun as the latest city wall...

...But the government of Menachem Begin pushed settlements to incorporate what it believed were -Israel's historic lands...

...Shifra Blass acted as guide, and her descriptions of the settlement made it sound like one of the utopian communities in nineteenth-century America, perhaps Putney or Oneida...

...But, she said, Palestinians were rooted to small parcels of land, most of which were now inaccessible in either Israel or the West Bank...

...26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1987...

...To hear a description today, it was the Middle East equivalent of Injun country—with Arabs serving the role of Indians...

...To her it dismissed the achievements of the Palestinians or their claim to Palestine...

...Rather than take a table in the bar, we simply talked on the sofa where I had been waiting...

...Residents were carefully screened...

...There were now more than a hundred settlements and 60,000 "colonists," to use his description...

...American hostages, seized in Beirut, were released in Syria after President Reagan authorized an Israeli agent to deliver weapons to Iran, fighting a seven-year war with Iraq, the ally of our allies in the region...

...In fact, few Arabs could be seen on the street...

...Palestinian gunmen hijacked a cruise ship, threw an American invalid overboard, and then escaped the fate of pirates by disappearing into the Italian judiciary...

...As if in a time warp, I felt I had visited Europe during a feudal period, when countries were forming and wars were fought over religious questions or village squares...

...which appeared first as a winking electronic oasis and later as a Potemkin village...

...Her plain, rough-cotton dress and fortitude, despite the latter stages of pregnancy, were consistent with Ofra's prairie setting...

...later came the block housing, electricity, and the open sewer that snakes through the side streets and alleys...

...Turkish rule lasted until 1917 when General Allenby took Jerusalem...

...Eventually the crops took hold in the rocky soil, and the tents were replaced with row houses, which could have been ordered from the Levittown catalogue...

...In fact, when she spoke later in the community center, she said she had grown up in Philadelphia and emigrated in the early 1970s...

...To make this trip at all it was necessary to obtain a permit from the Ministry of Interior, which involved three days of dropping off and picking up my passport, standing in line at barred windows, and even buying a tax stamp from a robed clerk, whose office was a card table on the island of a busy intersection...

...In the grand design the settlers will become suburbanites...

...In this building—I was told repeatedly in Amman —Arabs were routinely asked, as part Of the inspections, to strip and pile their clothes in a basket...

...But the larger design of the settlements was to create a demographic club sandwich that would intersperse Jewish communities between those of Arabs...

...T he house of Laila Sharaf, until recently Jordan's minister of information, straddles a ridge that overlooks Baqa'a...

...Even in hazy sunshine the high-rise apartments in Tel Aviv were clearly visible, as were cooling towers from a nuclear power station and Boeing 747 jets making lazy turns on their final approach to Ben Gurion airport...

...When Israel returned the Sinai to Egypt after Camp David, the military needed weapons to remove some of the settlers there...

...But he could never imagine any of the settlers peacefully submitting to such a plan...

...To the north Samaria is the hair and face while Judea in the south takes the shape of the shoulders...

...No epidemics were present...

...Jordan then annexed it in 1950 and remained in control until the 1967 war...

...The prophet Samuel was said to be buried here, although our interests were less biblical and more tactical...

...The briefing before we left was an outline of local history...

...A hundred families with 350 children moved in, and in addition to a metal factory the settlement put up a silk-screening plant and various craft shops...

...Prior to the crossing an Israeli soldier boarded thebus, drew the shades, and warned against picture taking, since, as it turned out, the far side was heavily fortified...

...It brought to her mind Jerusalem under the Jordanians...

...Wheidi asked to be sent magazines and books—but she saw its politics only as an extension of Israel's...

...Technically, because Israel only occupies Jordan's territory in the West Bank, the river isn't an international boundary...

...No, she said quickly, that never happened...

...In New York, before leaving, I had collected several names of Jordanians and Israelis, but otherwise went with an open itinerary...

...As for living under Palestinian or Jordanian rule, she could not imagine it...

...daily and is completely closed on Saturdays, the Jewish sabbath...

...He wore a sports jacket, gray slacks, and had his necktie loosened in endof-the-day fashion...

...We reviewed the skyline as though sighting artillery...

...Wheidi talked of the symbolism expressed by camp life...

...East to west, however, is a matter of an hour or so...

...Blass exuded an air of manifest destiny...

...Royal Jordanian flight #132 avoided a direct route to Amman, which would have meant flying over Israel, and flew a long arc over the dry riverbeds of southern Turkey and Syria...

...I want them to know," she said, "how Israel stole their land...

...Even though Jordan is sparsely populated, and some of the rocky hills give way to expansive farmland, the camp is crowded into an area not much larger than the playing fields of an American high school...

...They had let the city, especially the Jewish quarter, deteriorate...

...T he international symbol of squal- l or—corrugated tin roofing—interrupts the Irbid road north of Amman...

...Three of every four houses had a toilet...

...She neither avoided the subject of terrorism nor condoned it...

...What hypocrisy to speak of Israel, of Zionism, of a return to the lands of the Bible and then not to let people settle in the holiest towns...

...resolutions...

...The ancient towns, like Jaffa or Nazareth, were just as important to Arabs as to Jews, and the various national and religious claims to Jerusalem were duplicated throughout Palestine...

...She admired its open society—both she and Mr...

...Ending the day here, we came to listen to Shifra Blass, a spokeswoman for the Council of Jewish Settlement in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza...

...From her back lawn the camp spreads out as a desert labyrinth—with the streets showing up as tunnels through the maze and the perimeter as an ancient rampart...

...No rocks were felt against the windshield, however...

...None are eager to live under Arab sovereignty...

...Were it established as a Palestinian state, either independently or in federation with Jordan, questions about security might topple any Israeli government, even if the territory were demilitarized and Israel were to establish a defense around all boundaries...

...After he returned to Jordan, he developed his practice...

...It disturbed her that the classes, on average, had fifty pupils...

...On board was an assortment of Europeans, Asians, and Americans...

...ridors from the arrival gate echoed the loneliness of footsteps in a mall where the shops are closed...

...She knew each girl by name and when we talked —first in her office and later in class—she would interrupt the conversation to revise a lesson plan with another teacher or to restore order in the schoolyard...

...Blass said that land was being purchased fairly, despite the Palestinian claim that the Israelis were pressuring Arabs to sell...

...Mrs...

...She questioned the ability of the United States to serve the region as an honest broker...

...A satellite of the United Nations refugee constellation, it began in 1967 as a tent camp, with a few central spigots for water...

...She resented the American fascination with the phrase that Israel had "made the deserts bloom...

...Nor has it been easy to deal with Jordan on the question...

...Judea and Samaria could be annexed, as with Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, but that might raise the prospect that one day the majority of Israelis would be Arab...

...After his meeting broke up, Mr...

...The men carried guns...

...I want them to know that one day they will return...

...During the 1967 war Israeli fighter pilots nicknamed this spot "Mickey Mouse," because of two ear-shaped towers that protruded from the landscape...

...Later came the religious settlers, for whom the West Bank represented a return to biblical lands...

...The first settlements in the Jordan Valley formed a tripwire to signal a Jordanian attack...

...It was a re-run of what happened earlier in Palestine...

...That particular morning 65,370 people were living at Baqa'a, which broke down to 9,091 families living in 7,650 dwellings or about eight to each family and house...

...On this point she was inflexible, as only a principal can be...

...But it was an ugly scene, not to be repeated, especially on the scale of the settlements of the West Bank...

...10,000 students attend five universities which have been founded under the Israeli occupation...

...At Baqa'a Preparatory School No...

...Graceful and determined, she displayed the qualities of patience, leadership, and good humor that I remember from the best of my own teachers...

...Yes, hometowns were important, but usually for mythic beginnings...

...Some are religious communities where members participate in all aspects of village life, as if at a kibbutz...

...In rare cases the Israelis prosecute Arabs under the same hated statutes that the British used against Jews under the Mandate...

...What comfort did that offer for a future under the Jordanians...

...Never are we portrayed as a people or a nation, but always as some outlaw gang," he said...

...Seemingly the plane could have, set down anywhere in this wasteland and rolled the last fifty miles to the terminal...

...King Hussein, a Bedouin, rules a country with a Palestinian majority, which could use a state or federation on the West Bank to overthrow the Hashemite Kingdom...

...It was a lesson she intended to pass on to her students...

...It had the ability to wreck any settlement so it ought to be party to any agreement...

...Today the population is 2,000, which is planned to increase to 160,000 in the next century...

...In either land it is possible from many of the hilltops to look down on the spires of Jerusalem, a city whose divisions are a tapestry of the conflict...

...Tel Aviv wasn't mentioned in my Bible," she said, adding that to her Israel was the biblical towns of Hebron or Nablus or Jericho...

...Americans were happy living anywhere, she remembered...

...Not only did she encounter prejudice against Arabs, but Palestinians were seen only in the veil of terrorism...

...Traffic slowed on the rocky foothills that lead into the city...

...He feared the Israeli settlement of the West Bank marked a turning point for the Palestinians, and for the chances of peace in the region...

...A matter of caution, perhaps, but it was a fitting introduction to the fatalism of the Middle East: the exercise didn't insure that there wasn't a bomb on board—only that, if there were, its courier would go aloft with the suitcase...

...Of this policy she said: "What hypocrisy to speak of Israel, of Zionism, of a return to the lands of the Bible and then not to let people settle in the holiest towns...

...and, after being the object of thrown rocks, the Israeli military on the West Bank shot more than a dozen Palestinian demonstrators, killing two...

...On the walk back to the office, Mr...

...The story of the West Bank reads like that of Poland or Czechoslovakia, or any land which, because of its strategic placement, has as its history a chronicle of occupations...

...Finally, Israel must contend with the settlers, who while small in number have a powerful hold on the electorate...

...During the 1970s her husband had represented Jordan at the United Nations—a diplomatic life recorded by the pictures around the house...

...Approached in the half-light of dusk, the Jordanian desert reflected a gray, lunar complexion...

...The British ruled Palestine, including the West Bank, until they departed following the Second World War...

...Late that afternoon, however, the linoleum corMatthew Stevenson writes for a number of national magazines...

...rri he typical settlement is a condo' minium in the hills, fenced by barbed wire—a lonely outpost in enemy lands...

...Jordan had offered citizenship to the refugees and the opportunity to assimilate into the culture, and while some did, most clung to the camps—their only link with towns and villages in Israel...

...Not until the mid-seventies did the Israeli government authorize settlements, and then only for defensive reasons...

...Like Henry Adams, she spoke of life as a political education...

...And at its widest point, the West Bank is nine miles from the Mediterranean Sea...

...Someday, we were told, the West Bank might be returned to Jordan, but never again would Jerusalem be an Arab city...

...As she concluded: "What the settlers are doing today is no different from what the first Zionists did when they reached Palestine...

...I left, however, with the despair that is the region's most freely traded commodity...

...Nonetheless, our conversation repeatedly came around to how Americans perceived Palestinians...

...Maginot had only one line in France—here Israel has three or four...

...To redress this imbalance, the Israeli It would be misleading to etch Baqa'a in terms that evoke Calcutta or the slums of Rio...

...Up ahead, he explained, rocks were being thrown at cars...

...My impression of the Middle East was that it was in the early stages of a hundred years war...

...On a map, simply by connecting the dots of the settlements, it is easy to see the entrenchment lines that run north-south through the West Bank...

...But she thought it doubtful that the United States or Israel would ever agree to such a concord, at which the Palestinians would have to speak for themselves...

...Completed in 1983, before traffic warranted a field the size of that serving Houston, it was intended to mark Jordan's accession to the front rank of Middle East nations...

...Further, on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Israel was strengthening its occupation through the settlements and not searching for compromise solutions, such as those offered by the various U.N...

...Some of the smaller boys were chasing a ball while the older ones milled about on the sidelines—of what another British prime minister might have described as the playing fields of terrorism...

...Lurching side to side from the speed, the van followed several trucks past this formation...

...Homework, sadly, was an abstract concept...

...One thousand six hundred fifty refugees were eating in one of the camp's three feeding centers, as they were called...

...It took more than an hour to clear the Hussein barracks, but less than a minute to cross the Jordan at the Allenby Bridge...

...Another Israeli soldier met the bus at the modern immigration building...

...My group of ten included an Israeli family, an English couple, and an American scriptwriter from Hollywood who spent much of the day explaining to his various seatmates how soap operas are written...

...They provided the Israeli government with reservists at the frontier...

...Outside Ramallah, we blended into the rush hour traffic and arrived safely in Jerusalem, although I couldn't help wondering whether someday a rock thrown in anger would become, yet again, a shot heard 'round the world...

...had cast itself as a disinterested party, yet she believed the peace that it offered implied sympathy for the Israeli position...

...When living in the United States, she had found it impossible even to discuss the question of the Palestinians...

...A dark-haired man in his late forties, he was wearing sun glasses, a light cotton suit, and an expression as impassive as the drab olive paint on the walls...

...My trip coincided with a number of events that, when recalled as one, fix the image of the Middle East as the Balkans of the late twentieth century...

...grinding his way through the low gears until the van settled into overdrive...

...A bazaar that choked the main streets filled the air with dust...

...At the office of civil administration in the West Bank—in appearance, a military base—we heard from an American-born Israeli officer how local government operates...

...Having won the right to live in the West Bank, the settlers were working to purchase as much of the land as was for sale and to defeat any peace initiative that would put them under Arab rule...

...As though on a sales tour, we saw Ofra by bus...

...The Arab refugees from the 1948 war with Israel first set-tled in the West Bank, but were pushed east again in 1967...

...Troops in full battle gear lined both sides of the main street...

...Many of the girls would leave school to have babies...

...T he journey to the frontier between Jordan and Israel began on the runway at the Athens airport, brushed as it is by gentle sea breezes of the Saronic Gulf and a terrorist past...

...Green Line between Jordan and Israel—are a silhouette, perhaps that of Abraham Lincoln...

...It was a future she was trying to change...

...She recalled the tactics of Menachem Begin's Irgun Zwei Leumi and other groups, but said the only hope for peace was through a Geneva convention, attended by all the powers, including the Soviet Union...

...After deliberations with the tour guide, the driver went ahead...

...She explained why she believed Americans had such a difficult time understanding the demands of the Palestinians...

...Like most Palestinians, his hair and complexion were dark, and his trimmed beard recalled sketches of the Arab noblemen...

...Sharaf said to her husband that she could not imagine such a scene between Arab and Jew, he answered: "Not everyone's as crazy as we are...

...Altogether from the Allenby Bridge it was an hour's drive—as it would be for tanks in an invasion...

...On the East Bank of the Jordan River, in Jordan, are many of the Palestinian refugees from the Arab wars against Israel...

...She said it had been "an ugly city, dirty...

...Why," she asked, "should the Palestinians alone bear the guilt for this tragedy...

...Only a handful of Israelis would solve the problem by expelling the Palestinians from the occupied territories...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1987 25 government constructed a ring of settlements in the hills around Jerusalem...

...I found the camp's director, Mr...