Visiting with Palestinians in Kuwait

...Palestinians started to come here immediately after the 1948 War-mainly from the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, where the largest number of refugees had settled and there was little work...

...In Cattan's view, "the end of the Zionist idea" is a prerequisite to normal relations between Palestinians and Israel: "If they abandon the idea that they need 15 million Jews in Israel and say that they have nothing to do with the Jews of the world except religion...

...The neighbors are there because they replaced a Palestinian employe...

...And would they leave if a peace settlement led to the establishment of a Palestinian state on the West Bank of Jordan...

...Things will change by themselves...

...Hani Kaddumi, now a wealthy businessman and also a member of the Palestine National Council-with one son studying business administration and another studying engineering abroad-twists a pencil in the silence of his modest paneled office and says quietly, "The Palestinians are thirsty for a state...

...Forty per cent of Palestinian students, about 17,000 children, now attend PLO schools...

...In the refugee quarter in the suburb of Hawalli, for example, peeling four-story concrete apartment houses are bunched together, often on unpaved streets...

...They want an identity, a passport...

...Abdel-Mohsein Cattan speaks from a deep sofa in the living room of his tasteful new villa, surrounded by glass and chrome and thick rugs and a huge zebra skin on one wall...

...Would we accept nonbelligerency...

...All my friends say, 'I'm only staying in Kuwait until I save some money,' " one Palestinian observed...

...Hani Kaddumi built his ministry from scratch, bringing hundreds of talented Palestinians from the West Bank to staff it, getting offices built and furnished, and living all the time in spartan unair-conditioned quarters on a diet of rice and fish and filtered water...

...The sitting room was lined with ragged stuffed chairs, its only wall decorations a map of Palestine and a framed photo of Yasir Arafat, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader...

...And there is growing skepticism-undermining any talk of compromise-that Israel will ever give back the West Bank to anyone...

...I took my children to Palestine...

...Rabieh, who grew up in a refugee camp in Jericho after his family lost its home in Jaffa in 1948, received his PhD from the University of Houston...

...Kuwait contains a rich reservoir of potential administrators and developers...

...Although opinions vary, most people accept the PLO position that a state should be seen as the first step to an ultimate-if very far off?union with the Jews in a secular Palestine...

...I cried, it was so beautiful going back to visit...

...Thus it was that Hani Kaddumi arrived in the dusty backwater of Kuwait in August 1948, among the first of several waves of Palestinians who would help shape its development from a desert oasis into an ultramodern boomstate...

...Or, many of them might resume their pre-1967 arrangements, sending their families back to the West Bank and remitting their pay checks...

...Hani Kaddumi had left Jaffa during the fighting there that year with the newly emergent Israelis and was desperate for work...

...I showed them Jerusalem and the Dome of the Rock...

...Swarms of youngsters hang from tiny balconies or play in the dirt outside...

...if they choose to belong to this area and stop using their influence on the United States to act against the Arab world, then I think the whole area would be open to them.' But Abdel-Mohsein Cattan, reflecting a pessimism heard more and more frequently among Palestinians, is convinced there will not be a settlement without another war, and then only if the Israelis do not win...

...In reality there is a regular deficit of roughly 200,000 KDs that the PLO covers through collections from wealthy Palestinian businessmen...

...That was the year a group of Palestinian professionals, including an engineer named Yasir Arafat, founded Al Fatah, now the dominating force is the PLO...

...They put a newly-trained Kuwaiti over me at higher pay,' complained a young Palestinian with six years experience in a government ministry...

...Here the heat is killing us and in the winter the desert is terribly cold...

...Maybe it will take time, we are willing to wait, but a new generation of Israelis will accept the democratic state...

...The father, who left his village in Nablus in 1966 in search of work, earns 50 Kuwaiti dinars (approximately $180) per month as an assistant in a grocery store and pays 26 KDs for rent...

...For the middle class there are many question marks...

...But most will readily admit that the nature of Kuwait's society itself makes it difficult to forget, even if they wish to do so...

...After the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, there was a new wave of Palestinian immigration here-mostly the families of unskilled workers who had been sending their money back to Jordan, where it could buy far more than in Kuwait...

...She, her mother and her seven children now scrape along on contributions from the PLO and Palestinian women's organizations...

...But how could I explain why we weren't allowed to stay...

...A Palestinian housewife in Ahmadi, the somewhat integrated garden suburb for Kuwait Oil Company employes, said, "We have had Kuwaiti neighbors for two years but we never visit each other...

...Without that there will be war...

...Some, especially those who came after the 1967 War, are relatively poor...

...The children sleep on mats rolled down on the floor at night...

...But we have only a very few cards...

...This has prompted some Palestinian professionals to move on to other Gulf States and Iraq where the pay is higher, and in the case of Iraq, the conditions for foreigners more equitable...

...The Kuwaitis have no objections to such activity, so long as it does not pose any challenge to the government, and the PLO today occupies an embassy-like building that flies the Palestinian flag...

...To its credit, this tiny country accepted the flood of newcomers and by 1970 the number of Palestinians in Kuwait had jumped to 147,000, more than double the 1965 level...

...Will the Palestinians of Kuwait forget their dreams...

...This country, which rushed headlong into the 20th century on a tide of oil revenues, is extremely sensitive about its wealth and the role played by outsiders, who make up over half the state's population of 1 million...

...If there is a state Israel will change...

...As more Kuwaitis complete their higher education at home and abroad, though, foreigners are being bumped to make way for them in a deliberate policy of "Kuwaitization...

...Instead, every day they say they want to stay in Sharm el-Sheikh and here and there...

...The woman I spoke to expects that she and her husband will soon be replaced, too...

...Salah asks rhetorically...

...I predicted right after the 1973 War that they would never give up anything, he says...

...It would be a de facto situation...

...For the Palestinian poor in Kuwait, the roots of alienation are economic as well as geographic...

...But there is widespread reluctance to grant explicit recognition of Israel as a quid pro quo for a state...

...So the PLO has set up its own system, using government school buildings in the heat of the afternoon and hiring Palestinian teachers at under one-third the salary of Kuwaiti teachers...

...For the Palestinians of Kuwait do not live in tents...

...Today he is a millionaire...

...Despite this apparent security, however, they remain unassimilated politically and socially...

...Today he is a millionaire contractor and member of the Palestine National Council...

...Many middle-class Palestinians echo civil engineer Ibrahim Salah, who declares as we sit in his comfortable four-room flat in Salmiyeh, "We should take anything we can get...

...Adjusting to the social climate has been quite another matter, and explains why Palestinians generally have mixed feelings about Kuwait...

...Inside one building, entered through a narrow windowless corridor lit by a naked bulb, I visited the two-room flat of a laborer from the West Bank...

...A greater source of resentment is the fact that Kuwaitis receive better wages and benefits than others do on the same jobs...

...And the professor believes it will take another war to bring about the kind of settlement necessary to achieve that goal...

...But the Israelis have to declare they will go back [from the occupied territories...

...They know they'll get a job regardless, so they lag behind...

...Kuwait also became a haven for Palestinian laborers and skilled workers, many of whom had been born in refugee camps...

...The government pays one-third of the cost, about 200,000 KDs, and the parents are supposed to pay the remaining two-thirds...

...They expressed an eagerness to take up Palestinian citizenship, which would give them a new status here, and to visit and perhaps build homes in the new state...

...In answer to these questions, I was told over and over again: "Our children are more nationalistic than we are...

...Others noted that they came originally from areas inside Israel's pre-1967 boundaries, and wondered about the political makeup and economic condition of the new state...

...What they will do about it, of course, remains to be seen...

...Some people admitted openly, some after hedging, that they were too well established in Kuwait to leave...

...Palestinian identity, already heightened by the lack of integration, has been fortified by the formal existence of a Palestinian resistance movement in Kuwait since 1965...

...We would accept the West Bank state because we think it is only a stage toward a unified democratic state...

...They were true pioneers: Kuwait was then mostly desert...

...A large, vigorous Palestinian in his mid-40s, he arrived in Kuwait as a teacher in 1951...

...It could also develop service industries and tourism and electronics industries.' But it is crucial, Rabieh stresses, for the Palestinian to have the security of being able to go home if he gets fed up abroad...

...And there are 200,000 Palestinians in Kuwait, a fifth of the country's population...

...Because of the rapid influx of thousands of school-age youngsters after 1967, Kuwait could not absorb them into its educational system...

...If we lay our cards on the table before they offer anything, what do we have...

...Palestinians clustered heavily in three new suburbs of Kuwait City...

...Every Palestinian will tell you he can never forget his homeland...

...Their basic policy is always to give the Arabs an offer that is not acceptable...

...Those who own land would go back, but the state would have to establish the most advanced educational and medical and consulting centers and export its manpower...

...When I protested my boss said, 'You're still earning more than many Kuwaiti workers.'" A Palestinian teacher told me with mixed pride and annoyance, "The Kuwaiti students have no incentive to work...

...For men like Abdel-Mohsein Cattan the challenge is heady: They look forward to using their wealth of experience to build for their own state the very structures they set up in Kuwait...

...Unwilling to give up, the former employe of a British mandate passport office sent off a cable: "To the ruler of Kuwait: I am offering my services to work in the area of passports and immigration...

...By the '60s-in the wake of the political upheavals in Jordan in the late '50s-Palestinian professionals were pouring in: engineers and architects, doctors and teachers, personnel for the middle levels of the growing Kuwait bureaucracy...

...The more radical Marxist Palestinian splinter groups have no official presence in Kuwait...

...The key factor was the freedom to go and come as they pleased...

...A foreigner cannot own a business without a native partner holding a 51 per cent share...

...And what kind of jobs...

...Initially, the Palestinians had difficulty adjusting to a climate where daily highs of 120 degrees are common during the four summer months...

...Trudy Rubin, an Alicia Patterson Foundation award winner, is on leave from the Christian Science Monitor...

...But a serious housing shortage has resulted in the crowding of two and three families into tiny flats in slums not very much better than the refugee camps of Lebanon...

...But they can't start by saying "we will not give up this and this.' " Similarly, Palestinians here insist that the PLO cannot spell out what it will give up for a state until the Israelis make a concrete offer...

...But our kids have no choice, so they always work hard in class...

...I would go back," says Cattan, "but Palestine couldn't take all its people back...

...It has to be a courageous move by Israel," he says...

...They have grown up knowing that they are something different called Palestinians and they can't forget it...

...Israel should ask the Palestinians what they want, should say it is willing to discuss everything, even a democratic state...

...This wouldn't have to happen by force...

...What if there is no settlement...

...Of course, most of them have been saying it for 15 years...

...you are here to earn money and nothing more...

...The PLO leadership argued with me, but I was right...

...Those who arrived earliest do have longstanding close relationships with Kuwaitis, but most of the others have little social contact with their hosts...

...All of these factors contribute to the Palestinians' sense of frustration at having no permanent home to fall back on should they grow tired of, or feel themselves unwelcome in, Kuwait...

...Arafat is saying it, people are saying it...

...In these circumstances, it is not surprising that there is great interest among the Palestinians of Kuwait in the idea of a state embracing the West Bank and Gaza...

...Kaddumi doubts that a withdrawal from the West Bank forced by the great powers would be looked upon as an act of conciliation...

...The Israelis know they could get a state,' a Palestinian professor told me impatiently...

...Their situation provides an unusual insight into a problem that remains at the heart of the Middle East conflict...

...But its officials are quick to assert that "many' young men leave Kuwait each month for commando training in Lebanon or Syria, and that young Palestinians from Kuwait have participated in several of the suicide raids into Israel...

...What kind of a state-a puppet or a real independent country...

...I would go, but I would make sure that if I could not do something of value there I could come back here...

...Already there is talk here of holding a conference of Palestinian businessmen to discuss development plans...

...Yet far more are well-to-do professionals, company managers and government employes...

...Then let them argue it is impractical...

...I met one commando's widow, originally from a small village in the West Bank, who told me that her husband would disappear periodically for about a month, until one time he didn't return...

...We need a place so we can establish ourselves.'' Salah arrived in Kuwait 10 years ago from Jerusalem...

...As a result, non-Kuwaitis are not granted citizenship and cannot vote or hold office (although changes in these rules are now being debated in the National Assembly...

...I would feel uncomfortable with them, and besides they never invite us...

...Maybe Arafat would agree to nonbelligerency," the professor went on, looking out over the Persian Gulf toward Saudi Arabia...

...He must also pay for his children's schooling...

...Kuwaitis tend to live in separate residential districts-consisting of rows of huge two- and three-story stone villas favored by the rich, or lines of neat government apartments occupied by low- and middle-income earners...

...Maybe there will be no war for 10 years, but they cannot tell us whether or not to fight...

...If the Israelis would declare their willingness to go back to the 1967 borders, there would be peace in two weeks...

...Why have the Palestinians, an industrious, educated minority, been unable to assimilate happily into the Arab country with the highest per capita income in the world...

...Few, indeed, will declare they plan to remain permanently...

...Life here is purely practical...

...Both families lived in hot, overcrowded, slum-like apartments...

...One month later a friend burst into his home with the reply: "You are offered the position of Director of Passports and Immigration in Kuwait...

...I can also teach English, Arabic or mathematics...

...Her neighbor, an elderly man with 12 children, said three of his sons were with the commandos...

...But I don't think there would be a public declaration of recognition of Israel or nonbelligerency if the state were established...

...Nobody plans to stay here forever...

...Yet should a West Bank state be created, probably the first to return would be the thousands of poor Palestinians in Kuwait who do not reap enough economic benefits to make them hesitate...

...The PLO here serves largely as a local service organization...

...With a state the Palestinian outside would feel more secure, it would give him protection.' Professor Mohammed Rabieh, a highly respected Palestinian economist at Kuwait University, agrees...

...It raises money, helps young men find work, and provides for the widows and orphans of dead commandos...

...As one Western diplomat here told me, "The Kuwaitis may control the country, but the Palestinians are the grease that makes it run...

...His wife, Fathyia, is a teacher, and she is unhappy about how much less she earns than her Kuwaiti colleagues...

...But gradually cars, offices and apartments became aircondi-tioned...

...A circular fan hung broken from the ceiling...

...asked one middle-rank Palestinian bureaucrat in the Information Ministry...

...Fathyia, a round, vivacious woman who is placing chicken and stuffed grape leaves on the table joins in: "If the West Bank is a first step we will take it, but without recognition of Israel...

...He rushed to Amman only to find that the recruiter had left the previous day...

...Young men would come alone, join together in groups of 10 to a two-room apartment, and send the bulk of their earnings back to their families...

...He thinks the Palestinian state could help solve the acute shortage of skilled manpower in the Arab world: "The West Bank couldn't absorb all the Palestinians...

...At a higher level, Palestinians become enthusiastic when talking about what they could achieve for themselves...

...At the age of 27, as undersecretary of the Ministry of Electricity and Water, he built up Kuwait's electric power system...

...We need to make it easier for them to go outside...

...They will have to recognize the Palestinian people...

...Other early Palestinian arrivals helped set up the ministries of water, electricity and public works...

...One of them, Salmiyeh, a copy of the fashionable Palestinian area of Hamra in Beirut, is a smart apartment district, with clothing shops named Tulip and Chic Baby and Pretty Girl, record stores, and even a Wimpy Hamburger House...