The Palestinians
Steif, William
The Palestinians They are the dynamite that threatens to blow up the Middle East and the glue that holds it together BY WILLIAM STEIF | Rashidieh is a Palestinian refugee camp, established by...
...Ala says "our profit is to strengthen their relationships with our people...
...His parents also fled Galilee in 1948...
...The price and conditions were good...
...Ala is chairman and general manager of SAMED, the Palestine Martyrs Works Society...
...There were a couple of Palestinian camps and some small villages between the sea and the mountains...
...There are 400,000-plus in Lebanon, 300,000 in Kuwait, several hundred thousand more scattered among 150 million other Arabs, from Morocco to Iraq...
...He wears a Boy Scouts of America shirt he bought from a secondhand dealer...
...Three neighbors were killed...
...Its world view is the United States vs...
...On the average, six couples a week marry in Rashidieh...
...A French-speaking Moroccan puts it to me another way in Baghdad: "The Iraqis buy the materials of the West but they cannot buy its realism...
...Yet the American rage knows no bounds...
...Another committee member, Halid Ibn Walid, speaks up...
...I was around the corner drinking water...
...Two shell-scarred churches remain, but they are closed...
...I came by bus, I leave by bus...
...He answers with a question: "Does Japan have petrol or raw materials...
...More than 10,000 Palestinian men, women, and children live in Rashidieh...
...Waiting for an airplane at Cairo, I strike up a conversation with a man who turns out to be a Palestinian...
...The green paper's organization chart shows eight "resistance organizations," ten unions, a 301-member parliament, a sixty-member central council, a fifteen-member cabinet...
...Abbass fondles a daughter and says, "There is no difference between girls and boys...
...But mine was an exterior view, as if the Arabs were exotic animals in a zoo...
...There must be some, but they are rare...
...Angry as hell...
...They yearn for the glories that Islam brought—Haroun Al-Rashid, the zero, measuring the Earth's surface six centuries before Europeans discovered the Earth was not flat—and they yearn for the West's Twentieth Century materialism...
...See how we live," he says...
...Now we do...
...The first influx of Palestinians, after the 1948 establishment of Israel, was not strong enough to destabilize that government...
...American sentiment is still tied to righting that injustice, though thirty-six years have passed since the end of World War II, thirty-three years since Israel's birth...
...Fatah is by far the most representative of the eight...
...YuSEF Zamzam sits with several other members of Rashidieh's Revolutionary Popular Committee in the small building that serves as the town's headquarters...
...South Yemen gropes for a Marxism that fails it dismally...
...Down the hill is a blanket factory, where workers earn $250 to $275 a month...
...Don't you understand...
...A man, now thirty-five, is in charge of the handicapped workshop...
...Shell scars are all over the whitewashed two-room homes...
...It is no answer but it is a clue to the Middle East's intricacies...
...But the Reagan Administration is stuck in the time of the Berlin blockade...
...So the public speeches and private declarations goad all Arabs, including the Palestinians...
...No, I wouldn't...
...But it wasn't the same...
...In seven different Arab countries, and in Israel, I encounter Palestinians...
...There are traffic lights in downtown Beirut but none works...
...The green-bereted Syrians stay north of the river...
...I remember the phrase while visiting the Palestinians' Red Crescent Hospital in Beirut...
...I am very touchy about long-range shelling...
...Do you understand...
...As he talks, his fingers move over prayer beads...
...the fourth, a woman of thirty, was "driven mad," he says...
...Yusef Zamzam, who represents the Revolutionary Popular Committee, a kind of town council, explains: "In the 1970s we didn't have enough bomb shelters...
...The manager is pushing to raise output to clean up a backlog of orders...
...He persuaded his parents to move to Damour, forty-five miles up the Lebanese coast, where he thought they would be safe...
...It is a flowchart headed, "PLO Structure...
...Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin "intends to destroy the Palestinian people," says Walid...
...But at heart the Palestinians—and Arabs generally—are romantics, trapped between the Seventh Century precepts of Islam and the Twentieth Century precepts of the West...
...The Reagan Administration aims at the Soviets through Rapid Deployment Forces, F-16s and F-15s for Israel, AWACS for Saudi Arabia...
...Syria's minority Alawites rule a restless Sunni majority who think the Alawites are opportunistic heretics...
...But it doesn't mean the end of the fighter...
...Skilled Palestinian farmers work to help Third World peoples feed themselves...
...A short Arab with a small blue birthmark on his cheek told me so...
...There would be a stabilizing effect throughout the Arab world...
...Below his box is the military department— Palestine Liberation Army, Forces of Resistance Organizations, militia forces...
...At the Mediterranean's edge I look to my left and see the headland that marks the border between Lebanon and Israel...
...Some families have left permanently, but most return again and again...
...Some are really fronts for other Arab countries...
...They looked at me as if I was majnoun—crazy...
...I roamed all over the Kuwaiti border complex...
...We sit in his paneled office in a high-rise Beirut building full of PLO offices...
...Peddlers and beggars station themselves outside Chtaura, on the main road to Damascus, because they know traffic always slows to rubberneck at the Syrian-manned Soviet missiles atop a nearby hillock...
...The Palestinians came to Lebanon as an under-class, and they made common cause with the indigenous under-class, the Shiite peasants of the Bekaa Valley, the narrow, prodigiously fertile strip of land behind the coastal mountains where grapes, tomatoes, figs, and hashish grow in equal profusion...
...The politics of oil will play a part, but so will the American feeling that the debt has been paid, the guilt assuaged...
...I am reminded of a Palestinian who told me, "We could stop the flow of Saudi oil like this"—snap of fingers...
...An hour passed and I became increasingly choleric...
...When an Arab tells you he'll meet you in fifteen minutes you know it may be fifty minutes or two hours or tomorrow...
...Today, the area between the sea and the mountains is one vast suburb, composed of Palestinian settlements and Shiite towns...
...Jordan's "plucky little king"—the cliche British journalists apply to Hussein—balances between his Palestinians and older, smaller Moslem interest groups...
...Bokra (tomorrow) is a key word in the Arabic vocabulary...
...But if Americans still have the same position toward the Palestinians and continue to support Israel against us, in the future it will be your turn...
...Small groceries sell melons and cigarettes...
...Eight boxes trail beneath the cabinet: political department, health department, education department, and so on...
...An Egyptian scholar, Ali Hillal Des-souki, remarks on "the failure of modern Arabic thought to produce a meaningful synthesis between Islam, the religion of the masses and a major source of their value system, and modernity, manifested in western science and modern culture...
...What will happen if no people buy your mass production...
...I tell you this faithfully and honestly...
...We are sure we will overcome...
...Would an independent Palestine be socialist...
...The temperature was 130 degrees fahrenheit...
...Just treat us even-handedly," he says, "treat us fifty-fifty...
...He smiled placidly...
...The Zionist companies and lobbyists stretch their arms to all places...
...I began looking for the cabbie...
...I was shot in the left leg, the Israelis amputated the right leg," he says—and then the left leg...
...It has three medical clinics, seven sports clubs, five theater groups, and a dozen poets and painters...
...Americans, more than any other people, are the key to Middle East stability...
...A third is agricultural, with projects in Syria, the Sudan, Saudia Arabia, Uganda, Congo-Brazzaville, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, "and soon Madagascar...
...I'm pay for more than I should to go to Kuwait City and you're fooling around here"—I thought he had some devious scheme going...
...He is "with the PFLP," the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, smaller, more leftist, and more activist than Fatah, the Palestine National Liberation Movement that enlists most Palestinians...
...I recall the same phenomenon last year in Dubai: The highest official I met in the United Arab Emirates was a Palestinian...
...The Middle East's biggest bank is Palestinian...
...Arafat is cabinet chairman...
...that, in turn, brought bigger guns to the Palestinians from the Soviet surrogate, Libya, and more money from the rich Arab states...
...Their natural leaders and allies were the Sunni Palestinians, who also had a grievance...
...There are no city services, no planning, no rules, no government...
...It is another city, quite different from Sunni West Beirut or Christian East Beirut...
...The phrase echoes through my mind as my car plods at the end of a Palestinian funeral procession in Beirut...
...He says, "Most of the Palestinian people are farmers...
...If the people want socialism, that is okay...
...Thousands more are scattered through the area...
...the Soviet Union, period...
...The manager presents me with a box...
...He adds, "There are only civilians here...
...Or a mixed economy...
...If someone goes up to get water or to urinate, he can be killed...
...And the knowledge that there is another outstanding debt—to the Palestinians...
...We rarely have crimes...
...That means dealing with the PLO, as we've already done indirectly several times...
...Saudi Arabia is bound to Islamic fundamentalism...
...I grabbed my bag and typewriter and left...
...A second SAMED sector produces propaganda films...
...As Palestinians, we don't like to make war, we are lovers of peace...
...Both can carry a gun for Palestine...
...It is the wrong target at the wrong time, and there are Israelis who say this, too, though Washington will not listen...
...More than any other people, Americans are the key to Middle East stability...
...That applies all over the Arab world...
...We sought generational justice, a generation after the horrid injustice...
...Egypt tries to restrain an upsurge of Islamic fundamentalism without alienating four million Coptic Christians...
...We lived peacefully with Jews before 1948 and there was no trouble...
...Zamzam smiles slightly and asks, "You wouldn't like that every other day for months on end, would you...
...SaMED, says Ala, operates forty-two workshops or factories "in all ten Palestinian camps" in Lebanon...
...I have recently undergone two days of shelling on Beirut's Christian east side...
...I'm furious...
...The factories are in place and operating...
...Each has its own life...
...Israeli jets," says Ala...
...Then I looked closely...
...It was started in 1970 "mainly to take care of the children of martyrs, the 27,000 Palestinians who have been killed since we began our armed struggle," says Ala...
...The Reagan Administration has picked the wrong target for American anger in the Middle East...
...Rashidieh is closest to the Israeli border and closest to the thin United Nations forces trying to keep Haddad's units away from the Palestinians...
...It may mean committing Americans troops to keeping peace between Israelis and Palestinians...
...He adds: "As PLO fighters we have gone many times to the South...
...Suppose the Zionist has a company of 1,000 workers, they all vote for the Zionist candidate...
...We were paid in hard currency...
...How much should an American journalist believe from these lovers of peace...
...There are paved streets, chickens, old cars, irrigation canals for nearby vegetable fields, occasional goats, and mosques...
...About 70.000- Palestinians live in the four camps...
...United Nations officials moved most of the Palestinian Christians away in the late 1950s...
...In 1973, the seaside road from Beirut Airport to the city's outskirts ran through eight miles of sandy waste...
...Through our committee we enlighten our people about Begin's plan...
...But that is not the target of the Reagan policy-makers, though every American embassy I have visited in the Middle East recommends it (in Washington the "Arabists" are written off easily...
...Working in agriculture and fishing doesn't provide enough income, so the PLO helps support our schooling and gives money to those in need...
...We walk past the ruined house to an adjacent hut...
...Despite a Shiite majority, Iraq is set on a secular, Sunni path...
...American help is the cause of all that happens to us...
...We know the imperialist and Zionist information departments will try to distort this...
...The cabbie directed me to the Kuwaiti immigration station and said he had a little other business...
...It is raw and tough...
...I found a familiar face and shouted angrily: "Where have you been...
...A merchant in the souk at Damascus pulls me to the back of his shop to chat about his homeland, "Occupied Palestine...
...Next door, a smaller shop produces gifts...
...On both sides of the seaside road, almost to the airport, there are small enterprises— garages, fruit-and-vegetable stands, shops, restaurants, tailors, motels...
...There is no sign of Lebanese authority anywhere...
...The town has terrorists, too, young fanatics working covertly because the PLO is unable to discipline them...
...They yearn for those pressures...
...It certainly means telling the Israelis that Americans have expunged their guilt, and telling the Israelis they must make room for the Palestinians...
...But it's useless to talk about it too much...
...The second Palestinian influx, after Israel took the West Bank of the Jordan River in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and after Jordan's King Hussein overcame his Palestinian challengers in 1970...
...He has a scraggly beard, broken teeth, and a disoriented look...
...That is a very simple doctrine...
...Next to me sat the short Arab with the blue birthmark...
...Abu Khaldoon is the police chief, but he says "the Palestinian Armed Resistance Police are different from other police...
...I ask Ala how he would create an independent Palestinian economy...
...Like every other Arab, he knows the Israelis are far better armed and equipped than the Arabs, thanks to the United States...
...He thinks he will be able to force them to accept a Camp David agreement...
...The Arabs will continue to smile blandly at us as we blunder down our warlike path, but they will believe us less and less...
...They work in the fields around here"—Lebanese-owned fields lush with bananas, citrus, and truck crops...
...But we have five embroidery and sewing workshops and two dancing teams...
...But you Americans are pushing us into the arms of the Soviets," Jordan's Crown Prince Hassan tells me...
...That is our legacy of guilt from the Holocaust...
...When it came to political commitment in the Arab-Israeli conflict, I and most others of my generation—I served in World War II—felt emotionally tied to the Israelis...
...There is no internal discipline within the PLO for them...
...NUMERICALLY, the Palestinians are insignificant...
...He is deeply perturbed by the Israeli bombing of Iraq's nuclear reactor and the Israeli jet strikes on Beirut that killed hundreds...
...An hour and a half passed and I was back in the Kuwaiti border station, searching every face, seeking a glimmer of recognition...
...he pays nothing...
...He is bright and funny, but now he is not being funny...
...The continuous Israeli bombing has hindered our development...
...Thoughtful Israelis know and say this already...
...Since the 1975-76 Lebanese Civil War the government has been external, imposed by arms...
...There are no services, no planning, no government— no sign of Lebanese authority AhMED Abu Ala hands me a green sheet of paper...
...The seven, leaving aside Fatah, are usually responsible for the terrorist acts that outrage Menachem Begin, Israel, and the West...
...I asked when the bus would come...
...You leave us no choice," Hassan says...
...All have been started and are run by the Palestinians and Lebanese Shiites who live nearby...
...In Kuwait, the cabbie is a Palestinian and so is the newspaper executive...
...But the Palestinians are a cause and every Arab leader needs a cause, a political rallying point, a focus for public aspirations that have few roots in reality...
...It is a town...
...We waited...
...I don't know...
...He lived with his mother and father in a two-room brick house they had built in Rashidieh...
...Director Amin Issa, thirty, works two shifts to keep up with orders...
...Some products are exported to Africa and to Arab nations and some go elsewhere...
...Lovers of peace...
...The Zionists may destroy America because the Zionists control the economy of America, and also the British and German economies...
...She gives no sign of recognition...
...Would I like a ride to Kuwait City...
...Abbass leads the way to his bomb shelter...
...The harvest of bitterness, toward Israel and the United States, is reflected everywhere...
...He replied: "But I'm waiting to get my passport back...
...AmONG the sandbags at Al Buss, another Palestinian camp near Tyre, Abu Saleh discusses his people's problems...
...He gestures to cement steps leading underground and says, "Since March of 1978 we have been shelled 450 times...
...It is in the heartland of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), seven miles from the Israeli border, four miles from Major Saad Haddad's pro-Israeli Lebanese forces, two miles from the ancient coastal city of Tyre...
...Instead, Palestinians specifically, and Arabs generally, tend to empathize with the capitalist West...
...At last...
...Ali sucks tea through his broken teeth and says, "Death doesn't matter...
...I make a quick calculation: I have one chance in two not to be shelled this day...
...To them the terms "Palestinian" and "PLO" connote terrorism, and they correlate terrorism with the Soviets...
...Another SAMED sector imports machinery and raw materials to keep PLO factories going...
...The Palestinians' overwhelming piesence pushed the Lebanese Christians irto organizing their military forces...
...I knew it was not true...
...tipped Lebanon into anarchy...
...The cause serves to hold together the idea of an Arab Nation but it is unlikely that there ever will be an Arab Nation and it is certain that no modern Arab country's leader wants one...
...It is crawling with ants...
...He tells me he was captured "in a military operation in the occupied lands" at Nablus in 1969...
...I haven't any car keys," he said...
...That's the way it is ail over Lebanon today...
...Sonic booms interrupt us...
...There, in darkness, a figure is stretched on a mat, babbling...
...He, too, was born in Rashidieh...
...He replies, "It is too early to say...
...Some certainly have sent rockets into the Israeli border town of Kiryat Shmona, embarked on commando raids into Israel, perhaps bombed a European synagogue...
...He is deputy to the commander of the joint forces in the South, a middle-aged man who grew up in Haifa, "just down the coast...
...I have never been uglier than I was to a short Arab man with a small blue birthmark on his right cheek...
...A month earlier, a shell destroyed their home...
...There is as much—maybe more—terrorism on the Israeli side of the Lebanese border as there is in Rashidieh and the other Palestinian camps...
...On a hill outside Damour, a shoe factory produces 180 pairs of military boots daily, using Hungarian machines...
...They are in the middle echelons of the Saudi government at Riyadh and Jeddah...
...I didn't know the cabbie's name but the car was where he'd parked it...
...At Borj Al-Barajenieh, a Palestinian camp on Beirut's outskirts, furniture is being made in a large factory...
...We chatted for twenty minutes and then he did a thing so typically Arab I think of it each time I read Menachem Begin's latest verbal assault on Arabs...
...IN five trips through the Arab world since 1973, I have never met an Arab Marxist...
...Since the Israeli commando raid on Tyre in March 1978, Israeli shells and bombs, mainly supplied by the United States, have killed 175 Rashidieh residents, wounded more than 1,000 others, and destroyed 1,200 houses...
...The dead man died in an Israeli air raid...
...A Lebanese friend, a Moslem, tells me: "There is what the Arabs say publicly, there is what they tell you in private, and then there is what they really think...
...The most successful businessman I meet in Amman is a Palestinian...
...He was short and said he was a cabbie...
...The only visible signs of law and order, south of the Litani River, are the Palestinians' red berets...
...I demanded, thinking I might remove my bag and typewriter from the locked cab...
...Yusef Ismael Ali, twenty-eight, walks onto the patio and sits down...
...I know...
...No one stops him...
...To develop ourselves," he says, "we Palestinians move to Tyre, to Sidon, to Beirut...
...That means we must recognize Arabs as people, not exotic desert fauna i naa oeen traveling ior two montns ana that day had come more than 350 miles from Baghdad to Basra to Abdali in a taxi that lacked air-conditioning...
...I don't think Americans will continue to lug their guilt around much longer...
...So is the biggest insurance company, the biggest contracting firm, the biggest accounting firm...
...The Palestinians They are the dynamite that threatens to blow up the Middle East and the glue that holds it together BY WILLIAM STEIF | Rashidieh is a Palestinian refugee camp, established by the United Nations more than thirty years ago...
...His parents fled Haifa in 1948, when he was a child...
...The workshops employ 4,500 workers and provide "ready-made clothes for all civilians and the military, furniture, plastics, blankets, civilian shoes and military boots, canned foods, detergents and soaps, bakery goods, textiles...
...the Christians' effort at regaining their former dominance brought in the Syrian military, whose presence brought Israeli aid to the Christians...
...SAMED falls under the finance department...
...A week ago both were killed in an Israeli air raid...
...He bought two cartons of cold orange juice and handed me one, with a straw...
...There is a great similarity between the Israelis and Hitler's Nazis," he says...
...His parents came from Galilee when Israel was created in 1948...
...He is a handsome man with a black beard who was born in Rashidieh twenty-eight years ago...
...It is a matter of commerce, of trading...
...Language is not enough for nationhood...
...About 85 per cent of all Palestinians subscribe to it, and it is Arafat's group...
...SAMED is the Arabic word for "steadfast...
...Divergent interests, systems, and outlooks clash with the idea of Arab Nationhood...
...Our basic problem here in Lebanon is economic...
...That means American recognition of Palestinian rights, and American recognition that Arabs are people, not exotic desert fauna...
...Menachem Begin and Ronald Reagan and the generals in the Pentagon do not see this...
...I was hot, thirsty, and grateful...
...It establishes hospitals, clinics, businesses, factories...
...There are a million-plus in Israel, 1.5 million in Jordan, the only Arab country that has granted them citizenship...
...There are dozens of ruined houses, abandoned, on the path to the beach...
...The rest—PFLP, Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), Saiqa, the Arab Liberation Front (ALF), the Popular Front-General Command, the Palestine Liberation Front (PLF), and the Palestine Popular Struggle Front—are all splinters...
...The town has running water, electricity, seven kindergartens, six grade schools, and a high school...
...The PLO supplies literature and helps us rebuild our houses...
...The patio is tiny but pleasant, overhung by a grape arbor that provides shade from the hot Mediterranean sun...
...Indeed, the Israelis may find they have more in common with the Palestinians than Menachem Begin thinks...
...Kuwait tries to cope with a population that is 41 per cent foreign...
...In the end they will fail...
...I stopped Arabs and asked if they knew where the taxi's driver was...
...The green paper contains one anomaly if the PLO is to be considered a government-in-exile: The eight resistance organizations are outside Arafat's immediate jurisdiction...
...Have you the car keys...
...Yet Israel alone, without America, is nothing...
...Upstairs, a small factory churns out halevah, a sweet candy based on sesame seeds...
...The proof is that the election of any American President is affected by votes of the Zionists...
...I for Inshallah (God willing), B for bokra, M for malesh (never mind...
...I fought through a mob to get my passport stamped, then went to a bench to await a bus to the Kuwaiti side, muttering...
...He thinks by striking here continuously he can create a split between the Palestinian and Lebanese joint forces...
...And at that instant I saw my cabbie strolling toward his car...
...Lovers of peace...
...He has four children, aged one to seven...
...Above Ala is a painting of Yasser Arafat, to one side a photo of Arafat with Ho Chi Minh...
...The American media usually describe Rashidieh as a "terrorist camp," but it is not a camp at all...
...He smiled again, enraging me further...
...We teach them to use the Kalashnikov-47 in case of attack from the sea...
...The Arabs exude charm, but they cannot keep an appointment on time...
...There are separate handicraft shops for women, which concentrate on "traditional dress" and permit women to work at home...
...He is a stocky man in a blue blazer that betrays his British education...
...My passport was stamped and returned in fifteen minutes...
...Now Ali has returned, alone...
...There used to be a Lebanese government, precariously balanced between a Christian president and a Moslem prime minister...
...As an American," he says, "you don't have to submit to the rule of Zionists who are directing the American people to this way of war...
...And I did, from Taiz in North Yemen to Tangier in Morocco, from Sharjah in the Emirates to Samarra in Iraq...
...It was the short Arab with the blue birthmark, the man who'd treated me so kindly...
...Ala cites figures: 25,000 engineers, 27,000 physicians, more than 120,000 technicians in various fields...
...Israel caused the emigration of my parents," he says, "and followed them to Lebanon to kill them...
...The Palestinians may be the best-educated, most highly skilled Arab population...
...That doesn't mean big numbers—there may only be a few—but the very rich and the capitalists who control the American economy turn their wealth to supporting the Zionists...
...Garbage piles up willy-nilly...
...The Palestinians are living within history and will free the world of the Zionists...
...And in Lebanon, more than anywhere else, the presence of the Palestinians is felt...
...Along the road outside Beirut, it is raw and tough...
...OU are now entering the IBM countries,' said an old friend who met me at Beirut Airport in 1973...
...I fled, in cowardice, and tried to vent my anger on my cabbie...
...Five minutes," he said pleasantly...
...We met on the Iraqi side of the IraqKuwait border station at Abdali near the end of Ramadan...
...Our police are involved in health, culture, political, social, and information activities...
...If they want capitalism, that is okay...
...Crossing from Jordan to Israel, the first person I talk to is a Palestinian woman who works in Jerusalem and tells me, acerbically, how the Israelis have just strip-searched her...
...A Cairo University-trained teacher sits in his high-ceilinged apartment at Tyre and blames "the American media, which everyone knows is Zionist-controlled," for the Palestinians' plight...
...Just remember those three Arabic words and you'll get along fine...
...I'm furious...
...Another man approached...
...But the Palestinians are the glue that holds together the fragile idea of the Arab Nation...
...I had been an Ugly American, picking the wrong target for my anger...
...Rashidieh's cement work catches my attention...
...Now a half-dozen young Palestinians are sending him to the cemetery by firing round after round into the air...
...Anarchic Lebanon is split into fiefdoms, and the countries of the Mah-greb—Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco—differ as widely as the more easterly nations...
...We agreed to meet at the border station in a few minutes...
...The repellent sweet symbolizes the Palestinian cause...
...The Arabs were exquisitely courteous...
...The pressures on the Israelis from the United States (and Western Europe) will be too much for Israel to withstand, I think...
...We're wasting time...
...No problems, aside from heat, dust, and discomfort...
...In Baghdad, the bank teller is a Palestinian, and so is the restaurant manager at Basra on the Shatt Al-Arab...
...0 William Steif, a correspondent for the Scripps-Howard Newspapers, returned recently from his latest tour of the Middle East...
...I think change will come, if not with the Reagan gerontocracy then surely with the first American President who was a child in World War II...
...Down a dozen concrete steps are a narrow slab and blankets...
...I took his arm and dragged him to the passport counter, demanding his passport...
...HaSSAN Abbass asks his wife to bring tea as his daughters, four and one and a half, play at his knees on the patio of his two-room home...
...He has been to grade school and high school in Rashidieh and now works in the nearby fields—when he works, for Abbass is a part-time terrorist...
...We exported 100,000 shirts to the Soviet Union," says Ala...
...For every Arab the first priority is to reach some sort of solution to the Palestinian problem...
...It is an easy walk...
...For a generation the Christian-Sunni Moslem power structure in Beirut kept the lid on the Shiite peasants, but in the 1970s the Shiites migrated to the coastal cities seeking better lives...
...I shouted...
...Soon, soon," said the official, calling out waiting Arabs' names...
...He wants to go home some day...
...If an entrepreneur on the seaside road wants power to run a generator or an air-conditioner, he simply taps into the power line along the road...
...Again, I pulled the man with me...
...I will go back to Palestine, to Galilee where my parents were born...
...It is easy to do...
...Four Palestinian camps are grouped around Tyre, a city of about 50,000 people whose classical ruins continue to sustain direct hits from Israeli artillery...
...Six weeks earlier, a shell landed squarely on the two-room house next to Abbass's...
...We're not against Jews, we're against Zionists who want to exploit as much as possible from the Middle East and its wealth...
Vol. 45 • November 1981 • No. 11
