NO QUIET ON THE WEST BANK
Steif, William
No Quiet on the West Bank How much more blood for a place of rocks and sand? BY WILLIAM STEIF Like any tourist, I stand on a wall of the Old City of Jerusalem. Inside, in Moslem, Christian,...
...We should make the first move, recognizing Israel...
...Look at the hysterical drama of Yamit," the Sinai town Israel gave up reluctantly in returning the final slice of the Sinai to Egypt last spring...
...hundreds of opponents of Village Leagues detained or arrested...
...Virtually all the masons who build the rosy stone apartment houses in metro Jerusalem are Palestinians...
...And not all the firing is random...
...Really thousands," he says, "but you can't depend on my figures...
...Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Palestinians still live in the ruins...
...But we are not permitted to work in government departments unless we have a permit...
...A weakened PLO mainstream makes Israel more securityconscious than ever, and is likely to hasten its takeover of the West Bank...
...This has not prevented Huddein from asserting on Israeli television that the Israeli occupation will end, that the Palestinians should negotiate with the Israelis, and that "self-determination" will come...
...The others, fewer than 20,000, are in settlements, but some are only "weekend settlers" who have found second homes away from Tel Aviv or Jerusalem because of the favorable terms the Israeli government has extended to settlers...
...And he doesn't...
...There is reproach in his eyes, but he is too polite to say anything more about Americans to an American...
...In 1973 there were only black places on the rough roads between the Arab towns and villages...
...Israeli settlers blamed but no proof...
...Begin's tough line is the way to win votes in the Middle East's only democracy...
...I skip from ruined storefront to ruined storefront, trying to stay behind the barricades...
...From a not-too-distant observation post six weeks later, I can see Borj alBaranjneh, Shatila, and Dbayeh on Beirut's southern outskirts...
...People like [former Foreign Minister] Abba Eben are increasingly isolated voices...
...And it is also the Palestinian heartland, no more than eighty-five miles north to south, thirty-five miles east to west, just over 3,300 feet at its highest point, 1,200 feet below sea-level at its lowest point, where the Jordan trickles into the Dead Sea's brine below the Allenby Bridge...
...Israelis forcing the shops off the main street of Zahiriyah to clear the road from Hebron to Beersheba...
...His ambition was to do advanced work in English literature at an American campus—"most of my teachers at the university were Americans...
...The well-lit settlements form patterns against the dark hills...
...Israel has destroyed our last hope and promoted the worst elements of our society...
...Two men sit in the lobby in armchairs, talking...
...A Danish woman, widow of a Palestinian at the Rashidieh camp, has returned to Denmark, Salameh believes...
...Mieh Mieh, 2,500 inhabitants, housing slightly damaged...
...They want that patch of rocks and sand on the Jordan's West Bank as much as the Israelis do...
...it is a metropolis of a million people or more...
...Israeli bans on any kind of construction outside the Palestinian municipalities...
...The Palestinians think it was kind of classy for him to have held on in Beirut for so long...
...Now we are like rats," he says, "trapped...
...restrictions on bringing currency from Jordan...
...Why does he sit in the lobby...
...It is too soft...
...In Israel, the summer war and Reagan's West Bank initiative have had curiously contradictory effects...
...Jerusalem is no longer a shrine town...
...The new danger is the constant rattle of Kalashnikovs and rocket-propelled grenades that the Palestinians—"terrorists" in the Israeli newspapers, "fighters" in the Arab press—fire at random to celebrate their "victory...
...A similar fate befell a smaller camp in Beirut...
...IA Palestinian killed while assembling a bomb...
...I advise against acts of violence...
...The Palestinians see this, too...
...We drive close to Labadi's office...
...The Lebanese Government Hospital, badly damaged, stands at the edge of Ain al-Hilweh...
...But Abdullah Masoul, a twenty-eightyear-old Christian Lebanese police officer, says "there is no danger...
...three of them killed, two seriously wounded...
...I find the sandbags sheltering Labadi's office building and slip into the lobby, now a mess of plaster, glass, and dirt...
...So the Israeli army won't "lend a hand" to move hundreds of thousands of Palestinians out of Lebanon, says Freij...
...He answers his own question: "Nothing...
...Four days after the first Palestinians have left Beirut under the agreement negotiated by U.S...
...It isn't true...
...It is a map of the West Bank, marking the 1949 Israel-Jordan Armistice Line that sliced Jerusalem in half, and the 1967 Ceasefire Line which allowed Israel to repair the city's cleavage...
...The grievances are matched by the defiant reaction...
...During the summer war in Lebanon, most Americans had the impression that the West Bank was "quiet"—that somehow the Israelis had pacified the 800,000 Palestinians living there by ousting the elected mayors of the largest towns and supplanting them with "Village Leagues...
...The Israelis want to stay here and know we don't have the military power to push them out...
...It has been nine years since I made this drive...
...In the hospital's reception room, a woman cradles a baby...
...The stores are closed and many of their goods have disappeared through the gaping holes that were windows...
...There are 106 blue dots in all, twenty more than when I visited Jerusalem in mid-1981...
...We should concentrate on politics...
...Everything gone...
...But he says, "The West Bank cannot absorb 100,000 Israelis," the number Milson—and Begin and Sharon—want to plant throughout Judea and Samaria...
...It shows: f Twelve major stone-throwing incidents...
...H Five small bombs defused by Israeli sappers...
...But his wife and five children have survived, uninjured...
...One says: "Only power makes a difference...
...That would embarrass Israel and put the Americans to the test...
...1982, UNRWA estimated 230,000 registered Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, half of them in thirteen camps...
...The men seventeen to fifty-five have fled north to fight again with the PLO...
...A few houses, partly wrecked, accommodate families...
...roadblocks around Nablus...
...curfews in a number of the West Bank's 450 towns and villages...
...Ain al-Hilweh was demolished by two days of Israeli pinpoint bombing...
...We went everywhere in his Fiat, of which he was inordinately proud...
...It is a colonial policy, aimed at slowly annexing the territory, tidying up the Jordan...
...K Five Molotov cocktails thrown at Israeli army vehicles...
...This is reflected in another way: Israeli statistics show that Palestinians cultivated 2.3 million dunams of land—there are four dunams to an acre—in 1968...
...Almost 35 per cent of the Palestinian labor force works in Israeli industry...
...its floors lie at crazy angles, one atop the other...
...Israel's Jerusalem settlements could be differentiated from the outland...
...He agrees, glumly...
...others wear purple berets...
...I ask...
...It's against Israel's interest" to have them go home to the West Bank...
...H Four small bombs exploded without injuries...
...It is the same driving south from Tiberias through the Jordan Valley at night...
...But they want to go home, like Jews going home to Israel...
...Half that total were in refugee camps...
...Its eyelashes, eyebrows and hair are gone...
...But the father of a PLO official says, "The Village Leagues are small groups in no way representing the Palestinians...
...I am looking for Mahmoud Labadi, PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat's chief spokesman...
...The shots are punctuated by occasional rounds from eighty-onemillimeter mortars whose puffs of black smoke smear the blue Mediterranean sky...
...Abu Nidal and his "Black June" movement, for example, may have only a couple of hundred supporters, but they can still free-lance assassinations and bombings...
...There is no compromise," says one...
...Last year we spent three days together when he guided me through refugee camps—really towns—near Tyre in southern Lebanon, to military headquarters, to Palestinian blanket and boot factories above Damour, to enterprises in Borj alBaranjneh just south of Beirut, to a Palestinian Red Crescent Hospital in Beirut, to the PLO headquarters building across the street...
...We drive south from Hamra, West Beirut's Sunni-dominated business district, past the Soviet embassy, with its broken windows and chipped facade, past the driver's apartment house, its exterior marked by huge black scorches...
...No Israeli party has ever won an outright Knesset majority since Israel was founded in 1948...
...But few Palestinians belong to the eight Village Leagues so far founded...
...The three had held 20,000 to 30,000 Palestinians and were totally destroyed...
...I insist on taking a look at Ain alHilweh, on Sidon's eastern outskirts, though the Israelis aren't eager to have a visitor there...
...Women carry plastic buckets of water from huge metal tanks set up by UNRWA...
...I recognize him and he recognizes me...
...One aspect of Reagan's plan cheers him: "The first thing on the West Bank is for all settlement to stop immediately...
...Then a PLO guard sticks his face into the taxi's back seat...
...They expect more terrorism, for the evacuation of Arafat and 12,000 Palestinians—plus 2,500 Syrians—from Beirut has loosened the PLO's grip on the crazies at the fringe...
...He glances out at Manger Square, the Basilica of the Nativity beyond, and asks a rhetorical question: "If Arafat raises an olive branch tomorrow, what are the Israelis prepared to give...
...Special Envoy Philip Habib, I am poking around the Arab University sector, that southern part of West Beirut which the Palestine Liberation Organization made its headquarters...
...They are the creatures of Professor Menachem Milson, the civilian who guides the Israeli Army's occupation of the West Bank...
...He rattles off grievances: the Palestinian Bir Zeit University closed until October 11...
...He's the only major elected Palestinian mayor whom the Israelis have not ousted...
...Fire from bombs," he says...
...I do not know whether the woman and her child are Palestinian or Lebanese...
...A Western diplomat in Israel has kept a boxscore of West Bank unrest during the weeks of the Lebanese war...
...Milson resigned in September, after Begin's initial refusal to investigate the massacre of Palestinians in two refugee camps near Beirut...
...11 A "weapons factory" uncovered, and twenty-seven weapons found...
...There is no third-floor office any longer," he says...
...11 Around Sidon: Ain al-Hilweh, 25,000 inhabitants, housing totally destroyed...
...He doesn't know how many people died in the summer war...
...All else has to be resolved by negotiation, by taking a precedent from the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty regarding the Sinai...
...I have nothing now...
...It is very hard to get one...
...For weeks he and Labadi lived underground, in this building's basement, under Israeli bombs and shells...
...administrative detention" or arrest for "indefinite periods" without charges...
...I ask myself over and over how many more lives will be ruined in the struggle for the West Bank's rocks and sand...
...11 Israeli settler and Israeli civilian employee of the military administration murdered...
...He stops only to point at a large, devastated building...
...An old man has resumed his occupation: From a teetering table in front of his wrecked shop he sells vegetables...
...The William Steif, a former correspondent for the Scripps-Howard Newspapers, has reported frequently from the Middle East...
...Another exults, "There's always a home here after a war...
...Now Ronald Reagan, the Great Conciliator, wants them to live together in peace...
...Every storefront has been sandbagged—in vain...
...The beating administered by the Israelis has, if anything, strengthened the Palestinians' will...
...We live in a Hamra apartment on loan from a Lebanese," he says...
...The head of the Palestinian business branch, SAMET—who knows...
...He wrote "The Palestinians" in the November 1981 issue of The Progressive...
...My car...
...a soldier injured...
...His parents brought him from Galilee to Lebanon when he was a child...
...My cab driver, a calm, gray-haired Sunni Moslem, maneuvers his old Dodge through the rubble...
...But I will stay here...
...the leagues' leaders are regarded as quislings...
...I see the same evidence on a night-time drive from Jerusalem through Ramallah, Nablus, and Jenin to the Israeli city of Kiryat Shmona at the edge of Galilee...
...Rashidieh, 15,000 inhabitants, 60 per cent of houses destroyed...
...The Village Leagues are the Israeli response to the Camp David call for Palestinian autonomy...
...11 Ten clashes between backers of Village Leagues and Palestinian villagers...
...It can easily absorb 100,000 Palestinians," Freij says...
...those arrested had explosives...
...Begin's Likud bloc would win sixty-six of the Knesset's 120 seats if an election were held immediately, the polls show...
...Not here now, out to lunch," says a mustached man in stylish glasses...
...Just before the Museum Crossing I see a truck-mounted battery of Katyusha rockets...
...I shall never know, but I shall never forget them...
...There is disillusionment, pride in the PLO, uncertainty about the future, long- and short-term...
...Who could object...
...Joseph, a Christian Palestinian who lives on the West Bank and cannot be identified further, sums up: "Tension always has been high, but never more than now...
...The sidewalks are cluttered with twisted metal, bricks, splintered wood, and broken glass...
...Inside, in Moslem, Christian, and Jewish Quarters, there is the usual buzz of life...
...The humanistic European approach doesn't work politically any more...
...He knows there will be much suffering and many more deaths before the Palestinians achieve a homeland, if they ever do...
...Salameh knows they are not...
...in most, Israeli soldiers used tear gas and fired into the air to disperse crowds...
...They dot the hills of the West Bank...
...11 One dead, one seriously wounded in clashes between Village Leagues...
...But he also knows they have not surrendered...
...He talks of the "Arabization" of Israel, the growing Sephardic majority that has overwhelmed the nation's European founders...
...I look again...
...Salameh's somber mood contrasts with the exuberance of the Palestinians I encounter as my taxi threads along the broad corniche to the Museum Crossing and East Beirut...
...What remains will be Arab enclaves...
...Its hilly heights, 2,500 feet above sea-level, and its modern, Israel-provided services make it the most pleasant place to live in the Middle East...
...For years he taught English to Palestinians at a refugee camp supported by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA...
...The fighting in Lebanon has ended, but the war here goes on...
...We should have made a Palestinian peace initiative long ago...
...But the rosy stone apartment houses on the distant hills outside Jerusalem are evidence that it will take more than words from a Los Angeles television studio to bring peace to this part of the world...
...PLO fighters holed up in a hospital wing and it took the Israelis seven days to root them out...
...I have lost everything," he says...
...There is an invisible quarantine around Huddein's house," says Joseph...
...Salameh is a Palestinian intellectual, a tall man with a bush of black hair...
...He is a "moderate" by any standard, a respected merchant, mayor for twelve years, council member for twenty-six years...
...Children play in rubble and garbage...
...Their goal is to set Arab against Arab," he says...
...He wears borrowed tennis shoes, gray trousers, a pink, open-necked shirt...
...II Six instances of "miscellaneous mischief," including several robberies...
...Only old men, women, and children remain...
...But the ten-story building across the street, where SAMET has been headquartered, is destroyed...
...The socialist idealism of the early Zionists is vanishing...
...Tyre's French-speaking Greek Catholic Archbishop George Haddad tells me 600,000...
...My home...
...Heading slowly toward the port for embarkation to Syria and the Sudan are a dozen truckloads of PLO fighters who fire Kalashnikovs and RPGs wildly into the air and wave their green, red, black, and white PLO flags...
...You'll be able to drive from Beirut to Cairo in a day...
...As the cab drives on, it occurs to me that the PLO guard probably was born in Lebanon and has never seen the West Bank...
...They didn't expect much from Egypt...
...f Palestinian found dead...
...I have a travel document issued by the Lebanese government," he says...
...Qaddaffi's advice to Arafat to commit suicide didn't go down well...
...They raise V-forvictory signs, laugh, cheer, sing, and swagger like a victorious army...
...The American West Bank expert says Begin and Sharon have "hammered together a kind of new majority...
...By May...
...So far Israel, through settlement or military "reservation," has appropriated a third of the West Bank's land...
...But within a few years, fifty per cent of the West Bank will be under Israeli laws...
...dumbbell-shaped West Bank, 2,148 square miles, is dotted in blue, and each dot represents an Israeli settlement...
...We must have Eretz Yisrael...
...Some Palestinians wear kefiyas—checked cloths—drawn around their faces...
...He is lucky...
...Freij thinks it "unwise" to comment on specifics of Israel's West Bank occupation...
...That doesn't mean I have to agree with every word the PLO says...
...The elderly Palestinian men pick at a pile of broken masonry under which lie the twisted remains of an auto...
...this year, Palestinian farmers cultivated 1.6 million dunams, a reduction of almost a quarter in fourteen years...
...Like most people in Bethlehem, he is a Christian Palestinian...
...Rashidieh is rubble," he says...
...there is no more compromise in the Palestinians than in Menachem Begin or Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon...
...Goats and sheep have a hard time finding spots for grazing, but there are patches where tomatoes, pineapples, citrus, and apples grow prodigiously if man has taken a hand to the soil...
...It is a land of rocks and sand, mountains to which snow clings in the winter, a valley in which the temperature reaches 130 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer...
...The baby's face and head are bright red...
...Now Israeli soldiers sit atop Huddein's roof, guarding his home...
...An American who knows the West Bank intimately says, "If anything, Arafat's popularity has increased...
...The leagues' most important leader is Mostafa Huddein, of Hebron, once a Jordanian minister...
...Freij, sixty-two, is a short, plump man with a small mustache...
...But the West Bank is part of Eretz Yisrael, the Biblical Judea and Samaria...
...It's not easy to uproot settlements once they're planted...
...North of Jericho dozens of Israeli soldiers search the hills and valley for Palestinian infiltrators...
...Everything else—Gaza Strip, Golan Heights, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt— is peripheral...
...He thinks the Palestinians remaining in Lebanon will "try to rebuild, to repair the damage...
...The Palestinians feel betrayed by the other Arab states—Syria, Jordan, Libya...
...No one knows what will happen...
...Outside is the long view of the distant hills, where thousands of new homes have been built of rosy Jerusalem stone and surrounded with curved streets, landscaping, utilities, supermarkets, and schools...
...It is a place where Jews, Christians, and Moslems have lived together and apart for many centuries, and still do...
...I see the shift in American friends who have settled in Israel...
...It is a laudable goal...
...That is true of most of the younger generation of PLO fighters...
...Salameh has lived in Lebanon most of his life but he is not a citizen...
...Israelis preventing contact with international voluntary agencies except through the Israeli "apparatus...
...He is Assim Salameh, a thirtyeight-year-old Palestinian, one of Labadi's lieutenants...
...He says, "We should be more politically minded...
...There are about 110,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank, but that figure is deceptive...
...He is quiet as we bump over a rutted, rubble-strewn trail through ruins...
...Now Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin plans to add a dozen more blue dots to the map...
...UNRWA in mid-1977 counted 201,171 in a total of 1,706,486 Palestinians scattered from Aleppo in northern Syria to Aqaba in southern Jordan...
...No Palestinian expected Begin and Sharon to bow to Reagan's pressure...
...Elias Freij chats in his Bethlehem office...
...Now, set along hillsides on the smooth-paved roads, there are regular rectangles of light—Israeli settlements, fenced...
...No one knows how many Palestinians are left in Lebanon...
...a 60 per cent cut in government services for Palestinian farmers...
...The Shatila camp, and nearby Sabra, later witnessed the slaughter of hundreds of Palestinians by Christian Phalangists...
...I support the PLO as our official representative...
...The American West Bank expert says the Israelis are arming the Village Leagues and claim to have trained 600 of their members...
...He says, "Even my clothes are gone...
...A friend in Jewish West Jerusalem has given me a map, which I study as I stand on the Old City's wall...
...They are in the Arab part of Greater Jerusalem, a piece of the Israeli thrust onto the West Bank of the Jordan River, east toward Jericho, north toward Ramallah, south toward Bethelem...
...They glare, unsmiling, at strangers in a passing auto...
...He glances at it for a moment, sees I'm an American, hands it back, and says, "Tell Reagan I want to go home...
...It withstood the Israeli onslaught for seventy-two days...
...Anti-American sentiment has never been higher than now"—and Reagan's call for Palestinian "self-government," under the Jordanian aegis, is seen primarily as a means of placating the oil powers—the Saudis, the Kuwaitis, and the Emirates...
...I think Arafat will have a freer time in Tunis than he did in Beirut...
...H Two "terrorist cells" uncovered...
...In the upper left corner is the Mediterranean, the lower right corner the Dead Sea...
...Israeli firepower, and my American taxes, have contributed to this...
...By the end of June, UNRWA reported the fate of five southern Lebanon camps: H Around Tyre: Al-Buss, 5,500 inhabitants, 50 per cent of houses destroyed...
...He attended the Arab University in Beirut, taking a degree in English literature...
...A teacher in Tyre is in an Israeli prison camp...
...I sop up the brilliant summer sunlight and wonder whether President Reagan, or any American, can properly sense the power and passion of the age-old contest for the West Bank...
...The West Bank and Gaza will be ours...
...I have no answer...
...A pedestrian had to look sharp and make a dash to cross the street...
...Israeli aircraft did not achieve what Sharon wanted, to destroy the Palestinian leadership...
...the Tubas police station now a jail because other jails are "overflowing...
...We moved down here"—he gestures to a cubbyhole at the rear...
...He is twenty years old, at most, and wants to see my passport...
...That leaves two Palestinian camps around Tripoli and one in the Bekaa Valley under Syrian-PLO jurisdiction...
...More than 90,000 are suburbanites who live in Greater Jerusalem...
...Women on the cracked sidewalks blow kisses and throw flowers...
...It has been burned by a phosphorous bomb or shell...
...More Israelis than ever—about 45 per cent, according to a Jerusalem Post poll—are willing to cede a part or all of the West Bank to the Palestinians...
...Now the only place to walk is in the street and there is a new danger...
...Israel talks of 300,000...
...Men walking in the street pay no attention, though the celebration already has resulted in a dozen accidental deaths and dozens more wounded...
...one dead, at least twenty-five injured...
...relatively few injuries...
...In June 1981, the area bustled with vendors, shoppers, busy ground-floor stores, traffic...
...The only thing I know for sure is that no more than 1,000 Palestinian fighters died...
...He says: "Israel won a military victory in Lebanon but I think the PLO won a political victory because it got out intact...
...H Five Palestinians believed to be Israeli collaborators attacked...
...The PLO will go on...
...It could sustain an additional million people over the next fifteen years...
...he travels with an escort of Israeli soldiers...
...Mahmoud Labadi...
...It is flat and dusty...
...That was a Lebanese house," he says, "the only one here...
...last night, a sniper killed an Israeli soldier at the Galerie Samaan Crossing from Christian East Beirut to Moslem West Beirut...
...Borj al-Shamali, 11,000 inhabitants, 35 per cent of houses destroyed...
...H Ten major demonstrations to protest the Lebanese invasion, resulting in four deaths, at least thirty-five serious injuries, hundreds of arrests...
...But at the same time, Begin's popularity reached an all-time high—at least before the refugee camp massacre...
...I ask about the people we had visited together in 1981...
...It is dangerous," says an Israeli official, citing murders of two Israeli soldiers forty-eight hours earlier...
Vol. 46 • November 1982 • No. 11
