The Christian Science Monitor Apr 26, 1:23 PM EDT
Palestinian plight is flip side of Israel's independence joy
By KARIN LAUB Associated Press Writer
JALAZOUN REFUGEE CAMP, West Bank (AP) -- Mohammed Shaikha was
9 when the carefree rhythm of his village childhood - going to
third grade, picking olives, playing hide-and-seek - was
abruptly cut short.
Uprooted during the 1948 war over Israel's creation, he's now
a wrinkled old man. He has spent a lifetime in this cramped
refugee camp, and Israel's 60th independence day, to be
celebrated with fanfare on May 8, fills him with pain.
"For 60 years, Israel has been sitting on my heart. It kicked
me out of my home, my nation, and deprived me of many
things," he said.
And each Israeli birthday makes it harder for 70-year-old
Shaikha and his elderly gin rummy partners in the camp's
coffee house to cling to dreams of going back to Beit Nabala,
one village among hundreds leveled to make way for the influx
of Jewish immigrants into the newborn Jewish state.
Israel's joy over independence after two millennia of Jewish
exile has been the Palestinians' "naqba" - their catastrophe.
The state they were to have in a partitioned Holy land was
made stillborn by the 1948 war. The 1967 war that brought the
West Bank and Gaza under Israeli rule doubled the catastrophe.
And the negotiations that are meant to bring about a
Palestinian state are bedeviled by constant violence and
distrust.
Perhaps even more dispiriting for the Palestinians is the
acrimonious ideological battle between Hamas' Islam radicalism
and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' embrace of Western
ideas.
This year, the two sides couldn't even agree on joint "naqba"
commemorations. Instead, on May 15, the date Palestinians mark
the "naqba," Abbas' Fatah movement will sound sirens in public
squares and hold large rallies, while Hamas plans a separate
event.
A poll finds one-third of the young would emigrate if they
could, weakening the social bonds that have held Palestinian
society together.
The dreamed-of Palestinian state was always an unwieldy
notion, uniting the West Bank and Gaza with Israel in between.
Now the divide is more stark.
After last year's civil war, Hamas militants run Gaza, while
Fatah moderates control the West Bank, separated by an Israeli
travel ban and a Western boycott of Hamas.
As Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert pursue a peace
deal, negotiations move at glacial pace and the idea of a
Palestinian state alongside Israel looks ever more distant.
Gaza's 1.4 million people are getting poorer and more
militant, three-quarters living on $2 a day and scrambling for
such basics as cement, winter shoes and painkillers. So acute
is an Israeli-induced fuel shortage that donkey carts are
back.
The West has placed its hopes for peace in the West Bank,
where Abbas rules, and is injecting massive foreign aid that
has restored a limited sense of stability after eight years of
fighting with Israel.
Israeli troops still carry out nightly raids in the West Bank
in search of wanted militants and enforce stifling travel
restrictions. But civil servants - the largest group in the
labor force - get paid regularly, West Bank cafes are crowded
on weekends, a hunger for education is packing universities,
and there's a small building boom.
It all testifies to a determination, by a generation raised
under Israeli occupation, to keep going.
This perseverance takes many shapes.
Iyad Hmeidan, a former Fatah sup****ter, has turned to religion
and Hamas in his disappointment over the broken promise of
statehood. "In this period, I rely on God," said Hmeidan, a
36-year-old accountant and grandson of a refugee from Jaffa
near Tel Aviv. "Hamas relies on religion, the words of God."
In the West Bank, another Fatah activist disillusioned with
peace efforts has started a microcredit bank, making grants
and loans to small businesses, including 12 village women who
produce olive oil soap.
"This is the only way to try and create some changes for the
people ... and some hope," said the 52-year-old banker, Sami
Saidi.
As Israel celebrates its achievements - robust economy,
democracy and army - Palestinians look back on a history of
failures. "We were the losers over the years ... and we will
keep losing," said Luay Shabaneh, head of the Palestinian
Central Bureau of Statistics.
The refugees and their descendants number 4.5 million today,
or nearly half the world's 9.3 million Palestinians. Few
refugees can realistically expect to go home again, because
Israelis fear being swamped by a mass repatriation.
That makes the Palestinian predicament especially harsh, said
Karen Abu Zayd, commissioner of the U.N. Relief and Works
Agency which helps the Palestinian refugees.
Refugees can usually expect to go home once the crisis dies
down, but here, she said, "we don't know when they'll go home.
.... there is a lot more hopelessness."
About one-third of the refugees and their offspring live in 58
camps, some of them sprawling shantytowns, in the West Bank,
Gaza, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan.
Mohammed Shaikha, his parents and five siblings settled in
Jalazoun north of the West Bank town of Ramallah in the early
1950s, living first in a tent, then a two-room shack. He
married, had eight children and worked in the laundry of a
U.N. teachers' college. In 1980, he built a bigger house.
While he clings to the mantra of return to Beit Nabala, his
native village, his son Wajih, 42, has put down deep roots in
Jalazoun, now home to 13,000 people squeezed into 65 acres of
drab box-shaped houses.
He bought a supermarket and is building two large homes with
money earned in 11 years as a supermarket clerk and limousine
driver in Paterson, N.J. He says he returned to Jalazoun for a
sense of community that was lacking in Paterson.
Wajih's daughter Mais, 18, misses Paterson, but considers
Jalazoun home, and said she failed to establish an emotional
connection to Beit Nabala during a roots trip with her dad a
few years ago.
The 1948 war had largely separated Israelis and Palestinians,
except for some 150,000 Palestinians who stayed put and became
Israeli citizens. With Israel's capture of the West Bank, Gaza
and east Jerusalem in the 1967 Mideast War, the two peoples
became painfully entangled again.
While the Palestinians under Yasser Arafat took to bombings
and hijackings to make the world notice their existence,
Israeli Jews poured into the West Bank as settlers claiming
the land as their biblical birthright. A six-year Palestinian
uprising ended when Arafat negotiated an interim peace deal
with Israel, but it fell apart when negotiations for a final
treaty reached critical mass and a fresh Palestinian uprising
broke out, this time using guns and suicide bombers. Nearly
5,000 Palestinians and more than 1,000 Israelis have been
killed in the past eight years.
Today, Arafat's ****trait is the centerpiece of the public
square in Jalazoun, but Israeli control of Palestinian lives
is ubiquitous.
Israel's separation barrier and roadblocks, built to stop
suicide bombers, now carves up the territory into separate
regions for Palestinians and protects the Jewish settlers.
Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005, but controls access from
land, air and sea, and, along with Egypt, imposed a near-total
blockade after the violent Hamas takeover last June.
The symbols of occupation - settlements, army bases,
roadblocks - are visible across the West Bank. Jalazoun's
immediate neighbors are a large army base and the settlement
of Beit El, whose red-roofed houses tower above the camp. In
all, some 450,000 Israelis have settled in war-won east
Jerusalem and the West Bank in the past four decades.
Today, many of those who fought Israel in the two uprisings
are dead, in prison or building new lives.
Ex-gunman Emad al-Shani, 39, accepted Israel's offer of
amnesty for members of the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, a Fatah
offshoot. The father of five now sells bread in the West Bank
city of Nablus, and after years on the run enjoys sleeping in
his own bed. "I finished my role and returned to my normal
life," he said.
Like al-Shani, many focus on their private life.
Natalie Zananiri, a 21-year-old information technology student
at Bethlehem University and a part-time beautician, hopes to
land a job abroad with a large cor****ation after graduation.
She dismisses the peace talks as "nonsense" and doubts she'll
see a state in her lifetime.
Others say Israelis and Palestinians can no longer be
untangled and are doomed to share one state. Such a view is
especially common among disappointed Palestinian peace
activists, such as Firas Husseini, scion of a prominent
Palestinian family whose uncle was among the first PLO
officials to meet with Israelis.
Yet after years of fighting, the current lull and influx of
foreign aid have given the West Bank's middle class and
business community a sense of op****tunity.
Abbas' government plans to build 30,000 apartments in several
new suburbs, and the road leading into Ramallah, the West Bank
business hub, is lined with high-rise construction. Rich
Palestinian exiles have been invited to an investors'
conference in Bethlehem next month.
Patriotism means setting up new businesses, said Monib al-
Masri, one of the West Bank's richest men whose castle-like
home rises above the Nablus skyline.
"We'd like to ask more people to come and invest," said Masri,
70.
Meanwhile, no roadblock or free-fire zone can keep out the
winds of globalization. China has glutted the West Bank with
im****ts that even include black-and-white checkered keffiyehs,
the Palestinian headdress of choice.
In Gaza, by contrast, 10 months of blockade have shut nearly
all the factories for lack of raw materials, and tens of
thousands have lost their jobs.
Yet Palestinians don't publicly blame it on Hamas' refusal to
recognize Israel or stop the daily firing of rockets. Instead
they blame Abbas, Israel and the West for refusing to accept
the election result that favored Hamas.
Hamas says Abbas is welcome to negotiate on behalf of all
Palestinians, provided a deal is put to a referendum, but its
rocket attacks have repeatedly soured the climate for
negotiations.
Amid the division and hopelessness, anthropologist Sharif
Kaananeh urges his fellow Palestinians to take the long view
and learn from Jewish history: "If they waited 2,000 years to
claim this country, we can wait 200 years."
---
Additional re****ting by Mohammed Daraghmeh and Dalia Nammari
in Ramallah, Ali Daraghmeh in Nablus and Sarah El Deeb in
Gaza.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/ISRAEL_AT_60
_THE_PALESTINIANS?
SITE=MABOC&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2008-04-26-13-
23-58
--
A government, of, by, and, for: Rich, Elite, Freemasons.But
all things that are reproved are made manifest by the light:
for whatsoever doth make manifest is light.The light ****neth
in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.The light of
the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy
whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil,
thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the
light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!
Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ
shall give thee light.For my yoke is easy, and my burden is
light.
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