Just Back from Palestine: No Peace in Sight

Riad Z. Abdelkarim, MD

During my just concluded visit to the Israeli-occupied West Bank, everyday nuisances of life in American suburbia were virtually erased from my memory, replaced by a world of incessant military checkpoints, identity card checks, and army-imposed closures and curfews. Over the past few weeks, Israel has tightened its closures in the Palestinian territories, choking off towns, villages, and refugee camps from each other and further strangling the ever-fragile Palestinian economy. Apartheid--Israeli-style--is the rule of the day as Palestinian towns have become mini-bantustans, and gun-toting, militant Jewish colonists roam the territories at will, imposing their own brand of vigilantism. What is usually a fifteen minute taxi ride from a central West Bank village to Ramallah has become a one-and-a-half hour ordeal requiring travel on bumpy dirt roads along precarious hillsides, bypassing Jewish settlements, and around numerous concrete barriers and roads blocked by large mounds of dirt placed by Israeli army bulldozers. On some days, even these dirt roads are blocked. Palestinians requiring emergency medical attention have frequently been turned away at Israeli checkpoints, and tales of women in labor giving birth in taxis abound. Even during the tense months of the first Palestinian intifada (from 1987-1993), the situation was never as bad as it is now.

Indeed, these are not "usual" times in the West Bank and Gaza. A four-month long Palestinian uprising has claimed the lives of some 350 Palestinians at the hands of Israeli soldiers and settlers. Over 12,000 have been injured, some crippled for life. Everyday concerns about arriving at a destination on time have been replaced by the much more basic desire to simply arrive safely. On New Year's Day, I traveled with a journalist friend in the northern West Bank to the funeral of Dr. Thabet Thabet, one of over a dozen Palestinian leaders assassinated by Israel in recent weeks. We were subsequently fired upon by an Israeli soldier at one of the seemingly ubiquitous army checkpoints that dot the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The soldiers manning this "flying checkpoint" were uninterested in seeing the journalist's press-pass, which should have granted him immediate passage. My journalist friend is no stranger to Israeli violence, however, having been attacked or shot some twenty times during the past ten years. On the second day of the current "Al-Aqsa intifada", he was shot and beaten by Israeli police while covering Palestinian demonstrations at the Al-Aqsa mosque. A few days later, a cousin of mine narrowly escaped an attack by Jewish settlers on a road leading to my family's village. Another young boy, whose mother was my wife's childhood classmate, was not so fortunate. On his way home from school, he was shot in the eye by a thinly rubber-coated metal bullet fired by an Israeli soldier. The bullet penetrated his brain, and he died several days later, adding to the shockingly high toll of children killed and wounded by Israel's "shoot-to-kill" policy. These are not isolated instances of violence; almost every Palestinian has a tale about the daily humiliation and terror imposed collectively on an entire populace by a military occupation that--in many ways--has actually worsened since the Oslo peace process began in 1993.

During my travels through the West Bank, including Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem, I encountered a paradoxical coexistence of cynicism and resolve among the general Palestinian public. Palestinians do not seem to care whether Prime Minister Ehud Barak or reviled hard-liner Ariel Sharon wins the upcoming Israeli elections. They expect Israel's repressive policies to continue either way, differences in the tenor of political rhetoric notwithstanding. Similarly, they have little faith in the corrupt, self-serving "sulta", or Palestinian Authority (PA). From the college-educated Jerusalem taxi driver who drove me to the airport to an esteemed West Bank university professor, many Palestinians feel that Israeli authorities have intensified the military and economic pressure to force them to succumb to a "peace" deal that nobody expects will meet even minimal Palestinian aspirations. Such a deal would result in near-total Palestinian acquiescence to Israeli demands (ignoring most of the requirements of international law), while benefiting only an increasingly marginalized minority of Palestinian elites connected to the PA.

On issues ranging from sovereignty over Jerusalem to the right of return of four million Palestinian refugees and illegal Jewish settlements, most Palestinians agree that recently departed President Bill Clinton's proposals for an overall agreement merely represent a wholesale adoption of previously-deemed unacceptable Israeli positions. While talk of "peace" abounds, the de facto "unilateral separation" which Barak has threatened is an unacceptable and shortsighted approach. In the words of one exiled Palestinian refugee, any agreement imposed on the Palestinians without legitimately addressing their grievances in accordance with international law will merely be "ink on paper" that is as devoid of meaning as it is of justice.