The End of the Peace Process, page 12
His sister says about Wadie that he does people’s voices when he knows that they’re acting a part. In addition to my being the aged parent, perhaps he felt that I was too much the interviewer. We slowed down for the soldiers. A flick of the wrist from one of them was all we got, and we sped on to West Jerusalem: it had stopped raining and the area vaguely resembled the hills around San Diego. Sure, we were able to drive around in our little rented car, but the sense of powerlessness we felt was insidious. At that moment, still aching through my jet lag and the incipient fatigue that is endemic to my illness, I felt that the dreariness of our collective situation as Palestinians was leading us absolutely nowhere. The peace process had become a new reality, but there were too many unaccounted for miseries left over from the past, too many inequities in the present and foreseeable future to help us round the corner into real peace and real independence. I think that Wadie experienced the same frustration as I. He confessed to me at the hotel that his singleminded assault upon Arabic was his way of getting over the taunts of his Lebanese cousins and the awful experience of being an Arab-American schoolboy in Manhattan during the Gulf War. “By forcing my way into Arabic I could be at home really. I didn’t again feel as helpless as I did when they connected me with Saddam Hussein and terrorism. On the other hand,” he added wistfully, “I can talk, listen, understand, but aside from my translations and work for Hassan, I don’t do too much here.”
WADIE IS NEVER disconsolate for long. He carries around some gaily colored juggling balls in his pocket, brings them out and starts to juggle. “It’s better than standing around,” he says the next morning, as he brings me a rented pele phone, the Hebrew word for “magic phone,” pronounced “belly-phone” in Arabic, which, despite its mispronounced name and provenance, is the major status symbol and indispensable instrument for being in Palestine: this is a cellular telephone which, since we spend so much time in delays on the road (a ten-mile trip can take an hour and half), you must have with you at all times to make contact with anyone. Our routine was driving up and down the Jerusalem-Ramallah road, going to meet people whom Wadie and I thought of as doing something in the present morass. Unfortunately, there isn’t much of a West Bank press to consult for orientation as you start the day. The two main papers are al-Ouds and al-Ayyam, recently begun by an old friend, a former Fateh operative called Akram Haniyé who was deported by Israel in 1987, became a close adviser to Arafat in Tunis, is back in Ramallah, and having reportedly refused a political appointment, has been publishing his paper since the first of the year. It is better printed and put together than its rival, but I couldn’t see the difference in content: replication and primitive imitation are everywhere in the new Palestine, a wilderness of mirrors. The striking thing about al-Ouds the first day I look at it is that nearly every item on the front page is bad news: house demolitions, 70 percent unemployment because of the closure, food shortages, confiscations, and so forth.
Otherwise, however, there is a tiny margin of press freedom, given that the Authority has routinely imprisoned and threatened journalists. Before Oslo my articles were run by al-Ouds; now I appear only in Xerox copies passed around the West Bank, according to a cardiac surgeon I met in Nablus. But the really odd thing is that a couple of days after I was attacked on the radio, al-Ayyam ran a back-page guest column by Ghassan Zaqtan in which he defended me for opposition to Oslo and for my principled positions, political courage, and analyses. And a day after his column, I ran into Zaqtan, a poet and journalist who grew up in Beirut, at the Ministry of Culture where he works. Another irony—one part of the Authority attacks, the other answers.
Hassan Barghouti, the DWRC’s founder and director, is as tall and skinny as Wadie, but he has a serious back problem, the result of six years imprisonment and interrogation in Israeli jails. Despite an occasional wince, plus the awkward posture and stiff walk of the chronic back-sufferer, he communicated an attractive self-confidence. The Center occupies sixth-floor offices in the Bakri Building, downtown Ramallah’s largest structure, which is filled with souvenir and shoe-shops on the ground floor. Wadie’s relationship with Hassan is almost fraternal, though Wadie keeps the deferential silence appropriate for the very junior sibling who is his brother’s assistant. Barghouti chronicled the rise of Palestinian working-class sentiment during the intifada, and its subsequent fall after Oslo, when Fateh operatives took over and converted the unions into nationalist organizations. “This is our bane,” he says with considerable animus, “the use of nationalist discourse to cover over social inequities, real economic injustices, and the sorry state of our civil life generally. My idea [he sounds very much like the trained lawyer that he is] has been to go in and help laborers who because of incredible job shortages are either treated badly by their Palestinian employers or summarily fired. We [he nods at Wadie, who had told us about this in December] negotiated a settlement between the Ambassador Hotel and a dozen employees that they discharged unfairly. Wadie also helped us write up and translate a report on the unacceptable rate of child labor in the West Bank. He also must have told you how we visited the tanning plant in Nablus where workers are given no protection against the chemicals they use or the fumes they inhale.” Agitatedly Wadie added, “I’ve never seen anything like it, and what makes it worse is that the management tried to convince me that the atmosphere was ‘good for the workers’.”
The Center has about a dozen members, including a Palestinian Israeli lawyer improbably named Castro, and two or three Europeans of Wadie’s age. It is clear to me, the proud father, that Wadie is very much liked by everyone: his remarkably unabrasive manner is enviable. That plus his sense of humor, his juggling, and his total lack of affectation or pretentiousness make him extremely easy to be with. Like his mother, he is also a very private person; unlike his loquacious father and sister, he doesn’t find it easy to reveal or articulate what he feels, although it is clear that he takes things very seriously.
One of his colleagues gave me a handful of pamphlets about workers’ rights that Wadie had edited and translated. Hassan later said about them that they were only a fraction of the real difficulty, which was to prevent Arafat from grabbing hold of all the workers’ pension fund money now held by the Histadrut. “For all these years,” he explained, “our people worked in Israel, sometimes at the rate of 100,000 laborers a day. Now there are only three or four thousand who are allowed to work there, but Israel has been deducting money directly from their paychecks all along; that in addition to the large sums they deducted before have accumulated into a considerable amount. Arafat is trying to convince the Israelis to give him the money, claiming that he is the only national authority.” Another example of nationalism being used as an instrument of blocking social justice for Palestinians.
Wadie was also eager for me to visit the JMCC where he worked as a translator, occasional columnist, and editor to supplement his tiny monthly stipend from DWRC. It’s remarkable that “information” in the form of news reports, speculation, official pronouncements, leaks, constitute what seems to be about 90 percent of conversation and activity. Aside from an occasional trip to Jordan or Europe, all of my middle-class friends, most of them professionals, are condemned to nightly social gatherings with each other. For the short time I was there I found the hospitality and fellowship invigorating fun, but I could also see that such a life diet could become claustrophobic. For the first time in our lives we find ourselves in a society with no certainty about, or prospects of, improving anything beyond a fairly narrow circle of friends or relatives. Arafat’s office is in Gaza, as are many of his ministries, though some have branches in Ramallah and Jericho. This makes ordinary government, and a sense of continuity, order, stability impossible. There are three branches of the health ministry for example, one each in Gaza and Jericho; then there is Arafat’s brother Fathi who directs the Red Crescent.
A physician I met in Nablus spoke of the ensuing confusion. Medicines are in constant short supply, whereas fourth generation antibiotics suddenly proliferated even though they are useless in most cases of illness. Somebody made a killing on the super sophisticated drugs; in the meantime everything else is unavailable. He also told me that 70 percent of the serious illnesses on the West Bank are either cancer or heart related, yet there is neither a cardiac unit nor an oncological service anywhere in Palestine. In addition, Arafat throws his weight behind one health ministry, then another, keeping all three off balance and in need of his patronage.
I could discern two sets of functioning civil institutions in Palestine: one is the network of Islamic welfare organizations which is especially strong in Gaza; the other is the group of NGOs, most of which began during the intifada when the Israelis made life very difficult for Palestinians (closed schools, twenty-four-hour curfews, massive censorship, closures). Now Arafat’s Authority is battling them in an attempt to reduce, and perhaps even dissolve, their influence. For someone like Wadie who came to Palestine as a volunteer the obvious choice to set down was the NGO network; not only are most of them run by gifted and in some cases charismatic people like Samiha Khalil, the seventy-year old woman who was the only candidate to oppose Arafat in the January elections, but they were entirely staffed by natives of the West Bank or Gaza whose work began out of real and immediate needs.
The JMCC is a perfect example. Ghassan Khatib, who founded it and spoke with me and Wadie in his East Jerusalem office next to the Turkish Consulate, said that he got the idea when he saw wave after wave of foreign journalists who were in the territories to cover the intifada with no one on the Palestinian side able to give them systematic attention or information. So he started to contact them, arrange for interviews, take them into towns and villages, and generally supply them with a Palestinian view of the complicated uprising. A political science professor at Bir Zeit University, Khatib was naturally linked to many of the intifada committees; partly as a consequence of that fact, when the negotiations began shortly after the October 1991 Madrid Middle East Peace Conference, he was made a member of the Palestinian delegation in Washington.
He is a quiet-spoken, undemonstrative middle-aged man. “Most of the ministries are not really doing much,” he said. “Health and education are at least managing to do something, but the overall level of services is extremely low. Mostly,” and here he echoed everyone I spoke to, “mostly there are lots of director-generals, and under-secretaries—large numbers of them—who are there as a way for Arafat to appease his supporters. But they don’t actually do anything. Except for the security apparatus, which is a going concern.” I had recently read an article on this apparatus by Graham Usher, who does the best foreign on-the-spot-reporting from Palestine; his estimate is that Arafat annually spends $500 million on it, and still comes up short. I was curious to know what the overall legal situation was, since the Authority did not have sovereignty over Area A but only self-rule. Khatib told me that a draft set of Basic Laws was circulating around, but that it hadn’t passed.
Another friend, a lawyer, told me later that he had been asked by Arafat to reconcile the commercial laws of the Gaza Strip (operating under Egyptian and Israeli jurisdiction) with those of the West Bank (formulated by the Jordanians and the Israelis). It was easy to do so and he turned in his report in early 1995, but until now nothing has been done. Merchants and investors therefore operate in a legal limbo, with Arafat’s personal involvement necessary to conclude arrangements on any significant business. A fair amount of information in the Western press, including the Wall Street Journal, confirms this impression. For ordinary Palestinians, however, this reinforces their sense of being lost (Diyà is the Arabic world for it that I heard over and over again) and of powerlessness that goes with it. With the Israeli closures and house demolitions—there were at least two on my second day there—plus the Palestine Authority since the February bombings picking up and holding what is now an estimated twelve thousand “suspects, ” the feeling is one of a bitter realization that this isn’t peace. On the contrary, one woman told me, we’re neither at war, nor are we peaceful and independent: frankly, she added, I’m lost.
A steady stream of publications comes out of JMCC, partly to inform foreign journalists of what is taking place in Palestine, partly also as a way of telling a story that is more truthful than the PA’s. “Being in Jerusalem exempts us from Arafat’s control,” said Wadie’s colleague Imad. “We publish the Palestine Report on a biweekly basis, plus we have a twenty-four-hour service that delivers bulletins to all the news agencies and correspondents on noteworthy events.” One day last January, for instance, they carried a harshly critical interview with me that would never have made it into the West Bank papers. For its part Israel is far from careless about what information and discussion it tolerates. Yes, JMCC can send out its reports by fax and E-mail, but anything that seems to challenge Israel’s real (as opposed to verbal) authority it definitely opposes. As they tell me about their work in trying to spread around real information, Wadie and Imad speak with the confidence and enthusiasm of people getting something done in a time and place where little was being done.
I heard those accents occasionally and they fired me up intermittently. Munir Fashie, for instance, heads another NGO called TAMER, an association for improving general literacy and intellectual awareness. “Two of the main problems are the absence of role models and the inability to write concretely about anything,” Munir told Mariam, Wadie, and me in his spotless Ramallah office, which unlike all the others you visit is not dominated by a big director’s desk; we sat around in a circle with members of TAMER, who speak freely and show no deference to the boss. “Young people who look out on our world see no one they can admire or emulate; our leaders are corrupt and autocratic failures. So there’s a vacuum which we are trying to fill by encouraging ideas of self-development through reading. We’ve developed this notion of reading passports; you get one of these passports as a child, and as you take out library books or buy them from somewhere we certify that in the passports. Then you can move up and get a higher-level passport. As for lack of concreteness, we take out pages in al-Ouds, for example, where we encourage people to express themselves about a given feeling, or situation in which they find themselves. The idea is to focus attention on who one is, and to try to do that not in the abstract, fraudulent way that is promoted by our nationalistic discourse, but by expressing oneself simply and directly. Modest perhaps, but we think of ourselves as planting seeds.” One of TAMER’s associates is a handsome young woman, Safa, who has a U.S. graduate degree, and has pioneered sex education classes, formerly an untaught subject, in Palestinian universities and schools. She now travels constantly throughout the territories, giving lectures, demonstrations, showing films about intercourse, hygiene, harassment, infectious disease, and the like. “What I has been most fascinating,” she said to us, “is that I have found most of my vocabulary readily available in the classical Islamic tradition. It’s been there all along, buried under mounds of regressive prohibitions that actually misrepresent Islam for contemporary use.”
But these are relatively isolated individual initiatives. The general climate is not hospitable. On Friday March 22 the Israeli police prevented a conference on Jerusalem from taking place in Arab East Jerusalem’s Ambassador Hotel. We had been alerted to the conference when Wadie and I went to pay a call on the Alternative Information Center (AIC) in West Jerusalem; their publication News From Within, which I receive every month and on whose honorary board I serve, carries excellent coverage of the Israeli scene by dissenting Israeli Jews. Tikvah Honig-Parnass, the journal’s editor, was particularly exercised by Israel’s collective punishment of the Palestinians and quoted to me a leading writer, S. Yizaher, as saying that Palestinians were cannibals. Such racist emotions, she said, were never more prevalent than now. Anyway, she added, perhaps you could come to our conference tomorrow although we’ve received information that it’s going to be banned.
As indeed it was. What seemed like a small corps of Israeli soldiers in full battle dress stopped traffic fifty yards from the hotel, which perches on a hill in Sheikh Jarrah overlooking the Old City. We had to leave the car there and walk the rest of the way to the hotel. It was all I could do to restrain the usually unflappable Wadie from remonstrating. As we walked past he vented his spleen to me. “Here are these nineteen-year-olds with American rifles that they use to bully the Palestinians who just simply take it. I don’t know why I take it, but I do. The helplessness is awful, but so is their ignorance.” He was to repeat this several times while I was there, each time making it harder for me to say something appropriate, or to explain the facts away.
I couldn’t. This had been our condition all of my life. The basic difficulty is that when it came to being pushed around by young people with rifles, it did not finally matter whether the soldiers were Arabs in countries like Egypt, Syria, Jordan, or Israeli Jews on the West Bank or in Gaza. As an individual one felt alienated and demeaned. The disconnection between oneself and a sullen, almost impersonal authority directed at one’s personal freedom, in which the individual has no recourse except to acquiesce without complaint—this was a reality that endured all through the Middle East from my father’s generation under Ottoman and British rule, to mine under Israeli and undemocratic Arab rule. Now my son was experiencing it. Each generation seemed to hand it on to the next without being able to do a great deal to change it. Israelis push us around because we are Palestinians; in Arab countries—even Egypt—we are routinely searched and detained at airports, despite our U.S. passports; and wherever one goes one senses that Arab authority is crude, directed mainly at civilians, unrestrained by laws or constitutions.
A small group of people was standing at the hotel’s entrance. I greeted Tikvah, who introduced me to a chain-smoking, gray-haired man whom everyone addressed as Mikado. His name is Michael Warchavski, and he runs AIC. His wife is Lea Tsemel, whom I have known for a decade as an indefatigable Israeli lawyer stubbornly defending Palestinians in Israeli courts. Reminding me that Israel is an intensely legalistic country and that the only recourse was for Lea to be in court trying to get the ban lifted, Mikado explains that the police have the right to forbid any activity that conflicts with Knesset legislation passed a couple of years ago ruling “conformity with the Gaza-Jericho accords.” “So in this case,” he notes matter-of-factly, “the police have decided that a conference on Jerusalem in Jerusalem conflicts with the PLO-Israeli accords that ban any Palestinian political activity in the city.” When I ask on what grounds an academic conference could be construed as political activity he says that Feisal Husseini’s name on the program equals political activity. Husseini is close to Arafat, and has been designated PA minister in charge of Jerusalem affairs; he also belongs to one of the three “notable” Muslim families in Palestine (the others are the Nashashibis and the Nusseibehs). This adds to his status. “But AIC is an Israeli organization,” I said. “It doesn’t matter,” Mikado responded. “It’s the nature of the activity that is banned and of course the fact that West Bank and Jerusalem Palestinians are participating.”
