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Until When Will The Palestinians Pay For Arafat's Strategic Mistake?
Posted: Thursday, April 4, 2002
By Muna Hamzeh*
[2 April 2002]: I find such great solace in my daily phone calls to my friends Hourieh and Nizar in Dheisheh. They worry about what my phone bill may look like at the end of the month, and assure me that they will call me when the Israelis invade the refugee camp. I don't dare tell them the truth. I don't dare say that I am afraid the hour is coming when even my phone contact with them won't be possible. That even that connection will be gone. I don't dare tell them I worry that each time I talk to them may be the last time; that next time I call, they may not be alive.
I call Hourieh several times a day. And each day, I know what time she woke up, how she's feeling, what she's cooking - when she's not too nervous to do so - and how her children Kholoud, Sanabel and Alaa' are spending their time. "There was a suicide bombing in Haifa jut now," Sanabel, 8, told me when I called yesterday. I ask her what she's doing. "I'm playing cards on the computer. There is no school today and there will be no school tomorrow." I don't tell her that there won't be school for a long time. There is no need for her to know. I hang up the phone, pour more coffee and chain smoke. I am only physically here in Texas. But my heart, soul and mind are in Dheisheh even when I fall asleep. I pick up the phone and call Nizar. I can always tell if he's depressed, or simply just holding on. I tell him things like "May God protect you and keep you safe." And in my heart, I wish that God would protect every living soul in Palestine.
When I called this evening, Nizar told me that eighteen Israeli Merkava tanks are now stationed in the small town of Doha across the street from the camp. "The Apache helicopters have been flying overhead all night. The hour of their invasion of the camp is near," he says in a strained voice.
The refugee camp is now waiting its turn. The expectation is that the war crimes taking place in Ramallah will now start taking place in Bethlehem, and the rest of the West Bank. Israeli tanks have also already rolled into Tulkarem and Qalqilya. And just as they did in Ramallah, they will cut off the phone lines, electricity and water, set shops on fire, and use their megaphones to ask men between the ages of 14-40 to gather in one of the two schools or the stone query at the edge of the camp. But unlike the re-occupation of Dheisheh more than two weeks ago, no one is certain what the fate of the men will be this time. In Ramallah, no male who was rounded-up has returned home. The men are either being executed or taken away. Al-Jazeera.net reports that the Israelis have a total list of 40,000 Palestinian policemen that they want to either kill or arrest. Friends who have relatives in Ramallah say that nephew and nieces can see dead bodies on the streets. But no one can approach them. Welcome to Nazi Germany. It is now Palestine's turn.
With Ramallah being totally isolated from the rest of the world and declared a closed military zone, no one knows the extent of the war crimes that the Israelis may have committed. The press has been kicked out, and foreign delegations are either being deported or fired at. This morning in occupied East Jerusalem, the Israelis entered all the Arab-owned hotels, rounded up all the foreign nationals staying there and deported them to their respective countries. Also in Beit Jala this morning, Israeli troops opened fire at a peaceful demonstration held by foreign nationals who came to show their solidarity. Five foreign nationals were injured, with two being reported in critical condition. But the foreign nationals are defiant and insist on spending another night in Dheisheh.
I call my friend Rula just now and she tells me that the residents of Ramallah are spotting dead bodies near cars, next to trees, in doorways and entrances to buildings. Doctors warn of spreading disease. "There are too many dead bodies and too much blood everywhere," one doctor states to al-Jazeera.
Israel, it appears, has set the stage that would allow it to commit war crimes away from the eyes of the world. "When they lift the ban on Ramallah, the expectations are that the number of those who've been killed will be in the hundreds," Hourieh tells me. As I write, Israeli troops remain in Qalandyia, Jalazone and Amari refugee camps in Ramallah. Yet there is a blackout on news from the refugee camps. No one, including the press, is able to enter the camps. A friend who was able to place a call to Amari Refugee Camp could only say that the number of those arrested is "enormous". And even from within the refugee camp, no one is able to provide accurate reports because the camp is under curfew and has no contact with the outside world.
And now Dheisheh waits its turn to fall victim to Israeli butchery, expected to start in the next few hours. The Israelis have already announced that once they enter the camp, they plan to dynamite the family home of Ayat al-Akhras, the 18-year-old suicide bomber who blew herself up, killing two Israelis, and wounding 20 others, in West Jerusalem on March 29. Today's suicide bomber in Jerusalem was also from Dheisheh. The camp is bracing itself for the worst. Scores of people just completed a week-long course in first-aid. They know that they will only have one another to rely on. They've setup make-shift clinics in various homes.
Several days ago, the Bethlehem area ran out of cooking gas balloons, kerosene and gasoline. There is no poultry and the shops only have remnants of foodstuffs on their shelves. It seems that the intent is to force people to starve as this new war against the Palestinians continue. "Do you know what a penny is?" asked my friend Um Ra'ed when I called her yesterday morning. "I don't have a single penny in the house. The whole world has abandoned us. No one gives a damn about what happens to us. Allah is all we have left."
Meanwhile, a smiling Arafat in his "besieged" Ramallah office greets me whenever I switch the TV channels in search of news. One moment he is greeting a group of Western nationals who came to show solidarity. Next moment, he is saying, in his incoherent English, how he wishes he could become a "martyr". A third moment, he is telling us, in his incoherent Arabic, "we will not surrender." The mainstream US media, which is intentionally imposing a wide-scale censorship about the war crimes being committed in the Palestinian Territories, is inundating its viewers with the latest updates, and only that, of Arafat's "besieged" situation. We are told he is "isolated" in three rooms, that there is no electricity and no water, and that the Red Cross has managed to bring him and those "besieged" with him food. Lost in all this publicity, is the Palestinian public and the hell it has been living through at the hands of Israeli troops.
I don't know about anyone else who remembers the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, but I, for one, can't help getting this eerie sense of déjà vu. The same man who survived the blitz of Beirut, and then escaped unscathed, leaving the refugees of Sabra and Shatila to pay the deadly price for his strategic mistakes, is now the same man being "besieged" in Ramallah. This time too, he will come out of it unscathed, and the Palestinian people will once more pay the price for all the historic compromises he agreed to in his disastrous "peace" agreements with the Israelis.
How quickly people forget that the first Palestinian Intifada was achieving considerable gains on the ground, and in world public opinion, until Arafat and his leadership stepped in and agreed to such horrendous compromises that led to Oslo. Between 1994 and today, even a toddler in the West Bank and Gaza has been able to see that Oslo, on the ground, has meant nothing more than settlement expansion, by-pass road, land confiscations, house demolitions and the carving of the West Bank into bantustans, among so many other things. That same toddler then witnessed how the leadership of the Palestinian Authority built affluent mansions, skimmed millions of dollars allocated for building the future Palestinian state, and ran the show like mobsters, heading the biggest and most profitable businesses and institutions in the country. Meanwhile, the refugee camps continued to suffer from poor living conditions. Not once in the ten years I lived in Dheisheh did the Palestinian Authority contribute funds to add medical equipment to Dheisheh's clinic, or construct a playground for the children, or allocate scholarship funds for students, and so on. All what the Palestinian Authority's fat cats did was to watch their personal fortunes pile in foreign bank accounts.
Indeed, this time the price will not only be greater than the price paid in Sabra and Shatilla, but will include mass transfer in addition to the death of innocent civilians. During a phone conversation with Israeli-Arab Knesset Member, Ahmed Tiebi, the Palestinian leader told Tiebi he is concerned about Israel's intent to expel hundreds of Palestinian civilians it has rounded up in the past days, to Jordan and Egypt. And suddenly, Egypt and Jordan issue statements saying they will take measures to ensure that no Palestinians are expelled inside their borders. Then Jordan denies rumors that it plans to expel the Israeli ambassador. The rumor in Dheisheh today, which also seems to have been the rumor when Israeli troops re-occupied the camp a few weeks ago, is that the Israelis plan to gather the wives and children of the men it intends to expel and transport them in trucks to the Allenby Bridge in Jericho. "Now our biggest fear is another 1948 and another 1967," Hourieh tells me.
The plans for the transfer of the Palestinian population, or parts of it, is nothing new. There have been all sorts of reports on the matter, and even Israeli opinion polls on the matter. The refugees in the camps seem to be the most likely target of such a plan. And for those who doubt this notion, consider this: The issue of the right of return is the one issue that Israel isn't willing to consider. UN Resolution 194 isn't even brought up in most of the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, and Palestinian officials have long hinted at the impossibility of allowing the refugees to return to their homeland. At best, a few hundred thousand will be allowed to return to the Palestinian Territories. At worst, countries like Jordan have long expressed a willingness to accept monetary compensation for "absorbing" Palestinian refugees. There have also been all sorts of reports in the past about a secret plan to re-locate the refugees in both Arab and western countries. It would be foolish not to believe that the elimination, once and for all, of the refugee and right of return issue, is the biggest next step on the agenda. The time to implement it has never seemed more ripe.
My friend Rula tells me that the Jordanians have cut off phone contacts with the West Bank. Palestinians in Jordan with cell phones are calling local TV stations in the West Bank and asking them to broadcast the names and phone numbers of their loved ones, with the message "please call this person and make sure he is alright. Send us word about his well being." The Jordanians are also storming shops whose owners play nationalist songs and shutting the shops down. And only a few hours ago, the Jordanian police stormed a Palestinian refugee camp in the city of Irbid following anti-occupation demonstrations.
What a shame that Palestinian men, both young and old, have to die in cold blood, with a bullet to their heads. What a shame that they have to die this way in the absence of Arab inaction. What a shame they have to die this way while the Palestinian leadership still lacks a clear strategic plan. A "besieged" Arafat is still calling for the implementation of the Mitchell and Tenet plans. His people are being butchered and terrorized, and he cannot muster the courage to call Oslo a thing of the past, and call for the formation of a national unity government that will focus on, and only on, bringing this horrendous occupation to an end. No one in the Palestinian leadership, it seems, has learned from the mistakes of Lebanon. And the war crimes taking place in Palestine at this very moment are a continuation of the price the Palestinians have had to pay for Arafat's previous strategic mistakes.
If the Palestinian leader was right about anything, it was when he said that one day a Palestinian child will raise the Palestinian flag over Jerusalem. But that child will not be Arafat's child, or the child of any leader in the Palestinian Authority, but the child of all those who were killed in the struggle for the liberation of Palestine. And when that flag flutters, just wait and see how it is going to flutter with grace and dignity.
* Muna Hamzeh is the author of "Refugees in Our Own Land:
Chronicles From a Palestinian Refugee Camp in Bethlehem".
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