The New Palestinian Revolt

Chris Hedges

From Foreign Affairs, January/February 2001

Summary:  Last autumn's fresh outbreak of violence between Palestinians and Israelis has shaken an assumption that has reigned since the 1993 Oslo peace accords: that negotiations and interim agreements can lay the roadwork for a lasting peace. Now Oslo's delegitimization has swayed public opinion in Israel and the occupied territories away from compromise and toward more radical solutions.

Chris Hedges is a reporter for The New York Times. He was Middle East Bureau Chief for The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, based in Jerusalem and Cairo, from 1988 to 1995.

Rabah el-Loh, 23, stood one afternoon in front of the grave of his brother, Raid, killed in clashes with Israeli soldiers. The funeral had taken all morning and thousands of angry mourners still milled around the barren cemetery in Gaza.

"Goodbye brother," el-Loh said. "Say hello to the other martyrs."

The walls of Gaza are plastered with poster-sized photographs of "martyrs" shot by the Israelis. Many are pictured holding a weapon in front of the gold-topped al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. These are in fact studio photos taken long before the current unrest. The gun was a prop and the glittering mosque a carefully chosen backdrop. All that was real in these photos, apparently, was the desire of these young men to fight against Israel and for a Palestinian state -- and to die in the process if need be. And now, at least until the pictures fade or peel away, the slain youths will have their heroism recognized.

Raid's decision to become a martyr was a conscious one, his family said, based on his despair at life in the Gaza Strip, hatred toward Israel, and a belief that to not sacrifice himself was to dishonor those who had gone before him.

Only 28,000 Gazan workers receive permits to work in Israel. Nearly all who do are middle-aged men who are considered less of a security threat. The young therefore have nothing to do and nowhere to escape to. They cannot get married because they cannot afford housing. They cannot leave Gaza, even for Israel. Martyrdom is the only route offered to those who want to achieve a measure, however brief, of recognition and glory.

"He spoke only of this, of being a martyr for the last four or five days," said Raid's mother, Fatma. "I asked him not to go. But once his younger brother was wounded he felt that it was his duty. When he left I said, 'God be with you.' I knew he would never come back."

Palestinians like Raid have been nurtured on bitter accounts of abuse, despair, and injustice. Families tell and retell stories of being thrown off their land and of relatives killed or exiled. All can tick off the names of martyrs within their own clan who died for the elusive Palestinian state. The only framed paper in many Palestinians' homes is a sepia land deed from the time of the British mandate. Some elderly men still keep the keys to houses that have long since vanished. From infancy, Palestinians are inculcated with the virus of nationalism and the burden of revenge. And, as in Bosnia, such resentment seeps into the roots of society for generations until it resurfaces or is finally rectified, often after much bloodletting.

"Tell the man what you want to be," said Hyam Temraz to her two-year-old son, Abed, as she peeped out of the slit of a black veil.

"A martyr," the child answered.

"We were in Jordan when my son Baraa was four," she said. "He saw a Jordanian soldier and ran and hugged him. He asked him if it was he who would liberate Palestine. He has always told me that he would be a martyr and that one day I would dig his grave."