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.

Sheik Abed el-Fatah stood in a black robe with gold brocade trim in his airy mosque following a service for a "martyr" killed by Israeli troops the day before. Like most clerics, he sees war as inevitable -- part of a final, apocalyptic battle that will drive the Jews off Islamic soil. And he preaches this message week after week to crowds of shoeless men who squeeze into the vaulted structure or listen from loudspeakers placed outside on the street. The morning I was there he took the opportunity to lash out at the "Jewish-controlled" Western media. "This uprising will not be limited to Palestine but will spread to the entire Arab world," he said. "It will unite all the Muslims behind our struggle. All the Jews who came here from other countries, from all over the world, must now go back. Those that are from Palestine can stay, as long as they are peaceful."

the noose tightens

Ali Dhair, 54, stood oblivious to the periodic pop of gunfire between Palestinian gunmen and Israeli soldiers just over the hill near the Rafah border crossing. He was mourning his cucumber plants. "Look," he said, pointing to piles of twisted brown stems and roots. "It was too expensive to maintain them."

He was not alone. Piles of withered produce dotted the sandy plots around him. The Israeli decision to close the border made it impossible for farmers like Dhair to export farm products. He and many others are now bankrupt.

Not only have scores of farmers gone bust in the last few weeks, unable to export crates of tomatoes and cucumbers to Israel, the West Bank, Egypt, and Jordan; without basic supplies and money to pay workers, everything from tailor shops to construction firms has ground to a halt. The Israelis, who keep gunships off the coast, have curtailed the range of fishing boats. Tourism to places such as Bethlehem, which hosted half a million visitors last year, has dried up. And Israeli shoppers, who spent $500 million last year in West Bank towns, are no longer traveling into Palestinian areas.

The downward spiral strengthens the radicals. Armed fighters, who like their predecessors in the first intifada are intoxicated by newfound power and authority, have aided the Israeli blockade. They have stopped Palestinian workers from going to their jobs in the industrial park at the Erez checkpoint in Gaza, and the park has already lost about a third of its 3,500 workers. Radical Palestinians have also burned factories in Gaza and the West Bank. One fire forced developers to halt work on a fiber-optic-wired industrial park being set up in the West Bank by Israeli software companies -- once touted as the model of how the Israeli and Palestinian economies could be merged. "I am too scared to go to work," said Mohammed al-Kahlout, 28, who is a tailor in the Erez industrial zone. "Two days ago someone was shot and killed. In my workshop only 2 out of 20 people go to work."

As the closure drags on and the nearly 120,000 Palestinians with jobs in Israel stay home, pressure mounts in Israel to bring in foreign guest workers to replace them. Gaza's economy is sustained by its exports of fruits and vegetables and the salaries earned by 28,000 laborers who work in Israel. About 30,000 more are licensed to work from the West Bank. Another 60,000, nearly all from the West Bank, work illegally.

Rageh al-Kahlouf, 47, owner of one of the biggest businesses in Gaza, has shut down the two garment factories where he makes jeans for export. More than a hundred employees are without jobs. He will not pull his sewing machines out of storage until he can again import material and send out finished products. Al-Kahlouf said that during the last prolonged closure, in 1996, when Israel locked the Palestinians out for 104 days after a spate of suicide bombings, he was nearly ruined.

"It would take no more than a month for the Israelis to bring Gaza to its knees," he said, clutching a roll of returned checks from local merchants who did not have the funds to cover recent purchases. "But if Israel uses this weapon it will also sweep away Arafat's Palestinian Authority and see the radicals in the street prosecute a vicious and prolonged war with Israel. It could as well knock down the tired, secular regimes in places like Egypt and Syria, where the leaders are passive but must appear to respond to the calls from their own people to act."

hardened objectives