The roots of Palestinian combativity
THE UPRISING of the Palestinian masses under Israell rule has entered its fifth month. There is still no sign of a letup, and the Israeli authorities are stepping up the level of their repression. The number of Palestinians shot down rose notably during the three day period at the end of March when the occupied territories were put off limits to the press.
The shootings have continued steadily now for months, with an almost daily body count. This obviously has a brutalizing effect on Israeli society and political life that has begun to embarrass seriously even the staunchest supporters of the Zionist state. GERRY FOLEY
A N EXAMPLE is the New York
Times editorial reproduced in the April 11 issue of the International Herald Tribune, which declared: "Inexcusably, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir says that Palestinian rioters will be crushed 'like grasshoppers.' Does this man, a leader of Jews who were trampled on for centuries because they were Jews, believe that human beings are insects?"
That sort of attitude, however, is more or less inevitable when an entire people are seen as enemies. The only answer then is to crush them or eliminate them as a community. And that requires a slaughter and massive terror that, in the present international political conditions, the Zionists rulers are unable to carry out. For that they would need an atmosphere of all-out communal warfare. There are forces in Israel that are trying to create that, as the provocative hike organized for Jewish settler children near the Palestinian village of Beita shows. In particular, the guard who turned a clash into a bloody battle was known as a Zionist "Rambo."
A basic aim of Zionism
It is in fact almost inevitable that in a situation where one people are oppressed in the name of another, that the underclass will tend to see members of the privileged group in general as oppressors or symbols of their oppression. That has happened everywhere such conditions exist, from US and British inner cities to South Africa. This tendency can be restrained by an effective political leadership of the oppressed, but it can only be eliminated by ending the oppression that gener-
The Beita incident shows that the most reactionary forces in Israel are trying to take advantage of this tendency to convince the Jewish population that it is "us or them." The only way to resolve this conflict, it is suggested, is to get rid of "them," which, of course, has been a basic aim of Zionism from the beginning, as of other colonialist ventures. But it is not just international political factors, including public opinion and real or pretended human values, that stand in the way.
A super-exploited labour force
There are inherent limitations to such colonialist ventures. In a two-tier society under capitalism, certain economic and social relationships develop. The oppressed population can be more easily exploited economically, and therefore it becomes valuable to the exploiters in the dominant population. They begin to become dependent on it. Secondly, the relatively privileged population tends to lose its aggressiveness, while the exploited population becomes more and more desperate. These factors, for example, blocked completion of the English colonization of Ireland. They began to become obvious in Israel at the time of the Lebanon war. In the Palestinian uprising, they have emerged in a still more pronounced way.
The Palestinian youth confronting the Israel occupiers do not simply represent a dispossessed people. They are a super-exploited labor force. They do not just look from a distance at lands that once belonged to them. They are created by the conquest; they have had to learn to know their oppressors and how to defend themselves.
The following article, which was written early in the rebellion in the occupied territories, illustrates these roots of the desperation and the self-confidence of the Palestinians who confront the Zionist military forces every day and who have not been intimidated by a daily toll of deaths that has now continued for over four months. *
MIDDLE EAST
"We must
take our destiny into our own hands"
"IN THE YEAR 2,000 there will be a million Arabs. What do you want us to do? They will need food, water, jobs. This is a burden that our society will never be able to bear." It was in these terms that Shimon Peres, minister of foreign affairs and leader of the Labour Party, justified his plan for disengagement from the Gaza Strip over Israeli TV. MICHEL WARSCHAWSKY
IGHT YEARS AGO, the last time I went to Gaza, I promised never to set foot again in this place whose poverty and desperation could only be compared with what you find in the shantytowns of Latin America. Moreover, everything indicated that the "pacification" undertaken in 1971 by General Sharon had been effective — at the cost of killing hundreds of people and dispersing tens of
Gaza and the refugee camps around it seemed to have passed the banner of resistance to the Israeli occupation to the universities and urban centers of the West Bank. There at least something was happening. In Gaza, the Israeli order prevailed. And now, in the space of a few weeks, this region forgotten by the journalists, ignored by the foreign work groups that come to study the situation and offer their solutions, has become the focus of attention and of the dilemma facing Israeli politicians.
For weeks, the TV channels have been bombarding us with pictures of crowds flooding into the streets and besieging military units, of the youth who forced an Israeli soldier to flee, ofeelere cames thaton at 3 again have become liberated territories at April 18, 1988 • #139 International Viewpoint
MIDDLE EAST night and for a good part of the day.
Every evening on television we see those youth in Gaza that only yesterday were to be found in the "slave markets" of Jaffa, Ashqelon and Jerusalem. But they no longer have anything in common with the desperate heros of David Grossman's Ghetto Gaza or Yellow Time.
If the Gaza Strip has been compared with Soweto, it is because for many of its inhabitants it is a dormitory, where they come to try to recover in a few fitful hours of sleep, a minimum of energy that will be exploited by the Tel Aviv industrialists, by the street cleaning services in the south Israeli cities, by the Jewish hospitals in the region and above all by restaurant owners and farmers in the coastal region. "We live here as if we were in prison"
In the extraordinary fresco of the occupation presented by Yellow Time, the young Israeli writer Grossman gives a powerful description of the lives of these young workers from Gaza. He uses their own words: "I work in a store in Tel Aviv. At
Gaza
8 mls/13km
Jabaliya
Beach A
Nuseirat
Gaza
Bureij
Deir el-Balah
Maghazi
Khan
Younis
ISRAEL
A Rafah
A Camp
• Town
Egypt
Palestinian refugees
(in thousands)
279
1 Lebanon
2 Syria
258
845
3 Jordan
4 West Bank
: 374
445
5 Gaza
2,201
Total
Lebanon
Tel Aviv
- Haifa
•
•JERUSALEM
7am, I leave [the hangar where about 15 Jordan other workers are shut in] and I work until 5pm. Then I go to the factory to work until 8pm. I eat and sleep. Organize myself? Where would I find the strength? I don't even dare look out of the window at what is
"We live here as if we were in prison. It is hard work until late into the evening. Your head explodes. After work, you don't have any strength left to think. You only want to sleep. In theory, I live in Tel Aviv, but outside of work, I know nothing of the city. Once a week, I go back home. I arrive at 5pm and go to sleep. On Saturday, I sleep until midday. Afterwards, I make little repairs in the house and look after my daughter. She doesn't know me...At 7am on Sunday I am back at work.....
Shut away in hangers or warehouses in the industrial periphery of Tel Aviv, such workers at least have the good fortune not to have to face checkpoints every night. These checkpoints haunt the young workers that I have met, who go back to Gaza every evening in buses or trucks. They are stopped for an hour, two hours, sometimes even for four hours at the point where they leave Israel and enter the planet of Gaza. Cars and trucks are searched, identities are checked. Sometimes they are interrogated, and not just verbally. This is done with the help of fists and feet.
Once a month at least, the checkpoint is closed. Collective punishment of those working in Israel is the reaction of the military authorities every time there is an incident in the Gaza Strip.
As Hamdi (21 years old) from Jebalya put it: "At times because of the Mahsom [checkpoint] - he uses the Hebrew term — we get home at 11 at night. The truck comes to pick us up at 5 in the morning. International Viewpoint #139 • April 18, 1988
### Israel
Israeli occupied They want to stop us from thinking, to wear us out, to keep us from having anything to do with politics. But I, and many others along with me, have gone on strike and attacked the soldiers precisely because of the Mahsom."
Hamdi and his brothers all work in the building industry in Tel Aviv. Their father is an agricultural worker on a farm near Ashdon, a few kilometers from the village where he was born.
The young people in the Jebalya camp have never known their ancestral villages, but when they are asked where they come from, they all reply "from Kabatye," "from Kaukaba," "from Yibne." Nonethethey have deep roots in Jebalya, where they were born or where they have lived the first 20 or so years of their lives.
Abdallah is 19. He has just finished high school. One of his brothers is working as an engineer in Libya. The other two are workers in Israel. All three have diplomas from universities in Cairo and Beirut. "We went through all the procedures so that Ali could return. But to no avail. He is considered to be an emigré, and we can only see him for two months of the year."
The music of the future
Wouldn't Abdallah prefer to continue his studies abroad and be an engineer in one of the Gulf countries? "Never, I love my camp; I would leave it only to return to Kabatye. But that is the music of the fu-
Syria ture." Kabatye; he has only seen it once. "There was nothing left, only trees. I imagined it differently. I did not feel anything special, but I know that it is my village, that my home is there. In the meantime, I would not leave Jebalya for all the gold in the world."
A ghetto within a
Jebalya is a ghetto within a ghetto — 65,000 inhabitants in four square miles. The population density of Gaza is higher than that of Hong Kong. Despite the rain and the mud, the children run barefoot through the gutters where the rain water mixes with the slime from the sewers. There are houses everywhere. Nonetheless, unpaved roads run through the camp, whose breadth would be the envy of people in Tel Aviv.
They are one of the momentos General Sharon left behind when he "pacified" the Gaza Strip in the 1970s. They are called the "strategic roads," and in all the refugee camps thousands of homes were destroyed to make room for them, forcing the refugees to "re-establish themselves" in new places
We drove through the camp in a car, coming close many times to getting stuck in the mud. A friend accompanied me from the Erez checkpoint, which is the nightmare of the local people who work in Israel. I left my car there, with its yellow licence plates, which are not very welcome these days in Gaza. My friend was well known in the
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camp. He was born there, and was put under house-arrest for more than a year, after the military authorities forced him to interrupt his studies at the University of Bir Zeit on the West Bank.
Tear-gas grenades and truncheons
Every 20 meters, we were stopped by groups of youths, who gave us news or asked us to tell them what was happening. The radio had announced in the morning that calm had returned to Gaza, but virtually no one had left for work.
A patrol passed in front of the mosque, but it was not the sort of patrol of four or five bored soldiers that we were used to seeing all over the occupied territories. Today, it was 15, armed for battle, with teargas grenades, truncheons and gas masks. They walked in line, two abreast, carefully, their fingers on the triggers of their guns. They were parachutists. I recognized them by their red berets, the elite of the Hebrew
"In the camps, the paratroopers rule. In the cities and streets, it is the Guivati Brigade. You see, we have become specialists," Abdallah, who had gotten out of our car, said proudly. What strikes you most is the way that the soldiers try to avoid contact with the population at any cost. The Palestinian youth advance straight toward them, forcing the patrol to stop for a few seconds or to turn aside. Some children follow the soldiers, laughing and from time to time throwing insults at them.
Before the uprising got underway, things were different. The appearance of a patrol created a vacuum, and those who did not have time to get away hugged the walls to avoid being stopped and often picked up.
A car from the ACNUR, the UN agency formally responsible for the refugee camp, stopped near us. A young American, who seemed to know my companion, took him aside and whispered a few words in his ear. When he came back to the car, he told me: "We don't have much time. Jim just told me that one of those wounded last week has just died in Ashqelon hospital. He was a 17-year-old from Jebalya. The body will not arrive back before tonight, but the news is spreading like wildfire, and before another hour there will be trouble. There may be a curfew."
There were a dozen of them, sitting on mats in a house in Shatti, which is sometimes called "Beach Camp." This camp, like Jebalya, is tacked on to Gaza city. A few years ago, a few thousand of its 40,000 inhabitants were forcibly dispersed by the Israeli authorities in the context of a plan for "relocating refugees." But their homes were quickly occupied by other families in the camp. The rate of demographic growth is almost as great as at Jebalya.
The generation of the occupation
There were a dozen of them, all born since 1967. They became known as "the generation of the occupation." They talked first about their daily lives, about the checkpoint obviously, but also about fishing. As the name "Beach Camp" indicates, the place is on the sea, not far from the detention camp called "Ansar 2," where suspects and the so-called ringleaders of the most recent demonstrations are being held. Many families live, or lived, from fishing. The occupation has made them into importers of fish, but also often of hashish.
"Before the occupation, my father and my brothers came back with a lot of fish," Tariq recounted. "Since then, they have been forbidden to fish too close to the coast, for security reasons. Then, also for
MIDDLE EAST security reasons, the places in the north and south where we could fish were limited. Since there are a lot of us, and there are few places we can fish, there are few fish left."
Sometimes, at the limits of the territorial waters, fishing boats from Shatti meet Egyptian fishing boats and buy their catch, which they resell on the Gaza markets. Thus, Zionism, which was supposed to transform the Hebrew people into producers — without much success, moreover — has succeeded in making the Palestinians of
However, today the youth do not want to talk about fishing, about humiliation or about poverty. They want to talk about their own brave actions, and what one of them calls their resurrection.
Abdelmajid is 21. He comes from Ashqelon, but he was born in Shatti. He has finished high school and would like to go to one of the universities on the West Bank next year. He is a "political," and his language tends to be a bit emphatic. happened last week is the final uprising of the Palestinian people. Nothing will stop us. All of us are taking part, even the old people, even the rich neighborhoods of Gaza. In other times, our parents would say: 'We don't want you to get into trouble, to get involved with politics, to go to the demonstrations. ' Today, they are proud of us. We have shown the entire world what we are capable of. The soldiers are afraid of us. They run away like rabbits."
"We are not afraid of dying any more"
Each one relates his personal fight. One tells how they captured an Israeli soldier near the Shiffa hospital in Gaza. They stripped him, disarmed him and sent him back to his comrades. The Israeli press played up this episode a few days ago.
Drawing by Naji Al-Ali April 18, 1988 • #139 International Viewpoint
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5
MIDDLE EAST Another tells how they held off a whole army unit that was trying to get into the camp, and how he saw his best friend killed by a bullet that hit him head on.
"Even when there is a curfew", said Omar, 21 years old, "there are demonstrations of 20,000 people at night. We are all there, we young people. We give the orders - not the PLO like they say on TV, not the Islamic leaders, but us." Abdelmajid spoke with pride about his 12-year-old brother who takes a shower every morning so that he can die in a state of purity.
The central concern of these 19 and 20 year olds is death. *We are not afraid of dying any more," Omar explains. "With the death of Intissar [a young high school student murdered in cold blood by a Jewish settler a week before the mass explosion] and after the so-called incident where four people were tound dead at the entrance to Jebalya, we have been condemned to death. If you are going to die, it is better to die attacking the army."
This credo is expressed without heroics but naturally and with great sincerity. It is rather reminiscent of the attitude of soldiers on the battlefield, who are forced to think of death as an immediate and unavoidable possibility.
I have heard such remarks in Shatti and in Gaza, in Beit-Hanum and in Jebalya. Abdallah from Jebalya said: "It all started after the incident. But it was not an incident; it was a murder. The blood of Arabs counts for nothing. For the Jews, our lives mean nothing, so it is up to us to give them a meaning. All of us, even the old people, understand that today. If we have to die, let the whole world at least know why. When we went to visit the families of the victim, we swore not to let ourselves be slaughtered like lambs any longer."
### Deaths are not accidental
Don't let yourself be led like lambs to the slaughter. Two generations of Israelis have been educated in accordance with that maxim. It has been a banner for Israeli youth for 40 years.
In Gaza, no one believes that the deaths are accidental or owing to the nervousness of some soldiers. "We have learned that the soldiers do not shoot when they are in danger; they run away. They shoot when they have received the order to shoot and to kill. The military governor of Jebalya, Halabi, has killed two people here in the camp. Death is ever present, it threatens us everywhere. We have decided to go onto the attack. No, I am not afraid."
When we passed near Direl Bala'h, in the center of the Gaza Strip, we visited the school where Intissar was murdered. You can still see clearly the impact the bullet made on the wall. The murderer had just been released, three days before, on bail. 6 Temurder cide e was channed to involeuntary homicide. My companion told me International Viewpoint #139 • April 18, 1988 that in the days following the murder, hundreds of youths came to swear to avenge
Beyond the absolute desperation that I found eight years ago and which was described so powerfully by Grossmann in his book, there is death. But death can take another form than suicide or a slide toward a vegetative state. Heroism today is the answer of this generation to the desperate situation into which the occupation has plunged them. They have surmounted the wall of fear because they know that they no longer have anything to lose. They have become heroes ready to challenge the Israeli army because they know that they can win honor and maybe even freedom.
"Our backs are to the wall"
"Maybe it will take us many years more," Qassem explained, "but we have no choice. Our backs are to the wall" — once again a very Israeli expression — "and we will fight until we win. All oppressed peoples win at last, don't they? Do we count less than the Blacks in South Africa?" After a bit, he feels obliged to add, "If we do not take our destiny into our own hands, nobody else will, not even the PLO can do anything without us. Without us, all the Arab regimes will do nothing, and we are not expecting anything from negotiations. I, in any case, don't have any confidence in this International Conference..."
For years, the Palestinians in the occupied territories have waited. They have waited for the Arab armies, they have waited for the PLO commandos, negotiations, the International Conference, the Arab summit. Today, they no longer believe in this and they are no longer ready to wait. This waiting for salvation from outside created a very tense situation, and the disillusionment today is serving to ignite an explosion that is not just throwing the occupied territories into turmoil but all of Israeli society.
The Gaza YMCA is the only cultural center in the area. Over the last years, it has opened branches in most of the refugee camps. And there you find youth who want to engage in sports, learn languages or use a library worthy of the name.
Gazi teaches Hebrew there. He learned the language of the occupier in the 17 years he spent in prison for taking part in the actions of a commando unit of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in the heroic days of Guevara-Gaza, the legendary leader of the resistance from 1967 to 1971. After the exchange of prisoners in 1985, I wanted to find the person who wrote the Palestinian prisoners' requests to the prison authorities in a Hebrew that would be the envy of more than one Israeli. And so I found Gazi for the first time and subsequently I saw him again often.
He told me, "In Gaza, there is a great demand for Hebrew courses. After a long period of boycotting it, the new generation has learned that its best weapon is knowing the enemy, reading their press, understanding their language. The most political want to get to know the Israelis because they understand that the future will be either coexistence between the two peoples or perpetual
The generation of the occupation has learned to know Israelis, in particular their contradictions, their weaknesses. Hamdi from Jebalya told us, "We, unlike our parents and our older brothers and sisters, were born under the occupation; we have learned to know the occupier. They are not the invincible monsters that paralyzed our parents. We meet Israelis at work. They are human beings like you and me, with their weaknesses, their fears, their egoism and sometires their feelings.
"Between us, it is war. They have houses, nice books, a chance to study, a state. We have nothing. But they are empty. Behind their hatred of the Arabs is their fear of losing all that they have. We on the other hand have only our muscles to sell, for two shekels an hour. And that is why the Israeli soldiers run away when we attack them, because we are not afraid of dying a mar-
"This generation are not taking orders from anyone"
Another veteran, like Gazi, confirmed this: "The generation of the occupation feels more sure of itself than ours. They grew up when the PLO and Palestinian national feeling were already accomplished
"They were seven years old when Israel got its first major drubbing in 1973. At the age of 15, they witnessed the Israeli breakdown in Lebanon. But above all, they are not waiting for orders from anyone. In my time, there was only one Guevara-Gaza; today there are thousands who are taking their responsibilities without waiting for orders from anyone."
And later, we were back at the Erez checkpoint to pick up my car. There were no long queues of cars. Most of the workers preferred to stay in Gaza. The soldier who checked my papers was the same age as the youths with whom I had spent an intense
He and his comrades encounter them every day, from the other side of the barricades, but they have never talked to them, except to ask for their papers or to order them to move on.
Nonetheless, they are also of the occupation generation, the one that has known Israel only as Great Israel, for whom Gaza has always been part of their country. Handing back my identity card, he
"But what could an Israeli go to Gaza for? It's a madhouse. If we don't get rid of it quick, it will drive us crazy, like Lebanon. But everyone to his own taste. Goodnight." *