From Despondency to Despair

By WilliamE. Smith

West Bankers watch helplessly as the P.L.O. tears itself apart

"My wife and mother cried when they saw those pictures," said a teacher in Nablus, a Palestinian town of 80,000 on the Israeli-occupied West Bank. "We Palestinians must be the first people to suffer a civil war even before the creation of our state." He was speaking, with grief and horror, of the photographs he had seen of the fighting in Tripoli. Like others throughout the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, he was devastated at the sight of Palestinians killing Palestinians.

The 1.2 million Palestinians of the occupied territories are only peripherally involved in the Tripoli fighting, but ultimately they may be the biggest losers in the bloodletting. If a Palestinian state were ever created, it would probably be on their land, and they would be its first resident citizens. Whatever grievances they may have had in the past with the Palestine Liberation Organization and its chairman, Yasser Arafat, West Bankers have supported the P.L.O. as their only effective representative and Arafat as their symbolic leader. But as the fighting between Arafat's followers and their Syrian-backed opponents grew worse, the mood in the occupied territories began to change, as Bethlehem Mayor Elias Freij put it, "from despondency to disgust."

Reaction in the Arabic press of East Jerusalem was unusually bitter. The moderate newspaper Al Quds declared that there was no difference between last year's massacre of some 700 Arabs by Lebanese Christian militiamen in the outskirts of Beirut and "the massacres now being perpetrated by Syria and its Palestinian helpers." Another paper, Al Sha'ab, mocked the Syrian mobilization of reserves, asking, "If you have something serious to fear, why are you still bombarding the Palestinian camps?"

In Ramallah, just north of Jerusalem, a young Palestinian reflected on the effect the current fighting would have on the generation that has come of age under the Israeli occupation. "We grew up seeing the fedayeen [the Palestinian guerrillas] as hero figures," he said. "That has been shattered now." Others bridled at the fact that the Syrian-backed rebels were led by men who had originally come from the West Bank. Said an East Jerusalem journalist: "The moment they lifted arms against other Palestinians, they lost the right to be called Palestinians."

Whatever the outcome of the conflict, Arafat will almost surely be diminished in the eyes of West Bankers. A politician pointed out that if Arafat is cast aside and the P.L.O. comes to be perceived as an adjunct of the Syrian army, its role as sole legitimate voice of the Palestinians could be easily challenged, most probably by King Hussein of Jordan. "The King would be released from previous restraints and could enter into negotiations [with Israel and the U.S.] if he wanted to," said the politician. "And if he called for the support of the people in the West Bank and Gaza, he would get it."

Nonetheless, the public reaction to events in Tripoli was restrained. A one-day strike in East Jerusalem closed shops, schools and services. At Bir Zeit University students staged a demonstration at which they displayed signs denouncing Syrian President Hafez Assad. The Israeli military authorities later summoned the acting vice president of the university and questioned him about the raising of the Palestinian flag atop a classroom building during the rally. They did not, however, order the university closed, as they have done on previous occasions.

There is a harsh and quixotic quality to Israeli rule over the West Bank that, together with the government's massive settlement program to increase the number of Israelis who live there, has created a general sense of resignation among the West Bank's Palestinians. About 30,000 Israeli settlers now live in the area, and the number is expected to rise to 100,000 before the end of the decade. By then, says Meron Benvenisti, an expert on West Bank development, the Israeli presence will be "irreversible." In the process, many Palestinians have lost their homes and land without compensation. All must carry identity cards. They are subject to special military orders, which, among countless other things, ban the planting of fruit trees, the growing of eggplants and tomatoes in the Jericho area, and the import of animals into Israel without special permission from the authorities. Mayors are deposed, politicians live in fear of restriction to their homes or, worse, deportation. Says a prominent Palestinian politician: "They make life miserable for me. We live hour by hour. The military governor can call me at any time, and I must go to him, or else a new restriction order will be imposed. It is a pretext, to tell us, 'You are always under our command.' "

Many people in the occupied territories seem to expect the worst: eventual annexation of the land, but without most of its people. Palestinians cite the words of Chaim Weizmann, Israel's first President, who described the flight of 650,000 Palestinians at the time of Israel's 1948 war of independence as a "miraculous simplification of Israel's tasks." Says one Palestinian political leader: "For the moment, the Israelis have divided us into two categories, the educated, who cause trouble by talking about social and political rights, and the laborers, whom they need. They would like to expel the first and keep the second."

The pervasiveness of this conviction accounts for the determination of many Palestinians, in the absence of any real alternatives, to hold on to what they have. Since Arafat's expulsion from Beirut last year, the Palestinians have realized that they have nowhere else to go. Lebanon and Syria do not want them; Jordan has restricted their movement to the East Bank during the past year; jobs are scarce in the gulf states and elsewhere. "I certainly don't have a design for the future," says a university administrator, "but I feel the battle now is for our physical survival on the West Bank." --By WilliamE. Smith. Reported by Harry Kelly/Jerusalem and Nafez Hazzal/Washington

With reporting by Harry Kelly, Nafez Hazzal/Washington This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.