BY ARGIRIS MALAPANIS AND RYAN KELLY
RAMALLAH, West Bank -"There is no peace," said Jamal Cafi,
sitting on the steps of Birzeit University, on a hilltop outside
this city, during the sunny morning of February 4. "We got
nothing out of Wye Plantation or the Oslo accord."
Cafi, 25, a Palestinian student originally from Gaza, was referring to the agreement brokered by Washington and signed by Palestinian National Authority president Yasser Arafat and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the Wye River Plantation in Maryland last October. The pact was supposed to reverse the refusal of Tel Aviv to implement many provisions of the peace accord the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Israeli regime signed in 1993 at Oslo, Norway. But the Israeli rulers have once again refused in the last three months to meet agreed-on deadlines for additional troop withdrawals from areas of the West Bank, release of Palestinian political prisoners, and other promises.
The Oslo accord was the product of several factors. First was the failure of the Israeli government to suppress the struggle of the Palestinian people for self-determination. The "peace process," though, was as much the result of the bourgeoisification of the PLO leadership -turning its eyes away from the ranks of the fighting Palestinian masses and relying more and more first on the Arab regimes in the region and then on accommodation with Washington in the struggle for a Palestinian homeland. The intifada, the five-year-long rebellion against the Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, was largely exhausted by the early 1990s. While drawing new generations into the struggle, that uprising did not forge a new leadership strong enough to provide a revolutionary alternative to the PLO apparatus.
Despite the setbacks that contributed to striking the 1993 deal with Tel Aviv, however, Palestinian resistance has remained unbroken in the last half decade. Cafi and many other students, for example, joined thousands of workers and other Palestinians in protests throughout the occupied territories in November and December against killings by Israeli troops, for the release of political prisoners, and against Washington's bombings of Iraq. This resistance is one of the main reasons behind the current crisis in the Israeli ruling class - manifested in the splintering of the governing Likud party and the early parliamentary elections the Netanyahu regime was forced to call in December.
Cafi's opinion on the Wye and Oslo accords was shared by a large majority of the dozens of workers, farmers, students, and other Palestinians interviewed by Militant reporters in the West Bank and Gaza during a week-long trip here February 1-8.
Economic and social conditions have deteriorated considerably for most Palestinians in the occupied territories since the Oslo accord. As Sami Swalhe, 36, a Palestinian worker who lives in a refugee camp in Gaza City and travels to Israel for construction jobs, put it, "We are worse off today than six years ago."
Crippling unemployment
Among the 2.5 million Palestinians in the occupied
territories, about half a million are wage workers, including
agricultural laborers. Joblessness now exceeds 40 percent in the
West Bank and 55 percent in Gaza - a substantial increase
compared to 1993 levels. These figures top 60 percent every time
the Israeli regime imposes closures of the borders in the West
Bank and Gaza. The closures require special permits to travel
into Israel, which are virtually impossible to get for most
Palestinian workers. These are in addition to general work
permits for Israel, which are canceled during closures.
Since the Oslo accord, the Israeli occupiers have extended numerous borders inside the West Bank that they can shut down at will, preventing movement within the area.
The Palestinian National Authority (PNA) now has administrative and security control of all the major cities in the West Bank and most of the area of the Gaza strip. These areas, called "A," comprise only 2 percent of the land in the West Bank. Another 14 percent - "B" regions that are mostly the suburbs of cities under Palestinian command - is under joint PNA- Israeli control. "Joint" means the PNA must get approval by Israeli authorities for all projects there, from digging wells to repairing roads. The B areas were supposed to be turned over to Palestinian control under the Wye agreement, along with Israeli troop withdrawals from an additional 13 percent of West Bank territory. But Tel Aviv has not met its commitments, and has unilaterally suspended implementation until a new government is elected in May. The rest of the land in the West Bank, called "C," remains under complete Israeli control.
To get into an A area, one has to pass through first an Israeli and then a Palestinian military checkpoint. The Palestinian-controlled cities are thus surrounded by large areas where enemy troops reign.
This A-B-C division has provided a legal and physical framework for Israeli forces to confine Palestinians in the cities and villages where they live during closures. "We have allowed Israel to create a Bantustan-like system in the West Bank," said Haidar Abdel Shafi, head of the Red Crescent in Gaza, during a February 7 interview at his home in Gaza City. Bantustans, or rural "homelands," were isolated and impoverished areas were many blacks were confined under the racist apartheid regime in South Africa when not employed by white-owned mines or capitalist plantations.
Border closures often mean that farmers are not allowed to tend their crops or take animals for grazing on nearby hills. According to Rula Nesnas of the Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committee (PARC), closures in the last half decade reached a height of nearly 170 days per year in 1996 and 1997. Tel Aviv issues these military orders on the pretext of safeguarding Israeli "security." Their biggest impact is cutting off Palestinian workers from jobs in Israel.
Since the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, the little industry that has existed in these areas has been stunted from further development. And because of the unstable political conditions, virtually no foreign investors and only a handful of Palestinian businessmen have opened new production facilities in the PNA-controlled areas since the Oslo accord.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians depend on someone from their family working in Israel, usually on what they are referred to as "black jobs." These are physically demanding and lower-paid jobs in agriculture, construction, or house cleaning.
In the last six years, Tel Aviv has reduced the number of permits for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza who can work in Israel from a height of 180,000 to 60,000 at the beginning of this year. The Israeli rulers have tried to replace Palestinians with Jewish immigrants from Russia or Ethiopia.
"But tens of thousands of Palestinians cross the borders every day and work in Israel illegally," said Ziyad Abbas, a Palestinian journalist in Bethlehem. Around Jerusalem, thousands of these workers can be seen walking over mountain paths well before dawn to avoid Israeli patrols. The journey to and from work often takes hours on foot. These workers leave at 3:00 a.m. or earlier and get home as late as 9:00 p.m. "Many Israeli employers have recently used the situation to get free labor," Abbas said. Palestinian organizations have documented hundreds of cases of workers without permits receiving false paychecks or being dismissed after a few days' work without pay. "One day these bosses will pay dearly for this."
Farmers can't make ends meet
Through the laws of the capitalist market, and the myriad
special military and other regulations of the occupiers,
Palestinian farmers have found themselves more and more shut out
from being able to sell their products competitively. Outside
the relatively fertile Jordan valley around Jericho, there is
virtually no other place where Palestinian producers can make
ends meet farming the land. And even in the Jordan valley, where
most and the best of the land belongs to Israeli settlements,
most Palestinian farmers have been reduced to subsistence
farming, unable to compete with cheaper Israeli produce.
Productivity on Israeli farms is higher due to investments in
technology and irrigation Palestinians have been barred from.
And many of the Israeli products are subsidized by the state to
ensure penetration of the market.
"Confiscation of land and water has been one of the most precious prizes of the Israeli occupation," said Nadi Farraj, a farmer in Bethlehem and member of the Cooperative Society there. The co-op, with 800 members, owns a press for olive oil production, five tractors, and a bulldozer that are rented at a nominal fee by hundreds of farmers in the area.
Out of the 5.8 million dunams (1.3 million acres) of land in the West Bank and Gaza, the Israeli occupiers had confiscated 3 million dunams, or 53 percent of the land, by the end of 1997. From the land still owned by Palestinians, 1.6 million dunams are cultivated largely in mountainous terrain. Two-thirds are planted with olive trees. The rest is used mostly for the production of wheat and barley, as well as grapes, bananas, and other fruit and vegetables.
"The policy of Israel has fostered dependence on them and is trying to drive us out of production," Farraj said. "Besides a few labor-intensive crops - like strawberries, eggplant, or flowers - which are cheaper to produce using low-paid Palestinian labor in places like Gaza, we have been prevented from any development in the agricultural sector. It's much cheaper today to buy Israeli barley or wheat than what it costs us to produce. Before the 1967 occupation, Palestinians had 37,000 cows in the West Bank. Now we have less than 8,000." All the red meat and most dairy products are imported from Israel. "And we have to buy fuel oil from Israel, rather than being able to import it from Iraq or Saudi Arabia at much cheaper prices."
Farraj and a number of other farmers pointed out that Tel Aviv has consciously kept the infrastructure of Palestinian rural areas underdeveloped. Of the 1,000 villages in the West Bank, for example, 400 are without electricity today and 340 without running water. "The only roads they repair are those used by Israeli settlers."
One of the toughest problems facing Palestinian farmers is the lack of water for irrigation. The Israeli regime has prevented Palestinians from digging new wells or fixing those that are damaged, while Zionist settlers are encouraged and aided to drill deep to tap water aqueducts. The occupiers have also installed meters on Palestinian wells, and farmers have to pay dearly for every liter of water they use above the assigned limit. "They steal most of our water," Farraj said. Throughout the West Bank, reserve water tanks dot most rooftops of Palestinian households, used when the central supply, controlled by Tel Aviv, is cut off. "Thirty-two percent of all water in Israel comes from the West Bank. At the same time, we go without running water in many villages and even in our cities, sometimes for weeks. Today each Israeli consumes on average 10 times more water than each Palestinian. And to add insult to injury they say it's because we are not civilized people."
Farraj and other farmers pointed out that while Palestinians in the occupied territories see their crops dry out for lack of water, settlers nearby have plenty to keep their pastures green and swimming pools full.
Settlements grow considerably
According to published Israeli statistics, the overall number
of settlers in East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and West Bank was
about 320,000 at the end of 1997.
The number of Jews in Zionist settlements in the West Bank and Gaza grew to 170,000 last year from approximately 115,000 in 1993 - a 48 percent increase. The overall number of settlements, which are built exclusively for Jews, has remained the same, about 170 in these areas. But many have grown into cities, like the Ariel settlement in the Nablus area in northern West Bank that now houses 20,000 people. And often new settlements are linked with existing ones to keep their overall number deceptively low.
Settlement construction has flourished around Jerusalem. A ring of settlements on hilltops around the city are systematically being linked to cut off direct access to the West Bank. "The Zionist regime has pushed hard to alter the demographic facts on the ground to prevent us from declaring East Jerusalem the capital of a Palestinian state," said Mohammed Barakat, a minivan/taxi driver who lives in East Jerusalem. Last year, Tel Aviv claimed that the Jewish population of East Jerusalem surpassed for the first time the Palestinian population of 155,000.
Since the signing of the Oslo accord, Tel Aviv has confiscated 400,000 dunams (nearly 89,000 acres) of Palestinian land on the West Bank, according to Mohammed Abu Harthieh of the Palestinian organization Al Haq, based in Ramallah.
"The bulk of this activity took place under the former Labor Party regime of Yitzhak Rabin," said Haidar Abdel Shafi. "It's not just the `extremists' in Likud who are responsible."
Much of the confiscated land has been slated for construction of the so-called bypass roads in the West Bank. This is entirely new since 1993. According to Al Haq, completed bypass roads are already 400 km (250 miles) long. Another 150 km are currently under construction. And the Israeli regime has announced plans to build another 350 km of such roads. This is a vast network in the West Bank, which is about 150 km long and 40 km wide.
The justification for the bypass roads is to allow settlers to commute from settlement to settlement and to have easy access to Israel as Tel Aviv has given up control of small portions of the West Bank. These roads bypass Palestinian-controlled cities. On some occasions, though, entire Palestinian villages are cut in two for such roads to pass through. For "security" reasons, Tel Aviv takes over 150 meters on each side along such roads, which cannot be cultivated or inhabited by Palestinians.
As Barakat and many others said, these are "apartheid" roads. They are reserved for Israeli citizens. Most Palestinians in the occupied territories, whose cars have different color plates than Israelis, can't use them. Or they have extreme restrictions on what portions they can use and when, ordered by the Israeli military.
This situation has provoked constant clashes with the settlers, many of whom are organized by rightist Zionist groups and are armed, often forming paramilitary units. According to Al Haq, 115 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli settlers in the occupied territories since 1993.
"This is the Netanyahu-Sharon dream of how to prevent an independent Palestinian state from coming into being," stated Barakat. Ariel Sharon, now Israeli foreign minister, and the most ardent proponent of the settlement policy, called on settlers to seize more land after Netanyahu signed the Wye agreement. "The trouble is they'll have to kill a lot of Palestinians to do it," Barakat said.
The next article will focus on Palestinian resistance to the Israeli occupation and attitudes among Palestinians towards the Palestinian National Authority.