"Israeli closure policy has planted the seeds of hatred for a long time to come" Palestinian analyst, Khalil Shikaki

[BBC News Online, UK, 28 Sept, by Fiona Symon]: A year since the outbreak of the intifada, living standards among Palestinians have fallen dramatically.

Israel's stranglehold over the Palestinian economy is virtually complete and takes the form of over 150 military blockades erected in the West Bank and more than 40 in Gaza.

To these must now be added the new buffer zone, established this week along the border between Israel the Palestinian areas.

All entry and exit points to the West Bank and Gaza - even mountainous paths and dirt roads - have been closed.

Daily humiliation

Palestinians experience daily humiliation, and sometimes intimidation, at these checkpoints.

B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights group that monitors army activities in the occupied territories, says it is aware of at least six cases in which soldiers have shot and killed Palestinians "without provocation" at roadblocks during the uprising.

The Israeli army denies this, but what is not in dispute is the impact the checkpoints have had on the economy.

Palestinians face long waits at border crossings

This has virtually ground to a halt, according to a report by the Palestinian Economic Council for Development and Reconstruction. It puts the total loss in all economic sectors at $4.25bn dollars during the period between September 2000 and September 2001.

Tourism, which previously accounted for 11% of the Palestinian gross domestic product and was an important source of hard currency, has come to a complete halt as a result of the closure.

Farming, trade and industry have all been severely hit - PECDAR estimates that around 150,000 fruit trees alone have been uprooted. More than 4,000 homes have been destroyed, in addition to a large number of public buildings and projects, says PECDAR, which puts the cost of infrastructure losses at $165m and transport losses at $5m during the period.

Airport closure

The closure of Gaza International airport - the site of today's long-delayed meeting between Yasser Arafat and Shimon Peres - has had a disastrous effects on tourism and investment.

The Palestinian Authority has spent millions of dollars on attracting investment and upgrading tourism, but the airport closure has resulted in large numbers of investors taking their money elsewhere.

Meeting took place amid a hardening of attitudes

The siege has been particularly damaging because of the extent to which the Palestinian economy is dependent on Israel, says PECDAR, noting that 85% of trade is done through Israel, and Palestinians buy their electricity, water and telecommunications from Israeli companies.

Before the intifada the number of Palestinian workers was 651,000, of whom 133,000 worked inside Israel. As a direct result of the closure, unemployment has risen from 12% to 51% of the Palestinian workforce.

"A natural consequence of unemployment is poverty. As a result of the Israeli closure, thousands of Palestinians lost their jobs and consequently their main source of income," says PECDAR

Business paralysed

Palestinian analyst Khalil Shikaki said Israel's closure policy "has planted the seeds of hatred for a long time to come".

The blockades have not provided security for Israel, but have radicalised moderate Palestinians whose businesses have been paralysed, he says.

This view is reflected in the latest public opinion poll conducted by the Jerusalem Media and Communication Centre.

Palestinians saw Mr Sharon's visit to the holy site as the final straw

It surveyed Palestinians last week and found that attitudes towards the peace process have hardened. Support for the peace process fell from 38% last June to 29% this month and the percentage of Palestinians who regard the peace process as dead has risen to 42% from 27%.

Ghassan Khatib, director of the centre, says Palestinians are in no mood to compromise because they believe the one achievement of the intifada so far has been to prevent Israel from imposing its blueprint for a final settlement. "Palestinians believe that Israel initiated the violence, and that they are simply reacting and resisting Israeli aggression," said Mr Khatib.

[Associated Press - 28 September - RAMALLAH, West Bank] -- Thousands of Palestinians on Friday marked the anniversary of their uprising against Israel with marches, rock-throwing and three minutes of silence. Three Palestinians, including a 10-year-old boy, were killed by Israeli troops in confrontations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Forty-five Palestinians were wounded, two of them critically, doctors said. Six Israelis, including three civilians, were also hurt.

In another incident, a Palestinian man was killed in the West Bank town of Hebron when a bomb he was putting together exploded prematurely, Palestinian security officials said.

Despite the bloodshed, both sides said they remained committed to a fledgling truce arranged at the urging of the United States. Senior security commanders from the two sides met to work out the next steps, such as an easing of Israel's blockades of Palestinian towns.

Washington has been pressing for calm in the Middle East as it tries to bring Arab and Muslim states into an international anti-terrorism coalition.

Rallies were also held in Arab nations, where the public has been outraged by images of Palestinian deaths. In the Iraqi capital, a crowd of about 20,000 waved Palestinian and Iraqi flags.

In several rallies and mosque sermons, speakers urged Palestinians to keep fighting Israel. However, Palestinian officials said they were determined to make the truce stick.

"It's a matter of life and death for our people, and for the Israelis," Palestinian Planning Minister Nabil Shaath said of the cease-fire.

Yarden Vatikay, a spokesman for the Israeli Defense Ministry, said that the Palestinians had not lived up to their promises, but that Israel was not walking away from the truce.

The truce was affirmed Wednesday in a meeting between Arafat and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres. Israel has said it would ease its security blockade of Palestinian towns in the coming days, while the Palestinians said they were considering Israel's request to arrest suspected militants.

Despite the truce, there has been sporadic fighting, with seven Palestinians killed by Israeli fire since Wednesday. The U.S. State Department has criticized Israel for what it said was a "provocative" military strike in the Rafah refugee camp Thursday, scene of most of the violence this week.

Israeli-Palestinian fighting erupted Sept. 28, 2000, after Ariel Sharon, now Israel's prime minister, visited a contested holy site in Jerusalem's Old City, known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Haram as-Sharif, or Noble Sanctuary. Since then, 649 people have been killed on the Palestinian side and 177 on the Israeli side.

Across the region, Arabs rallied Friday to mark the start of the uprising.

In Syria, about 1,000 people marched through the capital in silence out of respect for the dead, while in south Lebanon, more than 1,000 people marched through the Palestinian refugee camp of Ein el-Hilweh to protest Israeli policy. In Baghdad, demonstrators chanted slogans calling for President Saddam Hussein to "liberate Jerusalem" and "blow up Tel Aviv," the commercial capital of Israel.

In Egypt, however, security forces turned out to deter demonstrations, and mosque preachers -- who mention the intefadeh nearly every week -- made only brief references to the anniversary.

In the West Bank and Gaza Strip, sirens wailed in several towns, including Jenin and Qalqiliya, as residents observed three minutes of silence in public squares to mark the anniversary.

Thousands joined a march in Gaza's Nusseirat refugee camp, streaming into the street after prayers at two local mosques. Marchers carried banners reading: "The uprising will continue until we uproot the Zionist occupation from our land."

A member of Arafat's Fatah movement, addressing the crowd through a loudspeaker mounted on a truck, said the fighting would continue "with all means," despite Arafat's orders to stop attacks on Israelis.

In the West Bank town of Ramallah, traffic stopped as Palestinians observed three minutes of silence. In the city's central Manara Square, masked men burned a cardboard model of a Jewish settlement.

After the rally, a procession made its way to an Israeli checkpoint, where dozens of youngsters threw stones at soldiers. Three stone-throwers were wounded by live Israeli fire and 24 were hurt by rubber-coated steel pellets, doctors said.

However, Palestinian police kept gunmen away from the area, traditionally a scene of firefights during Friday marches.

In the West Bank town of Hebron, Palestinian gunmen opened fire on Israeli troops, drawing return fire that killed a 25-year-old man and wounded 12 other Palestinians. In two nearby villages, two boys, ages 10 and 17, were killed by Israeli troops dispersing stone throwers with live ammunition, Palestinian doctors said.

The army said that troops briefly entered one of the villages _ Al Khader -- to chase Palestinians who had thrown an explosive device at an Israeli outpost. The army said a gun battle ensued, and that troops eventually left the village.

In Rafah, a Palestinian was critically wounded in what Palestinians said was an unprovoked shooting from an Israel tank parked at the outskirts of the refugee camp. The army said it had no reports of shooting in Rafah.

Many Palestinians said they were skeptical about truce prospects.

Some said they had sacrificed too much during the past year to end the uprising now. Others said there was little point in returning to negotiations because they felt Israel's hard-line prime minister, Ariel Sharon, had little to offer them.

"We have given a lot for this land," said Walid Ifha, a 35-year-old Ramallah school teacher. "To end the uprising without results is not fair. We should continue until we get what we want."

Israeli security forces in Jerusalem's Old City barred Palestinians under the age of 40 from attending prayers at the Haram as-Sharif.

In his Friday sermon, the top Muslim cleric in Jerusalem, Mufti Ikrema Sabri, called the uprising a "holy war" and said it would continue until Israel no longer controlled the holy city, which he said was under "military siege."

A year ago 12-year-old Mohammed al-Durrah died before the eyes of the world, instantly becoming an icon of the new intifada. Since then more than 120 children, 28 of them Israeli, have been killed. Suzanne Goldenberg visits the parents of the conflict's most famous victim and asks: has anything been achieved?

[The Guardian - UK - Thursday September 27, 2001]: On the wall of a breezeblock house, on a sand-spattered lane called Martyrs Street, there is a spray-painted rendition of the Palestinian pietà: a father, cradling his dying child in his arms, with both figures scored by red and black gashes representing bullets and blood.

This is the home of the al-Durrah family, unremarkable people transformed into modern-day icons when their son, Mohammed, was shot dead by Israeli soldiers in the very first days of the Palestinian revolt last year. Mohammed was 12 years old when he was killed on September 30, two days after the start of this second intifada. Within hours, the world was familiar with the final 40 minutes of his life, captured by a Palestinian cameraman for French television: the mask of terror on the face of a child, the convulsive twitches from each new round, and then the gradual loosening of the dying boy's grip on his father, Jamal.

Jamal al-Durrah and his wife, Amal, have been immersed in those scenes ever since, their sitting room plastered with images of Mohammed: cowering in his father's arms in propaganda posters; smiling in childhood snapshots; and serious in a large portrait in pastels donated by an Egyptian artist.

His death has been re-broadcast relentlessly by the Palestinian authorities on the television that is almost like an extra member of the family, and his short life has been re-lived in excruciating detail for the countless reporters, television crews, and dignitaries who have made their way here, drawn by the cult of the first child martyr of the intifada.

"I feel like he died only yesterday," says his mother, Amal. But while the constant attention makes it impossible to move beyond the first stages of grieving, she says she takes comfort in Mohammed's posthumous celebrity, and finds herself drawn irresistibly to the images of his death on TV.

"Even if they are horrible pictures, he was my son, and I still like to look at him," she says. "All the world saw Mohammed dying on television, and all the mothers felt that this child was their baby. When he died, he awakened the world, and so I think it was worth it."

Mohammed's father, Jamal, was hit by 12 bullets. He emerged from four months in a Jordanian hospital with a withered right hand, a slight limp, and a burning sense of mission.

"I believed in the struggle before the death of Mohammed," he says. "The main difference is that I have turned myself into an ambassador to tell the world about our struggle."

That sense of calling has taken the al-Durrahs - who had only left the Gaza Strip on one occasion before Mohammed's death, and who still do not own a telephone - to Egypt, Algeria, the United Arab Emirates, and the anti-racism conference in South Africa last month. Their home - a standard refugee shelter with a corrugated asbestos roof - is sparsely furnished with plastic chairs and badly scarred wooden divans.

But there are reports they have received thousands of dollars from well-wishers in the Arab world, in addition to the obligatory $220 a month pension doled out by the Palestinian Authority to the families of victims, and the $10,000 cheque from Saddam Hussein. Some of the donations paid for a marble headstone for Mohammed. An unemployed labourer before his son's death, Jamal muses about establishing a foundation for children with disabilities, or maybe a scholarship fund for needy university students.

Meanwhile, he and his wife have been consumed by the whirlwind of the past year. As they speak, their six surviving children pummel each other and scream, but fail to attract their parents' attention. The neighbours say they have run wild for the past year.

The celebrity, and their understandable bitterness at Mohammed's death, has also steeled the al-Durrahs' hearts against any chance of a compromise with Israel. To Jamal's mind, the carnage in New York and Washington on September 11 was a product of the Israeli secret service, Mossad, a theory he is willing to expound on at some length. Ask Mohammed's mother and father if they would be willing to contemplate living in a Palestinian state made up of the West Bank and Gaza, with Israelis as their neighbours, and both reply: "We must have all of Palestine."

Tomorrow, it will be exactly a year since the eruption of the violent Palestinian rising, which followed the provocative visit of the then hardline opposition leader, Ariel Sharon, to the hallowed ground in Jerusalem revered by Muslims as the Haram as-Sharif, and by Jews as the Temple Mount, site of two destroyed biblical temples. Since then, more than 750 people have been killed, including scores of children - Arab and Jewish - many far younger than Mohammed.

The spot where he was killed - Netzarim junction, a crossroads presided over by a hunkering Israeli army position - is unrecognisable. The concrete barrel where Mohammed and his father sought cover was destroyed by the Israeli army a few days after his death, along with a shack belonging to the Palestinian security forces. Two blocks of flats overlooking the Israeli army camp were razed later. In the man-made wasteland that remains, a lone Israeli tank now prowls, and a machine-gun nest looms from a mound directly opposite the spot where Mohammed was killed.

So what has the revolt won for the Palestinians? "There are no political solutions in the air as we enter the second year of the intifada," says Hussain Sheikh, the commander of Yasser Arafat's Fatah organisation in the West Bank. He says the uprising has achieved three broad aims: it has roused the international community to the Palestinian struggle against the Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza; it has exposed claims that Israel was willing to make painful concessions for a peaceful settlement of the Middle East dispute; and it brought renewed scrutiny to the role of the illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza as the focal points of conflict.

What Sheikh does not say, however, is that the primary accomplishment of the uprising was achieved with the images of Mohammed's death, when international sympathy for the Palestinians was never higher. The impact of those images was acknowledged by the Israeli authorities. Ever since, the army has stubbornly tried to promote an alternative explanation for Mohammed's death - that he and his father were in fact targeted by Palestinian gunmen.

The death of Mohammed did not stop other children from being killed. By the time the first reporters descended on the al-Durrah's home, the uprising had claimed an even younger victim than Mohammed: Sara al-Haq, a chubby two-year-old with copper-coloured ringlets, shot dead in her village near the West Bank city of Nablus. Instead, the killing of children has, in a way, defined the intifada, feeding the cult of martyrdom that has engulfed children cut down while throwing stones at Israeli tanks and, most ominously, the suicide bombers who have carried out dozens of attacks on Jewish civilians.

It has also provoked a macabre competition between Arab and Jew to claim the youngest victim of the revolt. According to the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, 140 of the Palestinian victims of the uprising have been under the age of 18 - or about a quarter of the entire toll. The Israeli human rights group, B'Tselem, counts 127 minors among the dead. Twenty eight Israeli children have been killed - including 22 who were blown up by suicide bombers inside the Jewish state. Yesterday there was still one more casualty: a 16-year-old Palestinian stonethrower shot in the head by Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip, three miles from the spot where Yasser Arafat and the Israeli foreign minister, Shimon Peres, were holding ceasefire talks.

In his iconic status among Palestinians, Mohammed al-Durrah now has a counterpart in a Jewish baby girl, Shalhavet Pass, who was shot dead in her stroller at the gates of the Jewish settlement in Hebron. She was 10 months old. Shalhavet's chubby face now stares out of websites, T-shirts, and amulets produced by the Hebron settlers in her memory.

However, the youngest Jewish victim of the uprising is Yehuda Shoham, aged five months, who died from wounds sustained when a rock was thrown at his family's car near the West Bank settlement of Shilo on June 6. The youngest Palestinian victim was not killed by Israeli soldiers, but by Jewish extremists. Diya Tmeizi, a three-month-old baby boy, who was born after his parents underwent a decade of fertility treatment, was shot dead with two other Palestinians when their car came under fire as they were returning from a wedding in Idna village, near Hebron, on July 20 this year.

Other children have died unremembered - as has a principal actor in the drama surrounding Mohammed al-Durrah's death: the ambulance driver, Bassem al-Bilbeisi, who was shot dead trying to rescue father and son. "I hear the al-Durrah family got money and has become famous now," says Hanan al-Bilbeisi, his widow, who says she and her 11 children have been reduced to penury by his death. "I know money is no compensation for losing a child, but I wish we could have been given a chance to have our say in the media. My husband also deserves to be known."

Those hundreds of dead - the celebrities such as Mohammed and the overlooked such as al-Bilbeisi - are the reason most widely cited by Palestinians for their unwillingness to go along with the ceasefire declared last week by the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat. How can they give up now when so many have died?

Sharon and Arafat have been made well aware that Washington does not want their conflict to intrude on its efforts to forge a broad war coalition, and that it cannot recruit Arab states so long as the intifada continues to rage.

Last week's truce was the fifth declared so far, but people had given it a breath of hope because of the unprecedented pressure from Washington for it to succeed. For some Palestinian leaders, who admit the intifada has brought them no closer to their aims, the ceasefire is a last, unexpected chance: they can abandon the largely military means by which the uprising has been fought, and return to mass protests. They realise they can hardly expect the international community to pay attention to their regional conflict when the world is transfixed by the attack on the US, and the awaited reprisal. Fifteen Palestinians were killed in the 24 hours that followed the carnage in the US; their deaths provoked little international comment.

The Palestinian leadership is also terrified that if they do not rein in the militants from Hamas and Islamic Jihad, there could well be another suicide attack inside the Jewish state - an eventuality that, in the present international atmosphere, could destroy for ever support for the Palestinians. However, Palestinians officials also say the ceasefire is tenuous, and the region could easily explode once more unless the truce produces real gains, such as an end to Israel's suffocating siege of the West Bank and Gaza.

"If the situation remains like this, we will have very many people who will want to die, especially if Sharon stays in his closed mentality, and remains opposed to any negotiations on a final settlement," says General Abdul Razak Majaida, the head of Palestinian security in the West Bank and Gaza, and the enforcer of the ceasefire. His security forces are also going to have to deal with popular resentment at Arafat's Palestinian Authority for making heroes of some of the dead - such as Mohammed - while others remain forgotten. Many Palestinians feel betrayed by their leaders.

But most of all they are going to have to convince a people who have surrounded themselves with images of their dead children to overcome the hatred that now rules their hearts. Emblazoned on the wall of his home, beneath the mural of the dying Mohammed, is a slogan evidently painted on with the al-Durrahs' approval. It says: "What was taken by force can only be returned by force."

Mid-East Realities

www.middleeast.org

Source: http://www.middleeast.org/articles/2001/9/415.htm