Though Palestinian farms have disappeared in Gaza, driving more Palestinians into Israel for day-labor jobs, Israeli farmers have found the Palestinians to be an important market for their crops, selling 60,908 tons of fruit and vegetables in Gaza in 1984. Indeed, the Palestinians in the occupied territories of West Bank and Gaza have become the second-largest export market for Israeli goods, behind the United States and ahead of Britain.
Commercial fishing, once an important employer inside Gaza, has been shrinking, too. Since 1967, Gazan fishermen have been restricted by a dawn-to- dusk curfew and have had their traditional fishing grounds reduced to one-quarter of the area they had used before the occupation. If they are caught outside the Israeli-imposed fishing area, their boats are seized and the fishermen are jailed and fined.
The Israelis, who heavily subsidize their own fishing industry, have blocked repeated efforts by Gazan fishermen to modernize. The Palestinians, for example, have been trying to build a jetty that would relieve them of having to launch their boats from the beach every day with tractors, but the Israelis won`t let them. Still, the Palestinian fishermen have to pay 48 percent of their income in Israeli taxes.
Predictably, the Gazan fish industry is sinking fast, as fishermen hire out as crewmen on Israeli boats or abandon fishing completely for day-labor in Israel. And, of course, Gaza now imports through Israel much of the fish it consumes.
”It`s like forcing fishermen to starve or turn into thieves in order to put food on our tables,” said Fathi Sa`idi, a representative of the Palestinian fishermen`s cooperative in Gaza. ”In the past (before 1967), we used to bring in hundreds of tons of fish every day. Now we are reduced to about a half-ton a day for the entire fleet. The best-quality fish goes to Israel to be sold because the Gaza market can`t afford it. Now our people buy Argentine frozen fish through Israel because it`s much cheaper than our own.” When they were forced into refugee camps in 1948, the Palestinians were largely a rural population thrust into overcrowded, urban poverty. Forty years later, nothing has changed. The average Palestinian household in Gaza consists of six to eight people living in a concrete or prefabricated house that is nearly 40 years old and only 216 square feet.
The Israeli military government makes it difficult, through regulations, to enlarge a house in the camps. Little has been done to improve the urban infrastructure of Gaza in 40 years. Few streets are paved, raw sewage flows through open ditches into cesspools or directly into the sea, and hospitals are understaffed and underequipped.
Gaza is a pressure cooker, and the Israeli military government has allowed it precious little opportunity to vent the constantly building steam. No municipal elections have been allowed in Gaza since 1948.
Getting out of Gaza today to attend school, find employment or simply take a vacation is an ordeal that puts the Palestinians at the mercy of the Israelis. Before 1948, the British issued an official ”British Passport Palestine” to all citizens of the protectorate, Arab, Jewish and Christian. Under Egypt`s administration, Gazans were given Egyptian travel documents identifying them as Palestinians.
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The Israeli military government, however, issues a travel document for Gazans with severe time constraints. If Gazans wish to fly through Israeli airports to foreign destinations, they get a travel pass stamped ”one time only” and good for only a year. That means students and workers must return to Gaza every year for a new document, which can be refused at any time with no explanation and no appeal. If they do not return within the alotted time, they are not allowed to return at all. The Israelis add insult to injury by declaring Palestinians` nationality on the document as ”undetermined.”
In effect, the Gazans are citizens of no place, protected by no one. They feel betrayed on all fronts. They blame the West for creating Israel and allowing the Israelis to drive them from their homes in 1948 and for its continued military and diplomatic support of Israel since then. They blame the Arab world, especially the oil-rich gulf nations, for ignoring their plight and refusing to use its economic muscle on their behalf.
It isn`t hard to understand, then, why Gaza gave birth to the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964. It isn`t hard to understand, either, why the PLO, after the 1967 occupation, used Gaza as a battleground with Israel. PLO units fought fiercely inside Gaza until 1972, when they beaten into submission by occupation forces. In that time, the PLO began escalating its attacks on civilian Israeli targets and became a reviled name in much of the world, synonymous with terrorism.
Time, even 40 years, is no healer of wounds if you sit in a refugee camp. Gaza is the proof. The Palestinians there hang on stubbornly to their refugee status, demanding the continuance of the ”temporary” relief the UN began giving them in 1948. To give up their refugee status would be, in the eyes of Gazans, an act of surrender and an acknowledgment that they no longer have a claim on their land in Israel.
The passing years have served only to swell the blistering resentment between Palestinians and Israelis.
”We`ve never been able to come close to having a life like we would have had in Palestine,” said one Palestinian father in Gaza. ”I tell you, you feel like you are in a coma, even after all these years. You want to provide well for your children. Instead, it is my sons who have to provide for me.
”You cannot forget the injustice. You cannot forget your homeland or lose the faith that someday you will return and will get back all that was stolen from you. That hope never vanishes. I taught my sons that hope, and they will teach their sons, and nobody will ever forget.”
The younger generation of Gazan refugees already has claimed leadership in the resistance. When I was in Gaza in September, 1987, gangs of youths roamed the streets, taunting Israeli patrols, throwing rocks, burning tires. Older refugees seemed proud that the torch had been passed, that the fight would go on.
Yusra Barbari, a slight, gentle woman in her 70s, heads the Palestinian Women`s Union in Gaza.
”Refugees are not only a humanitarian problem,” she said. ”It`s not enough just to eat and have a place to sleep. It`s dignity, respect and identity, too.
”I`ve been taken to military court for saying we were going to organize a sewing course and an English course. I was also charged for having certain books and for hanging a map and a flag of Palestine in my office. There is no freedom of the press here, no freedom of speech or of assembly. We are killed and humiliated every day, and nobody says anything.
”Now the new generation born in refugee camps is the one resisting. It`s not the older people. There is no future for them here, no jobs. They have nothing. They are not afraid to die.”
Two months after my visit to Gaza, the lid blew off. In December, Gaza was consumed with civil insurrection, strikes, boycotts of Israeli goods and bloody rioting against Israeli troops. It was the beginning of what the Palestinians call the intifada, civil insurrection, which spread quickly to the other occupied territories and has persisted throughout this year. More than 250 Palestinians have died (and 6 Israelis), and thousands of
Palestinians have been injured as the result of a stark Israeli military policy of severely beating demonstrators.
What is happening in Israel today seems not significantly different from 40 years ago. Israelis and Palestinians are two peoples contesting to live on the same land but not as equals. Each side is determined to have political, military and numerical supremacy over the other.
Each side has a well-grounded fear of the other, a fear that seems to preclude ever reaching a peace that would placate and accommodate both Israelis and Palestinians. The strife, the terrorism, the beatings and killings and draconian measures will continue. So will the insane buildup of arms and armies in the Middle East. And so will the constant realignment of greater and lesser powers in the Middle East that are jockeying for influence and seeking an edge in the chaos that will serve their own interests.
The most damning legacy of the Palestinian situation is that these refugee camps have come to be accepted by the world as a permanent fixture. After 40 years, even the Palestinians themselves accept the camps not only as inevitable in their struggle but as a valuable symbol to keep the fight alive. If the rest of the world can accept the Palestinian camps after 40 years as an unfortunate adjunct of war, it can accept refugees as permanent or semipermanent fixtures elsewhere. Refugees worldwide can be and are used as political goods to be brokered for political advantage or to be deposited as so much unwanted trash across a border on somebody else`s land.
Wednesday in Tempo: Sometimes there is no asylum in Africa.