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Westbank brokendreams { May 7 2002 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42851-2002May6.htmlhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42851-2002May6.html
West Bank's City of Broken Dreams
Incursion Took Physical and Psychological Toll on Ramallah
By John Lancaster
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 7, 2002; Page A01
RAMALLAH, West Bank -- Islah Jad, a British-trained lecturer at Bir Zeit University near here, is an outspoken emblem of Palestinian aspirations. She lives in a gracious stone house with a walnut tree out front, frequently travels abroad, and founded a women's group that for years prodded Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority to respect democracy and the rule of law.
It was an uphill battle then. Now it seems even harder.
As bulldozers scoop up the rubble left by Israeli forces during their month-long stay in this airy hilltop city, Jad's group has set aside its usual agenda in favor of a more urgent task -- collecting food and furniture for Palestinians whose jobs were lost or whose property was destroyed.
"We decided to shift all our programs to emergency aid," said the Egyptian-born Jad, 50, known for her advocacy of women's rights in Palestinian society. "You can't talk about training or advocacy or emancipation. It's impossible."
Jad's shift in priorities shows how the landscape of Palestinian life -- its civic institutions, economy, and social and psychological fabric -- has been reordered by the Israeli incursion into Ramallah and five other Palestinian-controlled cities in the West Bank. After a period of optimism and relative prosperity following the signing of the Oslo peace accords in 1993, the Palestinians in this middle-class city of 40,000 just 12 miles north of Jerusalem are reckoning with crime, trauma, lost opportunity and a desire for revenge.
Ramallah is an especially good vantage point from which to assess the fallout among Palestinians from the Israeli offensive, which was launched on March 29 in response to a wave of suicide bombings that targeted Israelis. As the West Bank's main commercial and political hub, Ramallah reflects the highest hopes of many Palestinians, but also underscores the costs of the confrontation with Israel that flared anew in the intifada, or uprising, that began 19 months ago following the collapse of peace talks at Camp David.
Israeli forces wreaked havoc with infrastructure and civic institutions in Ramallah, including a new forensics laboratory -- built with help from France -- that was destroyed with demolition charges, according to police officials here. The effects of the incursion on the local economy have been dire, as supplies to merchants are cut off and as customers disappear for lack of jobs and cash. Construction is at a standstill.
But the most serious and potentially long-lasting effects are also the most difficult to measure. Some Palestinians say they detect symptoms of serious strain in the social ties that have sustained their society through 35 years of Israeli military occupation and two uprisings, the first of which began in late 1987.
They cite, among other incidents, the brutal and extrajudicial shooting in Ramallah's main square on April 22 of three Palestinians thought to have collaborated with Israel, and a small but unusual outbreak of looting by Palestinians in downtown stores in the midst of last month's fighting.
"I am really worried about Palestinian and Israeli societies," said Mahmoud Sehwail, a psychiatrist who runs a treatment center for victims of torture and violence. "Anyone who is subjected to violence can project his aggression on their society, whether stealing or killing."
In a similar vein, mental health experts describe a troubling spike in clinical depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and other psychiatric ailments. In one case that drew wide attention here, a local pharmacist, Iman Titi, suffered three bullet wounds to her legs last month when she charged an Israeli military position outside Arafat's headquarters and hysterically demanded that the Israelis release her husband from detention.
"I was not sleeping," Titi, 31, recalled in an interview at her family's apartment, where she is recuperating. After being shot, she was taken to an Israeli hospital and spent time in a psychiatric ward. "I lost my mind," she said.
Palestinians who had grown accustomed to running their own affairs -- Ramallah was turned over to Palestinian control six years ago -- are suddenly facing a much less certain future. "The damage is in the psyche," said Adila Laidi, 35, the director of a cultural center here. "We used to live in security. Now we are just waiting for [the Israelis] to return."
"Really, it is very, very dark," said Burhan Odeh, 37, the usually cheerful manager of the New City Inn, which opened barely a year ago with backing from a Palestinian American investor hoping to capitalize on a new era of prosperity. "Without an end to the occupation, I don't think there will be stability."
Lost Independence
Israel seized the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the 1967 Middle East war, but turned over large areas to Palestinian control under the Oslo accords. Soon, Ramallah boomed. Investors, many of them Palestinian Americans, poured money into new hotels, office buildings, shops and restaurants. Palestinians from around the West Bank, and even some Israelis, came to Ramallah to enjoy the thriving nightlife, including jazz at a Tex-Mex restaurant where the saxophonist was an American Jew who lived in Jerusalem.
Much of that activity ground to a halt with the start of the Palestinian uprising, as Israeli troops restricted movement between Palestinian towns and cities, setting up checkpoints in response to violence and terrorist attacks against Israeli targets. That was followed by the destruction of last month's invasion: roadblocks of rubble, smashed cars, ransacked businesses and government offices.
Seven members of Ramallah's traffic police were killed, according to their chief, Col. Izzat Mansour. Israeli forces withdrew from most of Ramallah on April 21 and left the area around Arafat's compound early Thursday morning after Arafat acquiesced in the jailing of six Palestinians wanted by Israel.
The Palestinians have struggled to restore some kind of normal life. Bulldozers have reopened blocked roads and street-cleaning trucks scrubbed dirt from the pavement. Power and water were back on in most neighborhoods, while at city hall workers were trying to retrieve data from computers they say were damaged by Israeli soldiers. A gardener tended flowering shrubs near the front door.
"We have recovered, actually," said Mayor Ayoub Rabah, who holds a civil engineering degree from Wayne State University in Detroit, from behind the desk of his spacious second-floor office. "Everybody in our shop is trying to get things back to normal as soon as possible."
When pressed, however, Rabah acknowledged life was not normal. The city, for example, depends on taxes and licensing fees to pay for such basic municipal services as garbage collection. But with unemployment running as high as 50 percent, Rabah said, "no one will be able to pay taxes, so I expect our income will be zero."
Mansour, the chief of the traffic police, estimated that Israeli forces destroyed 80 percent of the police infrastructure in Ramallah over the past 19 months, including the new crime lab and most of the city's jail cells. Israel hit Palestinian security buildings on numerous occasions after suicide bombings in Israel, saying Arafat was not doing enough to control militants.
"Even if we capture a criminal, we do not have a place to detain him," Mansour said. Judging from the tiny open storefronts around Manara Square, the city's main square, Ramallah is adequately supplied with basic foodstuffs. The New City Inn gets coffee and sugar from a hotel-supply company in a nearby Arab town that sends deliveries in taxis via back roads that skirt Israeli checkpoints. DHL, the express delivery service, still delivers, albeit sporadically.
But many businesses are foundering, and some have shut down altogether. Raji Najami, for example, was until recently the manager of a DVD rental store in a downtown building. Israeli troops took over the store as an interrogation center, he said, and he accused them of stealing 600 DVD titles as well as Sony PlayStations and DVD players.
Now the store has nothing left to rent, and Najami doesn't know when or how the owner will reopen. "Insurance doesn't cover war," said Najami, 21, who relies on his income to pay tuition at Bir Zeit, where he is studying business administration. "We don't know what to do."
A similar sense of helplessness grips the more fortunate members of Ramallah society. Jad, the university lecturer, recalled a tragic sequence of events involving a young Palestinian policeman who was a friend of her son and a frequent guest at her home. He was hiding with a group of about 40 Palestinian policemen, many armed, in a building surrounded by Israeli troops. The young man, who was a member of the Palestinian anti-drug squad, telephoned Jad's home to ask for help.
Desperate to be of use, Jad called the municipal electric company, pleading with a manager to shut off power to the neighborhood where the young man was trapped so he and the others might be able to escape under cover of darkness. But the worker just laughed at the request, Jad said, telling her that he could not "even leave my bathroom" because the gunfire was so heavy, she said.
She then tried the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, again to no avail. "Every two minutes he kept calling us," Jad said. "I felt that I was losing my mind." Eventually the young man stopped calling. She learned 11 days later that he had been killed. He died in a confrontation with the Israelis, she said, but she did not know the details.
Like many others here, Jad said she had concluded that the Palestinian Authority -- founded by Arafat in 1994 -- would evolve from a kind of revolutionary group into a transparent, democratic governing body. "We thought we were heading for a state," she recalled.
But the experience of the past month has shaken that assumption to the core. "The Palestinian Authority was totally paralyzed," she said, lamenting the absence of any central authority for dealing with the humanitarian crisis following the Israeli incursion. "No one ever told the people anything," she said. "They were making declarations to journalists about political stands, but nothing for the people. Can you believe a leader of a people in resistance, and in his office he doesn't have a generator?"
Growth in Crime
Serious crime is a relative rarity among Palestinians, who pride themselves on their ability to maintain traditional values and social cohesion under the pressure of military occupation. But the latest Israeli offensive has caused at least some Palestinians to question that, too.
For example, while business owners blame Israelis for most of the looting that occurred here last month, they acknowledge that Palestinians were responsible in a handful of cases. Yusef Tahoun, 26, said Palestinians stole $16,731 worth of equipment from his computer store in downtown Ramallah in the early days of the incursion.
Some residents were also troubled by the near anarchy that gripped Ramallah in the first hours after Israel withdrew from much of the city. With no police on the streets a day later, the three men accused of collaborating with Israel were dragged from a car by masked gunmen who then fired at their arms and legs at close range as the men writhed in agony. Such scenes have occurred elsewhere in the West Bank, but the incident was highly unusual for Ramallah. Some members of the crowd cheered and reportedly tried to block ambulances that came to take away the wounded men, one of whom later died.
"Nobody condones that," said Rabah, the mayor, emphasizing that "police are back on the streets and law and order will be enforced."
Restoring Palestinians' psychological equilibrium may prove more of a challenge. Sehwail, the psychiatrist, said that 55 percent of Palestinians surveyed by his organization last summer reported symptoms consistent with post-traumatic stress disorder, such as sleeplessness, anxiety and difficulty concentrating. The level is certainly higher now, he said.
One example was Titi, the pharmacist, a patient of Sehwail's. She suffered what Sehwail described as an episode of "acute psychosis" after Israelis arrested her husband on the second day of the incursion.
Titi and her husband, Samer, recalled in an interview that at the beginning of the Israeli incursion, troops moved through the neighborhood using loudspeakers to order all men between the ages of 16 and 45 to report to a nearby school. Samer Titi, an optometrist who studied in Britain, figured he had nothing to worry about. He told his wife he would be home in just a few hours, and even took a shower before going.
But he did not return right away. He was moved from the school to a temporary detention center some distance from Ramallah and did not come back for more than a week. Iman Titi said she had no idea where her husband was, or even whether he was alive, and grew increasingly frantic for herself and her three daughters, ages 6 months to 5 years. The city was under curfew and there was heavy fighting in the streets, preventing her from venturing outside for food and water.
It was after that, she said, that she suffered a breakdown and ran to Arafat's compound, where she was shot by Israeli troops who apparently mistook her for a suicide bomber.
Samer Titi, who returned home from detention to find that his wife had been hospitalized in Jerusalem -- his sister was caring for their children -- said he can never forgive the Israelis for what happened here. "I'm very bitter," he said. "There is no sense of security. Any moment, they could start killing, taking you whether you did anything or not. I'm a person who believes in peace, but not this peace."
© 2002 The Washington Post Company
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