ROBERT NOVAK
Har Homa, dwarfing nearby dwellings of Beit Sahour, seemed larger than when I saw it at Holy Week a year ago. It is. The Israeli government has steadily enlarged settlements on the occupied West Bank.
Jimmy Carter raised hackles by titling his book about the Palestinian question Peace Not Apartheid. But Palestinians allege this is worse than the former South African racial separation. Nearing the 40th anniversary of the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank, the territory has been so fragmented that a genuine Palestinian state and a "two-state solution" seem increasingly difficult.
The security wall has led to the virtual elimination of suicide bombings and short-term peace. But life is hard for Palestinians, whose deaths due to conflict increased 272 percent in 2006 while Israeli casualties declined. The Britain-based Save the Children organization estimates half the children in the occupied territories are psychologically traumatized.
Palestinians argue things have gotten worse because of pervasive feelings of hopelessness. Students at Bethlehem University (run by the Catholic Brothers of De La Salle with an enrollment 70 percent Muslim) sounded more pessimistic and radicalized than a year ago. Ahmad Al Issa, a fourth-year journalism student, spent a year in an Israeli prison on charges of throwing stones at Israeli troops. Now he has bought into the libel that Jewish employees at the World Trade Center were warned in advance of the 9/11 attacks.
The U.S.-backed boycott after the election victory of the extremist Hamas in early 2006 has made the Palestinian Authority destitute. Deprived of help from the authority with the economy in a shambles, city governments are bankrupt. Bethlehem's Mayor Victor Batarseh has a special problem because tourists and pilgrims no longer stay overnight in the city of Christ's birth. Out of money and credit, he is ready to lay off the city's 165 staffers.
Batarseh, a U.S. citizen who practiced thoracic surgery in Sacramento, Calif., is pinned down in Bethlehem. A Christian and political independent who calls himself a private enterprise democrat, Batarseh is on the Israeli blacklist because he contributed to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (a State Department-designated terrorist organization). Denied permits for Jerusalem, the mayor must drive to Amman, Jordan, to get to meetings in Europe.
Republican Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey, at the university the same day I was, was given a tour of Jerusalem to see that the separation barrier in most places is a big, ugly and intimidating wall and not merely a fence.
Smith, a Catholic layman, was drawn here because of the emigration of the Holy Land's Christian minority. They leave more quickly than Muslims; contacts on the outside make them more mobile. Catholic Brother Peter Corlano of the Bethlehem University faculty told Smith and me: "We live the same life [as Muslims]. We are Palestinians." Concerned by the disappearance of Christians in the land of Christianity's birth, Smith also could become (as I did) concerned by the plight of all Palestinians. If so, he will find precious little company in Congress.
No comments:
Post a Comment