The Voices of Palestine

They say, "We belong to this land"

They speak with many accents but the message is the same, forceful and unrelenting in its demand for a homeland and desire for redress. Despite the handicap of being a people without a state, exiles scattered throughout the Middle East and even beyond, Palestinians as individuals have uncommonly excelled in the arts and literature, in business and the professions. Their political views vary, as do their opinions on the best way to achieve their goal of an independent state. But as a people they have managed to forge a special bond of community, rooted in an obsessive longing for the idealized soil of Palestine. Some of these voices:

"I tell the Israelis they don't realize how much we hate them, not because they are Jews but because of what they have done to us." So says Rashad al-Shawwa, 70, a moderate Palestinian by any measure, who has been mayor of Gaza since 1975. Because of his political adroitness, he has won the admiration of Israelis as well as Egyptians, Jordanians and P.L.O. moderates. Unlike some of the mayors on the West Bank, Shawwa has not condemned Sadat's peace initiative. "I don't think Sadat has sold out the Palestinians," he says. "I don't think he can afford to, even if he wanted to. The trouble is that the Israelis think they have gotten away with something by proposing autonomy for the Palestinians. But by seizing land and building settlements all they have done is intensified the hatred. The fear under which Israelis live is a reflection of their own guilt. They know they have gone too far, but they don't know what to do about it. If Israel could convince us that they are interested in co-existence and not domination, there is a chance we could live together. But that chance is diminishing."

With a fortune estimated at $100 million, Farouk Nasser, 50, can afford to live anywhere he wants in the world; in fact he has homes in London and San Francisco as well as a sumptuous permanent hotel suite in Beirut. One of the most successful of Palestinian businessmen, he heads the Modern Electronics Establishment, with headquarters in Saudi Arabia. Nasser, whose family founded Bir Zeit University, still dreams of returning to his birthplace. "I'll tell you why I want to go back to Palestine," he says. "I belong to this land. I was born there. I know the trees, I know the streets, I know everybody, and I always think that my grave should be next to my mother's and father's. I live like a king, but Palestine belongs to me. What is Begin? He's a Pole."

Mahmud Abu Zuluf, 54, is editor of East Jerusalem's influential Al Quds, the largest Arabic daily on the West Bank. He supports the Camp David agreement as "the first practical step toward a settlement of the Palestinian problem. If the situation is left to extremists on both sides, there will never be an agreement." He believes, however, that the establishment of new Jewish settlements on the West Bank shows that the Begin government is seeking only to maintain the status quo in order to tighten its grip over the occupied territories. "The settlement activity shows that Israel is not serious. Begin won't formally annex the West Bank," says Abu Zuluf, "because he doesn't want all those Palestinians voting for the Knesset. He just wants the land and not the people." The tall (6 ft. 6 in.), pipe-smoking editor, a onetime basketball star at the American University of Beirut, is especially anxious for a settlement because two of his three sons, who are studying at universities in England, "are hinting that they don't want to come back here without peace." Adds Abu Zuluf sadly: "I don't blame them."

During the final days of the battle for Tel Zaatar, a besieged Palestinian refugee camp that fell to Christian rightists during the Lebanese civil war in 1976, the last radio message that crackled over the air waves from the fighters inside was a request for the poems of Mouin Beseisso. "The partisans and fighters name Beseisso the poet of the revolution," came the message. "Let us hear his voice and his poems once more." Palestinian audiences listen with rapt attention to his strong, highly political verse, whose cadences reflect the long tradition of oral history and the loneliness of the desert. "Before the bullet there was the poem," says Beseisso, 50. "In the days of the tribes, it was not enough to have a leader. They had to have a poet." Born in Gaza, he published his first collection of poems, The Battle, as a student at the American University in Cairo in 1952. Egyptian authorities pronounced it subversive, and copies were hidden in girls' lockers at the university to avoid detection by police. Beseisso himself spent seven years in various Arab jails, including five years in an Egyptian desert prison that he describes as "outside the map of God, where it rains for five minutes once in 50 years." He asks, sardonically: "Will the Arabs ever be honest enough to talk about their concentration camps?" Beseisso edits the literary magazine Lotus in Beirut; his frequent travels abroad include visits to the Soviet Union and the U.S. As to the kind of Palestine he wants, Beseisso says: "We don't look for colorsa red Palestine, a green Palestine, a black Pales tine. Let the rainbow wait. First, let us go home."

Umm Jihad, 37, is a member of the Palestine National Congress and head of the General Union of Palestinian Women, an organization with approximately 100,000 members that supports many of the P.L.O.'s programs in health and education. She also directs the P.L.O.'s multimillion-dollar assistance program for families of Palestinians killed or captured in various conflicts. An ardent nationalist even as a young girl in Gaza, she became the first woman to join Al Fatah at the age of 16. The struggle to preserve a Palestinian identity was so strong at that time, she says, that "a Palestinian woman had to do a man's work." She is an expert marksman with the automatic weapon she still carries in her car in Beirut and can handle an anti-tank gun if need be. She is married to Abu Jihad, the P.L.O.'s military commander; as a sign of their commitment to Palestine they named the first of their four children, a son, Jihad (Arabic for "holy war"). "We are looking for peace, not war," she says, "but our rights have been taken. We are fighting for our rights in order to provide our children with a normal life so they can live like other children in the world. I can see victory is coming."

Maher Irsheid, 38, one of the largest Arab landowners on the West Bank, manages his family's vast 75,000-acre tract of fertile farm land near Jenin. But these days he travels from his office in Amman to the West Bank only once a year to avoid the "humiliating experience" of being stripped at the Allenby Bridge checkpoint. Staunchly pro-American, Irsheid was a member of the Jordanian Parliament when the West Bank was under Amman's rule; he is disenchanted with what he calls a "two-faced American policy that talks of human rights while providing weapons for the Israeli occupation." Palestinians, he adds, "feel more and more that they are fighting America and not just Israel, and all for the sake of Jewish voters in New York." Irsheid believes a federation between the East and West Bank would be prosperous. He rejects the Israeli claim to settlement rights as "ludicrous." After all, he asks, "if I ruled Spain 700 years ago, can I claim to take over the government there now?"

In 1974, Hanna Nasser, president of Bir Zeit University, was expelled from the West Bank by Israeli military authorities for "unspecified charges"a fate suffered by some 1,500 West Bank Palestinians. Nasser, 44, was taken in handcuffs from his home in the middle of the night, driven to the Lebanese border in a military van and tossed out of the vehicle. A physicist by training, he conducts public relations for the university from Amman. Nasser worries about what effect the Israeli occupation will have on younger Palestinians. "The Israelis should realize they have created a hothouse for young radicals in the West Bank. These kids are newly revolutionary, not like their subdued and docile parents, and they are extremely bright and literate. Their motivations are much stronger than those of their parents. And the Israelis may only be sowing the seeds of their own nightmare in the way they are treating Palestinian children."

Situated on the edge of the battle-scarred Sabra Refugee Camp in Beirut is the Acre Hospital, one of the 35 hospitals and 100 clinics operated by the P.L.O. Acre is the headquarters of Dr. Fathi Arafat, 48, chairman of the Palestinian Red Crescent Organization and younger brother of Yasser Arafat. Born in the Old City of Jerusalem, Dr. Arafat took charge of the P.L.O.'s medical and social program in 1965. He is especially proud of Acre, a modern facility with intensive-care units as well as rehabilitation centers for commandos injured in action. Unlike other Lebanese hospitals, Acre turns no one away. Palestinians engaged in the revolution and all emergency cases are treated free; others are charged a symbolic fee. Says Arafat: "We were sons of the camps, with memories of long lines to get water, to get food, to get to a hospital. Private hospitals were impossible for us. How were we to pay? Who could pay? Many times we have lost everything and had to begin all over again. Always we are under stress. Where will we be next? But we will return. I can feel it."

"You lucky bird, while I am oppressed and sad. Teach me how to fly above the sound of bullets. Teach me how to be free." The children, ages three and four, held hands as they sang The Song of the Bird in the sun-drenched courtyard. The song was written by Rima Terazi, 48, a member of the Society of In'ash El-Usra, a Palestinian rehabilitation center in El-Bireh on the West Bank. It includes a day care center for Palestinian children whose fathers are imprisoned for political crimes and also offers courses in homemaking and secretarial skills to improve the living standards of Palestinian women. Says Mrs. Terazi: "The special circumstances of our situation made it imperative that we do this. Because of the years of occupation, we have had to take care of problems that normally are the responsibility of governments."

Ibrahim Souss, 34, director of the P.L.O. office in Paris, gave his first piano recital in eleven years last November. In addition to Chopin mazurkas and Debussy preludes, he played a work of his own composition called The Myth of Sisyphus. Souss says the sonata was actually intended as a kind of anti-myth of Sisyphus, the legendary King of Corinth whose fate was to push a boulder up a mountain throughout eternity. As such, it represents a musical interpretation of Souss's belief "that man must take destiny into his own hands." Born in Jerusalem in 1945, Souss was only three years old when the Palestinians were expelled from the city after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. A gifted pianist, he found himself torn between music and militancy. After the humiliation of the 1967 war, he joined the P.L.O. "The essence of Palestine is its rejection of the idea of exile," he says. "From 1948 until five years ago, the world said, 'Let them be dispersed. Let them be integrated into another country.' But we said, 'No, we have our own personality.' Unlike Sisyphus, we refused to carry out our sentence."

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