Middle East Day by Day with the Intifadeh

By Johanna McGeary/Jalazun

For 40 days, raw concrete walls and army patrols sealed off Jalazun from the world. The Palestinian refugee camp near Ramallah in the West Bank was under curfew as punishment for its violent contributions to the intifadeh (uprising). Electricity was cut; cooking gas dwindled. As the men languished at home, the women organized survival. Around 3 a.m. most days, groups of women sneaked out of the camp and hid in nearby villages. During the day, they bought scarce meat and vegetables; at night they slipped back into Jalazun to feed their families.

Life is a little easier in Jalazun since the army lifted the curfew last month. Nonetheless, the intifadeh, now into its sixth month, has fundamentally altered daily life throughout the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Though the violence seems to be tapering off, Palestinians are settling into a pattern of sullen resistance. Spurred by orders from the uprising's leadership and restricted by countermeasures from the military authorities, the Palestinians are turning self-reliant to defy Israeli rule. And in just as many ways, Israel is struggling to reassert its control over daily Arab life in the territories.

Even something as simple as food shopping has become a duel between occupier and occupied. The uprising's leaders set opening hours for stores, usually three a day, and frequently call full strikes. But the army is determined to rule commerce and now often shutters shops in reprisal for days at a time. Schools have been closed for five months, leaving children to stay home or join the stone throwers in the streets. With few jobs in the West Bank and resistance to working in Israel itself, most men spend their days idly ( meeting on street corners. A Jalazun laborer who made $400 a month before the intifadeh is now lucky to earn a tenth of that. "We no longer eat meat," says Ali Abdul Khadar Khalil, 56, father of nine. "People are getting desperate." But, he adds defiantly, "any people searching for independence must remember it can't be achieved without suffering."

Though the poor are most affected by the uprising, middle-class Palestinians also must adjust to the new reality. Edward Lama feels trapped between threats from the uprising's leaders to close his souvenir shop on Bethlehem's main street and orders from the army to stay open. Most days his door is open, but he spends the hours sipping coffee in his deserted shop, while his two dozen employees slump behind counters of glittering gold, olive-wood crucifixes and brass trinkets. Business is down more than 50% since the intifadeh began, and Lama's income does not cover his monthly overhead. But he still pays his workers. "What can we do, let their families starve?" he asks.

Abdul Rahman, 45, a professor of Arabic literature at Hebron University, has not taught since December. He worries about his children, who have no school to attend, and spends hours searching for food. "You've got to know who's selling to buy," says Rahman, who has learned to visit butchers and grocers at their homes, where many of them now secretly keep their scarce supplies.

Many Palestinians are going back to the land. Nawal Rabi, 38, spends much of her day hacking out a garden behind her house in Jalazun. She is planting tomatoes, cucumbers and moloquia, an Arab green. With two brothers in jail and her father dead, Nawal struggles just to eat. In Sinjil, a West Bank village nearby, army roadblocks have cut off traffic for the past two months. Unable to drive to market, Hosneyah Khalil feeds her six children with the produce from her fields. She also has bought goats for milk. "We will show them we can live," she says.

In Beit Sahur, a town near Bethlehem, a group of local men started an agricultural cooperative in March. Walid Hawash, 29, runs the co-op's shop, selling seeds, tools and herbicides at cost to any residents who wish to start "victory" gardens. "We are doing this so the people can feed themselves," says Hawash. Last week Israeli soldiers threatened to close Hawash's store. "They say what we are doing is politics," says Hawash. "But we are only trying to live." Nearby, freshly turned earth marks a new garden that will feed 42 families come harvest time. Hawash obliquely acknowledges what the Israelis fear: "By going back to the land, we can continue the uprising a long time."

The Israelis are devising new ways beyond curfews, roadblocks and shop closings to reassert their authority. Palestinians who wish to see relatives in detention camps can no longer arrange their visits through the Red Cross but must go through the tedious process of seeking permission from the military government. Anyone applying for a birth certificate or marriage license must prove that all government fines have been paid, while Palestinians traveling to Amman must first traverse miles of red tape.

Last week Israeli authorities flexed another bureaucratic muscle. They ordered Gaza's 400,000 residents over the age of 16 to exchange their green identity folders for new booklets marked with different color codes. The Israelis say the codes indicate refugee-camp residence; the Palestinians say they identify political activists. Despite orders from the uprising's leaders not to comply, thousands of Gazans lined up in sweltering airless tents last week to receive their new documents. Said Major General Yitzhak Mordechai, Gaza's military commander: "They have to be clear they are under Israeli law, Israeli government."

But the Palestinians in the occupied territories seem prepared to pay a high price to prove that they are not totally under Israeli law. As the intifadeh drags on, the Arabs are increasingly intent on proving that they would rather change their way of life than their mind.