Israelis Hold Tight Rein : Gaza: A Mideast ‘Orphan’ Isolated by War, Politics

Rajah Hequil, 50, arrived about 2:30 a.m. to set up his falafel stand at what Gazans call “the slave market” on the northeast side of town.

Half an hour later, his 13-year-old son, Abdullah, showed up and started heating the vegetable oil used to deep-fry the ubiquitous Middle East snack made from ground chickpeas. Then, about 3:30, came 12-year-old Adib, who brought the RC Cola and other soft drinks, just in time to catch the first customers from among the thousands of laborers on their way to jobs in Israel.

By 5 a.m., the area was as busy as New York’s Times Square on a Saturday night, with horns blaring from gridlocked buses and taxis and drivers shouting the names of Tel Aviv, Ashkelon and the other Israeli towns on their routes.

Cooking smoke curled around gas lanterns hung from Hequil’s stand and others, casting an eerie glow over grizzled men and robed women lined up to buy a breakfast snack to eat on the tedious drive north.

Youssef Hamad Ibrahim, 40, the father of six children, said he is one of the lucky ones. He has a regular job in a chicken-processing plant that pays the equivalent of about $450 a month.

“I go,” he said. “I know I have work. There’s a lot here who go every day, pay the round trip, and only wait.”

Those are the day laborers, possibly a majority of the estimated 60,000 Gazans who travel daily to Israel. They stand on designated street corners in Israeli cities, hoping that someone will hire them to mow a lawn, dig a ditch or labor on a construction site for the equivalent of about $15.

Unknown Destination

A woman of 30, the mother of four children, said she was going to pick vegetables. Where?

“In Israel,” she said. “I don’t know where.”

Many would be disappointed, and would be back in Gaza by mid-morning with nothing to show for their efforts except perhaps heartburn from eating falafel on an empty stomach. Ibrahim recalled that before he got his present job, nine months ago, he once made the 100-mile round trip to Tel Aviv for 23 straight days without finding work.

By 6 a.m., with the sky turning dull gray, traffic was thinning and the Hequils were packing up to go home. It was the start of a typical day in Gaza, which Israeli researcher Meron Benvenisti has called Israel’s Soweto, a reference to the huge black community outside Johannesburg, South Africa.

Gaza is the other Israeli-occupied territory, the one usually overlooked in all the attention devoted to the West Bank of the Jordan River. It is normally so neglected by diplomats, journalists and other foreigners that attorney Fayez abu Rahme calls his home “Gaza planet” and its visitors “astronauts.”

Overcrowded and Poor

The West Bank is a pastoral paradise compared to Gaza, which is poor, overcrowded, unsanitary and very, very angry.

About five miles wide and 28 miles long, the Gaza Strip covers an area of Mediterranean seacoast only one-fifteenth the size of the West Bank, but it has three-fourths as many people.

Gaza’s 600,000 Palestinians are squeezed into only about half the strip, the rest of the land having been set aside by Israeli authorities for Jewish settlements or restricted border zones. This makes it one of the most densely populated areas in the world, with an estimated 7,500 Palestinians per square mile, compared to 360 per square mile on the West Bank.

Nearly two-thirds of these people are classified as refugees by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees, and more than half of the refugees live in one of eight squalid camps where children, goats and garbage vie for space on dirt streets with open sewers. On the West Bank, only one refugee in four still lives in a camp.

High Infant Mortality

Even by Israeli figures, which are more favorable than those of the U.N. refugee agency, the infant mortality rate in Gaza is triple the rate in Israel proper and almost half again as high as on the West Bank.

Gazans are disproportionately undernourished compared with the rest of the Arab world’s refugees, according to the U.N. agency, and the school dropout rate has been estimated by independent experts at nearly 30%.

During a particularly violent 18-month period in 1970 and 1971, Gaza became such a hotbed of armed resistance that Israeli soldiers and civilians alike considered it almost beyond the pale. Hair-raising shoot-outs were a common occurrence in the narrow alleys of the refugee camps, and well over 100 people were killed. Israeli troops finally established control after a massive crackdown still remembered here for its brutality, and they keep a tight rein on the situation today.

Nevertheless, the anti-Israeli feeling is so high that a prominent local Palestinian admitted that he was frightened on a drive through the city center in a car bearing a telltale yellow Israeli license plate. And an Israeli army patrol warned the driver of the same car against parking it in broad daylight in front of the main-street office of an international relief organization.

An Orphan Region

“Three days ago they torched a car with an Israeli plate just 300 meters down the street,” one soldier explained.

While the West Bank has close ties with Jordan, Gaza is an orphan--a swath of what was once Palestine consigned by war and Middle East politics to extraordinary isolation.

Jordan annexed the West Bank after the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, and even though Israel occupied the area in the war of 1967, West Bankers are still entitled to Jordanian citizenship. Although technically in a state of war, Israel and Jordan keep bridges open across the Jordan River, and this facilitates travel and commerce for West Bankers.

Gaza, by contrast, was administered by Egypt from 1948 until Israel captured it in the war of 1967. But it was never annexed. Clearly Cairo is even less interested today in assuming Gaza’s problems than it was a generation ago--even if that were an option.

Gazans are officially stateless. The Israeli “travel document” with which some are allowed to go abroad says, in the space for nationality: “Undefined.”

Inexpressible Condition

Of this statelessness, Tawfik abu Ghazaleh, a lawyer and partner in the Gaza Center for Rights and Law, says: “You can’t imagine it. You can’t express it unless you are living under it.”

He recalled a trip to England, where a passport control officer puzzled for a time over the document and then crossed out the word “Palestinian” where Abu Ghazaleh had so identified himself on his entry card. In its place, the mortified Gazan watched the man write in: “Israeli.”

Gaza is also politically less sophisticated than the West Bank, having been constrained by both Egypt and Israel. There is virtually no local press here, for example, as there is on the West Bank. And although there were municipal elections on the West Bank under Jordanian and Israeli rule, Gaza has had none since 1946.

But what is most humiliating for Gazans is the extent to which they have become an economic satellite of the government whose occupation they so vociferously oppose. Gaza is a source of cheap and willing labor to do the jobs that Israelis do not want.

Israel’s ‘Dirty Work’

“We are sweeping their streets, washing their dishes, collecting their garbage, being second and third waiters in their restaurants, and cleaning up their hospitals,” said Rashid Shawa, a former mayor and head of Gaza’s most prominent family. “All the dirty work in Israel is being done by us here.”

Thousands more Gazans toil in small local workshops under contract to Israeli firms. At one of several hundred such Gaza workshops the other day, a score of mostly teen-age boys sat behind antiquated sewing machines fashioning shirts and pants for sale under the Israeli label “Fresh.” On the other side of a concrete partition, separated according to Islamic custom, were four girl workers and a woman supervisor.

Israeli firms contract the work to these Gaza shops because “it’s about half as expensive” as having the work done in Israel, supervisor Wahid Daya said. Wages here range from the equivalent of $180 to $300 for a month of 11-hour days. The average wage in Israel is $600 to $700. Here the employers save on fringe benefits as well.

Hovels Sprout Antennas

Israeli officials contend that while Gaza is admittedly poor, its links with Israel have brought impressive economic growth compared to its 1967 starting point. Automobile ownership has increased from about 3% of the population to about 15%; about 85% of Gazans have television sets, compared to 7.5% in 1967, and even most of the hovels in the Jabaliya refugee camp have TV antennas on the roof.

But those same officials concede that they view any internal Gaza Strip economic development first in terms of its impact on Israel.

Historically, the backbone of the Gazan economy was citrus growing. But now Israel restricts Gaza citrus exports to protect the overseas citrus sales of its kibbutzim, or collective farms. Gazan products are barred from the most lucrative West European markets.

Also, while Israel “exported” about 60,000 tons of fruits, vegetables and melons to Gaza in 1984, Gaza is not permitted to export its produce to Israel. To enforce the ban, Gazans on their way to Israel must pass through a checkpoint.

Rewards, Punishment

Chris George, Gaza project manager for the Save the Children international relief agency, said the Israeli authorities try to manipulate outside aid to the area to “reward those Gazans who cooperate with them and punish those who don’t. . . . It’s a big problem.”

Nine of about 40 community development projects funded through Save the Children by the U.S. government are currently held up because the authorities disapprove of the local Palestinian individuals or organizations involved, George said.

These include a proposed dental clinic, blocked because Israel contends that the co-sponsoring Arab Medical Assn. has links with the Palestine Liberation Organization; a materials-testing laboratory frozen because the authorities contend that the co-sponsoring Assn. of Gaza Engineers is a political group; plans for a soccer field and playground at the overcrowded Jabaliya camp, which were initiated by Mohammed abu Nasr, a 36-year-old former prisoner released in an exchange two years ago after serving 15 years in Israeli jails for armed resistance.

“They don’t want the children in the camp to say it’s the nationalists and the fedayeen (fighters) who are helping us,” said Abu Nasr.

Acre for Sale

Dr. Hatem abu Ghazaleh, chairman of Gaza’s Society for the Care of Handicapped Children, said he has been trying for two years to persuade the Israeli authorities to set aside an acre of land for a vocational training center. They have offered to sell the land but will not donate it.

“Imagine,” he said, “to sell Gaza land to the Gaza people!”

Meanwhile, the Israeli government is supporting the development of a new resort area on expropriated state land turned over to Jewish settlers. Reuven Rosenblatt, chairman of the Gaza Settlement Council, said the hope is to turn the area into a playground for Israeli and foreign tourists.

About 2,200 people live in three groups of Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip.

Even the Jewish settlers are affected by Gaza’s unusual status as an orphan, Rosenblatt conceded. There is less political support for these communities than for settlements on the West Bank, which was the heart of biblical Israel.

In fact, Shawa said, Israel has offered “tens of times” to give up Gaza as part of a deal to retain control of the West Bank.

‘Part of Israel’

Rosenblatt argued that “we are here because it is a part of Israel, and a Jew has to sit on every empty piece of this land. If we don’t have the right to sit here (in Gaza) today, the Jews didn’t have the right to build Tel Aviv next to Jaffa, either.”

In that, the settler agrees with Sheik Ahmed Yassin, head of the fundamentalist Jamal Islaami movement in Gaza.

“My problem is Palestine as a whole, not just Gaza,” the religious leader said. Justice demands the return of all Palestine to Arab rule, he said, and “any solution that is built on injustice masquerading as ‘peace’ is no solution to us.”

The Islamic fundamentalists here are a significant and growing group, according to Israeli security sources, enjoying the support of as much as 20% of the population. They oppose the dominant PLO supporters as “materialist” and contend that a real solution to the area’s political impasse will come with a return to Islam.

Secular Gazans say the growth of fundamentalism here is just one of the natural outcomes of popular frustration over Israeli rule.

“Gaza has been diagnosed,” attorney Abu Ghazaleh said. “The question now is what the medicine will be.”