A Ritual With Israeli Troops : It’s an Open and Shut Case for Palestinian Merchants

It was like any other recent Thursday in this prosperous Arab town about 10 miles north of Jerusalem. The ridiculous was routine, and the routine was a spectator sport.

Someone had scattered underground leaflets before dawn, urging merchants to continue the commercial strike that has disrupted most West Bank business for more than a month.

But Hassan Zein, 45, needed no reminder of the daily ritual. He stood near the locked, metal-shuttered front of his Central Pastry Shop off Manara Square, peering into the thick, early morning fog for the first sign of the Israeli soldiers.

“When I see the soldiers, I take off the padlock, so I don’t lose it,” he said.

By 9:15 his logic became clear, as the first Israeli soldiers, armed with crowbars, made their way through the crowds of shopkeepers and onlookers lining the main street. The troops broke the locks on the Tarifi Coffee Shop first, then on several other stores, forcing the owners to open their metal shutters.

“Why is it important to the army whether or not the stores remain closed?” a reporter asked the patrol’s leader, a bespectacled young lieutenant.

“Ask the politicians,” he replied, ignoring further questions as he led his men store to store through a drill that they clearly found as distasteful as many of the merchants.

The only time the lieutenant brightened was when he knelt to take photographs of a television crew filming his men as they broke open another store.

Almost as soon as the soldiers turned into the next street, however, many of the merchants closed their shutters again.

“Yesterday we opened and closed five times,” said Jamil Said, 40, a grocer.

“It’s like a game,” said Aziz Khayat, proprietor of the Al Arab clothing store.

Actually, it was more like a turf war being fought under street rules that brand any compromise as a sign of weakness and any sign of weakness as an invitation to disaster.

“It’s symbolic to them and to us,” Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin said in an interview earlier this week.

Threat to Authority

The army has to force the shops open or see its authority eroded. The merchants have to resist or look like traitors to a Palestinian pride renewed by seven weeks of the most widespread unrest since Israeli troops captured the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967.

As the Jerusalem Post’s West Bank correspondent, Joel Greenberg, described it Thursday, the violent clashes that characterized the first weeks of the disturbances have largely been replaced by a “grinding contest in which the army and the Palestinian population, like tired prize fighters in the last round, are hanging on to see who can outlast the other.”

An army spokesman in Ramallah said Thursday that most of the businessmen want the soldiers to force them to open their shops.

“They need us because they are threatened,” he said, by Palestinian activists who coerce the merchants.

Looking Out for ‘Enforcers’

Across the street, on a rooftop overlooking the square, soldiers kept watch for suspected strike “enforcers,” calling out to their comrades below when they spotted a likely candidate.

The merchants, however, insisted that they were acting out of conviction. The striking shopkeepers stand near their stores, they say, because otherwise the soldiers force the doors and leave the premises standing open and unguarded.

“I’m here all day, and I see what happens,” Zein, the pastry shop owner, said. “After the army comes and opens us up, somebody walks into my shop or another one. The army sits up there and watches, and when the person walks out without buying anything, they say he was here threatening the stores to close. They watch that person and give him a whipping.”

Doing Little Business

Even when the shops are forced open, they do little business. Journalists here Thursday saw a woman walk into a dress shop, a boy getting a haircut and other women buying shoes. But mostly, the merchants said, people buy only necessities.

They say the strike is a financial hardship, but one they can cope with.

“The nature of Arab society makes it possible,” Ismail Tarif, a 52-year-old grocer, said. The army has broken eight locks on his shop since the trouble began, he said, adding: “People can live on much less. It’s not a problem.”

There have been strikes before, Tarif said, but nothing like this.

‘Doing It Ourselves’

“We’ve waited for 20 years for the Arab countries to find a solution, and they’ve done nothing,” he went on. “Now we’re doing it ourselves.”

Mitri Zabaneh, 28, whose family owns a specialty food store here, put in: “We were living under pressure for 20 years. I don’t think a couple of months will make any difference.”

The sidewalk in front of the Zabaneh grocery was littered with empty containers that had contained the stout new locks that now sealed the establishment’s metal shutters. The “Mul-T-Lock” padlocks were advertised as drill-proof and pick-proof, and they looked truly impregnable, but Mitri Zabaneh opened them as soon as an army patrol entered his street.

“We were afraid they’d bring a big hammer and ruin them,” the grocer said. “Then they couldn’t open them, and we couldn’t open them.”

Locksmiths Donate Time

At a nearby carpet store, a repairman tried to straighten the bent remnants of a bolt lock. He is part of a union of locksmiths who have been donating their skills to the Ramallah merchants.

Asked why he worked for free, he replied: “The Israelis break these things. It’s not as if the people are doing it themselves.”

A hardware store owner from across the street wandered by with a fresh cut over his left eyebrow. He refused to speak to reporters, but witnesses said he had been struck by a soldier who apparently had become angry that he had not opened his store voluntarily.

Another man in the crowd spoke up: “We are 5 million people. We have a history. We have a culture. We have an identity. And nobody is going to erase us.”