Arabs, Resigned and Cynical, Put Little Faith in Vote

The Palestinian farmers laboring in an olive grove outside this small village laughed bitterly Tuesday when their thoughts turned to the general election in Israel.

Their only contact with the campaign occurred a few weeks ago when soldiers plastered their three houses with stickers supporting Likud, Israel’s main right-wing party.

The next day, the troops tore down the houses after accusing the families within of harboring stone-throwers who had harassed motorists on a nearby highway.

“A curse on all the political parties,” said Fahmi abu Beni Fadal, an elder of a nearby village, gesturing toward the bulldozed piles of concrete where homes once stood. “They have already left their election statements with us.”

Abu Beni Fadal’s scorn, sharpened as it was by local anger, was echoed in several locations on the occupied West Bank as Arabs talked about the election that was occurring just a few miles away in Israel proper.

Although the 10-month-old uprising against Israel in both the West Bank and Gaza Strip set the terms of the debate in Israel for election day, the Palestinians expect little to change for themselves after the vote comes in. Peace is not around the corner, they feel, even if the winner should turn out to be the Labor Party, which pledged to hold peace talks with Palestinians and neighboring Arab governments if it comes to power.

Skeptics couched their reserve in a seemingly endless array of Arabic proverbs. In sum, they said, there is little choice between soft-line Labor and the more rigid Likud:

“It’s a choice between a fox and a wolf.”

“One will poison us slowly, the other all at once.”

“When you are swimming with sharks, do you ask who will take the first bite?”

Deadlock Seen

Even those who perceived differences between the two parties felt that the vote would end in a policy deadlock. “Although on the one hand, these elections could have provided a historic possibility, it seems that in fact the country is still divided right down the middle,” said Sari Nusseibeh, a political scientist at Birzeit University on the West Bank. “All one can do is to prepare oneself for a more difficult, prolonged state of conflict.”

Some Palestinians resented the anti-Arab tone of the campaign, which included calls by the far right for their mass expulsion. “The Palestinians were just a ‘demographic problem’--not a human problem, a political problem, a national problem,” complained Zohair Reyyes, a Gaza lawyer and journalist.

It is perhaps ironic that the Israeli-ruled constituency that has most influenced the election debate is one that has no vote. While Israel’s Arab citizens have political rights, their Palestinian Arab counterparts living in the territories occupied by Israel for 21 years are not enfranchised. Those who live in annexed parts of Jerusalem can vote only in local elections.

But the Palestinians are intensely interested nonetheless, with the West Bank Arabic-language press devoting unprecedented space to the subject. “Never in the last 40 years have Palestinians and Arabs in general taken so much interest in an Israeli election,” said Othman Khalak, an East Jerusalem businessman who is editor of the pro-Jordanian An Nahar newspaper. “I see it and I don’t believe it. Here we’re at war with Israel, yet on the mouth of every Arab on the street is the name of Labor and Likud.”

On Tuesday, Israel kept its own close watch on the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Palestinian residents were forbidden to cross the so-called Green Line into Israel. The press was officially barred from the West Bank and Gaza without army escort, although the ban was not rigidly enforced.

Israeli military jeep and foot patrols circulated in major West Bank towns and in Gaza, occasionally attracting a stone tossed from a side street.

The army will be on alert again today to guard against unrest during a planned general strike by Palestinians. The strike commemorates Britain’s 1917 Balfour Declaration, which laid the groundwork for a Jewish homeland in what was then British-ruled Palestine.

Olive Harvest

In any case, the countryside was peaceful and dominated by pastoral scenes of the olive harvest now under way. Families gathered to pluck the fruit by hand, pack it into bags and transport it, sometimes by donkey, to communal presses where the oil is squeezed out.

“The main effect of the intifada (the Arabic word for the uprising) is that Israelis are thinking about us,” said Mahmoud Katab, 55, who with a crew of eight was laboriously picking olives in Aqraba, which lies just a few miles southeast of Nablus, a major market city.

In the cities of the West Bank, there was more tension, due to occasional face-offs with Israeli patrols.

In Ramallah, just 10 miles from Jerusalem, a military jeep accidentally knocked over a tomato stall in the central market, prompting onlookers to jeer and whisper insults against Jews.

“I don’t care who they elect,” said an old woman who took a break from haggling over cauliflower. “I just want them to let us rest in peace.”

In Nablus, youths hurled rocks at soldiers who went on nervous foot patrols within the winding alleys of the casbah. At Balata, a Palestinian refugee camp that adjoins Nablus, masked youths beat up a man they claimed was a spy for Israel. Soldiers intervened and hauled the man away by ambulance. His condition could not be ascertained.

“We are far from the election,” said Jamal Iran, 40, owner of a shoe factory in Nablus. He lapsed into proverbs to explain his own ambivalent feelings about the vote:

“The stranger holds onto a straw. We know the Labor Party, so maybe it is better to deal with them. On the other hand, as we say, ‘One dog’s red, the other’s black. It may not make any difference.’ ”