Ex-Convicts Stuck in Jericho Are Powder Keg

The painful process of peacemaking between Israelis and Palestinians has taken a bizarre and potentially dangerous twist in this tiny test-case site for Palestinian self-rule.

Since June, Israel has dumped in Jericho about 520 Palestinians released from its prisons. The ex-convicts have been ordered to stay in Jericho until either their sentences expire or Palestinian self-rule is extended to the rest of the West Bank.

The move has, in effect, turned Jericho, a hardscrabble town of 16,000, into a giant halfway house. The town, struggling to provide everyday services for permanent residents, offers meager shelter and very little else to the men, some of whom were serving life sentences for killing suspected Palestinian collaborators.

And it is possible that even more released prisoners--there are still about 5,500 in Israeli jails, according to the Israeli army--will be brought to Jericho in the near future.

“That prospect is open,” confirmed Saeb Erekat, municipal affairs minister for the Palestinian Authority.

Some of the prisoners became so embittered by their living conditions that they recently issued a statement threatening to rebel against both the Palestinian Authority and the Israelis and to kill Israelis driving through Jericho unless the Palestinian Authority improves their conditions and offers them vocational training. Saturday night, about 300 released prisoners briefly blocked the main road leading from Jerusalem through Jericho, the road used by many Israelis traveling from Jerusalem to northern Israel. The former prisoners reportedly burned tires and chanted slogans, demanding that they be allowed to return to their homes. No one was injured during the demonstration.

The dumping of hardened criminals in their midst not only has angered local residents but has outraged Palestinians across the political spectrum, who accuse Israel of reneging on promises to free prisoners.

“The Israelis never give any confidence-building measures without making it backfire on us,” said Erekat, who is headquartered in Jericho. “We want the prisoners released, but we don’t want them put in a town like Jericho, which lacks any infrastructure to handle them.”

Of all the disputed issues between Israel and the Palestinians, the fate of prisoners is the most sensitive one, charged with emotion on both sides.

For Palestinians, the release of prisoners is considered an essential step toward ending the state of war between the two peoples and getting on with building peace. Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat, struggling to show skeptical Palestinians in the territories that his deal with Israel is yielding concrete results, is pushing hard for Israel to release all prisoners, from all factions, regardless of the crimes they have committed.

But Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s government treats the prisoners as a security threat, a political embarrassment and a source of leverage in other negotiations with Arafat.

Releasing the prisoners to Jericho seemed to offer a reasonable solution for the domestic political problem Rabin faced in releasing thousands of convicts. They would be released but would not be allowed back to their homes in the West Bank, where thousands of Jewish settlers live. And they would become the responsibility of the Palestinian Authority.

“Israel, torn between the need to demonstrate goodwill and the difficulty in releasing prisoners, some of whom were previously extremely dangerous people, chose a sort of middle road,” wrote Gideon Levy, a commentator for the Hebrew newspaper Haaretz. Levy called the release to Jericho “Israel’s distorted way of showing goodwill.”

“The gesture was not perceived as a (goodwill) gesture,” Levy wrote. “And in its place a new abscess is spreading, the abscess of those locked up in Jericho.”

Last month, Rabin increased the tension when he told his Cabinet that the government would not discuss the release of more prisoners until Arafat agreed to grant amnesty to Palestinians who had collaborated with Israel during its 27-year occupation. Since the PLO took over Jericho and the Gaza Strip, about 12 suspected collaborators have been murdered in the West Bank in areas outside the PLO’s control. But the government insists that Arafat could stop the killings if he wanted to.

The prisoners are also leverage for the Israelis as they try to pressure Arafat into cracking down on Hamas, the militant Islamic organization that continues to challenge Arafat’s authority in Gaza and Jericho and to carry out lethal attacks on Israelis.

But the Israelis have also put other conditions on the continued release of prisoners that infuriate Palestinians. They refuse to let out those who will not sign a pledge to renounce violence. They release members of Fatah, the largest PLO faction, while holding back members of rival organizations. They refuse to release any Palestinians convicted of killing Jewish Israelis, although they do release Palestinians who have killed suspected Palestinian collaborators.

“The most important thing is the situation of our brothers,” said Abdel Nasser Seiraffi, 30, a Palestinian released to Jericho on Aug. 19 after serving 10 years of a 15-year sentence for the attempted murder of a suspected collaborator. “All of them should be released and have full freedom, not like us. This is not full freedom. The life here is not different from the prison.”

Seiraffi sat on one of six bunk beds that crowd the room he says he shares with as many as 10 other former prisoners each night. The unfinished YMCA building that has become home for 200 of the released prisoners is organized much the way prison was for them, with men sharing rooms and forming committees to clean common areas and to lobby the authority for better conditions.

Seiraffi disavows those who threatened to kill if their conditions are not improved.

“We ask only to solve our problem in a human way,” he said. “We said that the pressure will one day cause an explosion; we did not say how we will react when that explosion occurs.”

Seiraffi and other former prisoners said they are far less interested in receiving vocational training than in being allowed to go home to their families in the West Bank.

“What do I feel, living here? I feel nothing, there is no feeling anymore,” said Rashid Kanaher, 20, who served three years of a six-year sentence for trying to stab an Israeli soldier. “This is just a big prison. We are away from our families still, away from our homes.”

The released prisoners say they received 1,500 Israeli shekels, or about $500, from the Palestinian Authority upon their release as “welcome” money and are supposed to receive monthly stipends of about $265 from the authority as long as they are trapped in Jericho. But few of the men seemed to believe that the authority, with its serious budget deficit, will be able to make good on that promise.

Jobs, Seiraffi and others said, are almost impossible for them to come by in Jericho, where unemployment among residents is already high. And so they spend their days in their rooms, hiding from the town’s sweltering summer heat, talking, playing cards and waiting for visits from family members.

“We feel our life is not stable, and we can’t concentrate on anything serious, on reading books or trying to educate ourselves as we did in prison. The most we can do here is read a newspaper. We feel like we are living in exile here,” Seiraffi said.