‘People Have Had It’ With Peace Process

Suleiman Ello should have been swimming in the Gulf of Aqaba on the day the Middle East summit got underway on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean.

Instead, Ello boycotted an international “peace swim meet.”

The Palestinian coach and his 20-member team were in no mood to join Israelis and other Arabs in a show of goodwill and brotherhood. They stayed away from the two-day competition off the coasts of Eilat, Israel, and Aqaba, Jordan.

“I like to participate in these peace things, but now I have to think about my reputation and what I lose,” Ello said in a Ramallah cafe. “I will not be a pawn while nothing gets better on the ground. I still have dreams for peace, but not now.”

Ello was expressing a frustration that is running deeper than ever--and is threatening to explode into devastating violence--among Palestinians who are losing hope in a peace process that they believe has brought them little in the way of prosperity and freedom.

The Oslo peace accords signed five years ago gave formal recognition to limited Palestinian self-rule and bound the Israeli government to cede land gradually to the Palestinians.

But it has been a fits-and-starts process, and talks broke down nearly 19 months ago. Even if this weekend’s summit at the Wye Plantation outside Washington succeeds in unblocking the impasse over land and security, such relative progress may not be enough to offer encouragement to bitter Palestinians or to persuade them of the value of investing in the peace process.

Many Palestinians believed that by now they would have had more territory under their control and that their economy would be booming.

Instead, they have watched Jewish settlements multiply, Palestinian unemployment continue to soar and their own political leaders flounder and flop.

The result, on one level, is apathy and alienation, as in swim coach Ello’s case.

Many cultural, youth and athletic programs that tried to promote peace by initiating contact between Israelis and Palestinians have been suspended in recent months, according to those involved. On a more ominous level, Palestinian analysts warn, greater cynicism and disillusionment threaten to explode into political violence.

“I have never seen Palestinian public opinion in such a low mood as today,” said Khalil Shikaki, director of the Center for Palestine Research and Studies in Nablus. “It is unprecedented--the combination of disappointment regarding the peace process and [Palestinian] national reconstruction all at the same time. This loss of hope is extremely serious and extremely dangerous.”

Shikaki said the research center, which conducts regular polling of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, has detected an alarming rise in the level of support for armed attacks against Israelis.

In a survey this month, slightly more than half--51%--of Palestinians who responded said they favor violence, up from 44% in August and 21% in early 1996.

And while two-thirds of those surveyed said they continue to support the peace process, almost as many--61%--said they believe that the negotiations ultimately will fail.

Significantly, support for Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat fell to its lowest level since the research center began polling in 1994, with only 43% saying they would vote for him in a presidential election, down five percentage points since August.

The ineptness and widespread corruption of Arafat’s regime has destroyed much of the faith Palestinians once had in their leaders.

Combined with what many Palestinians now see as Arafat’s inability to deliver a peace dividend, the disenchantment is feeding a seismic shift to more hard-line Islamic groups such as the fast-growing Hamas, whose militant wing actively opposes peace with Israel and has claimed responsibility for numerous deadly terrorist bombings.

Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas who returned to Gaza after his release from an Israeli prison a year ago, carefully capitalizes on the discontent.

“Even if this summit succeeds in getting agreement on a percentage [of land to be restored to Palestinian control], it will not change the reality of the Palestinians’ very bad situation,” he said as the summit began Thursday.

Shikaki and other Palestinian analysts say that as long as the peace process appears crippled and the Palestinian Authority appears incapable of improving the lot of its people, ordinary Palestinians will increasingly abandon Arafat and give up on the system.

Many nations that promised to put money into the West Bank and Gaza if the Palestinians made peace have not come through. Tens of thousands of Palestinians still live in wretched refugee camps; many Palestinian cities remain without adequate sewerage and water; schools, overcrowded beyond imagination, are in bad repair.

In some parts of Palestinian territory, nearly a quarter of the able-bodied population is out of work. Unemployment runs higher during periodic “closures” when the Israeli government, citing security issues, shuts its borders to an estimated 50,000 Palestinians who would normally cross into Israel to work.

The average daily wage for a Palestinian is half that of an Israeli, according to the Palestinian statistics bureau.

“On all fronts,” Shikaki said, “people have had it.”