‘Palestine Is Everything’ to the Arabs

Wearing jeans and a long-sleeved polo shirt, elbows on his knees, the 15-year-old looks and talks like any American teenager. His dream is to study computer engineering in California, where many of his relatives live.

The young Jordanian’s passion, though, is “Palestine” -- a place that no longer exists on most maps, and whose historical boundaries for the last 50 years have been entangled with those of Israel.

“Palestine is everything, it is everything to us,” said teenager Sultan Salwaha, who, like most Jordanians, is caught up in daily accounts here of Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers, of Palestinian homes demolished by Israeli forces.

In the United States, antiwar protesters and war supporters focus on Iraq. But in the Arab world, the attention is almost exclusively on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Conversations with factory workers, investment bankers and government ministers in this country wedged between Israel and Iraq almost always gravitate toward the dispute, even when the topic starts out as Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s regime.

The issue’s pervasive pull suggests that resolution of the difficult Palestinian situation holds the key to future American relations with the Arab world and perhaps to the success of the U.S.-led war on terrorism.

The matter so dominates the regional conversation that the final report of the Organization of the Islamic Conference meeting held this month in the Persian Gulf sheikdom of Qatar initially covered only one topic -- the Palestinians -- notwithstanding that the meeting was called to discuss Iraq.

When the omission was realized, delegates hastily added a statement on Baghdad.

The Palestinian struggle is the single issue on which the Arab world can agree. No other cause so inflames anti-American passions.

“In the West, decision makers have not understood how important the Palestinian issue is to the Arabs and the terrible shame that Arabs feel that they cannot correct the injustice being done there,” said Mustapha Hamarneh, director of the Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan.

Nashat Masri, a graduate of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, who worked for several years at Morgan Stanley in New York and London before returning to Jordan to start his own investment company, believes that a resolution of the Palestinian issue is key to winning the war on terrorism.

“Solving the Palestinian issue would put 99% of the Arab world on the U.S. side. If the Palestinian issue had been solved, a lot of the war on terror would be over because a lot of the Arab dislike or hatred of the U.S. is rooted in the Palestinian issue,” Masri said.

“The way terrorism is going to be defeated is by people saying, ‘There’s a plot here, there’s a plot there,’ ” he added. “The war on terrorism cannot be won by force; the [Osama] Bin Laden-style Afghans will die out, but if the fundamental problem continues to exist, the war of civilizations will continue and you will get other Bin Ladens.”

The potency of the issue has, if anything, increased over the last few years as the promise of peace dissolved in the face of violence between Palestinians and Israelis.

Hundreds of Israeli citizens have been killed, many by suicide bombers, since the current Palestinian uprising began in September 2000. But, not surprisingly, it is the Arab deaths at the hands of the Israeli army that resonate in this part of the world, and it is the fact that the toll is three times the number of Israelis slain that heightens the sense of grievance.

Middle East analysts increasingly have come to see the Palestinian problem as a major destabilizing element in the region. That trend has been abetted by Arab governments that, eager to distract their citizens from economic and political problems at home, have encouraged largely state-controlled media to focus on the conflict.

As a result, the issue has become almost iconic.

“Politicians will try to deflect public anger by turning people to external targets,” said Rami Khouri, executive editor of the Daily Star, a newspaper published throughout the region.

Khouri emphasized, however, that the Palestinian issue is an authentic symbol of long-term resentment.

“There’s the sense that we’re being subjected to a terrible and recurring and now century-old double standard,” he said. “That’s the single strongest criticism of the U.S. and Britain -- they come into the region and are going to reorganize the region, to protect American, Western or Israeli interests.”

For Khalid, 30, a worker in a phosphate plant in the southern Jordanian town of Maan near the Saudi Arabian border, the perceived double standard is summed up in the fact that the U.S. accuses Iraq of possessing weapons of mass destruction yet seems to tolerate Israel’s possession of such weapons

“America talks about disarming Iraq. Why don’t they disarm Israel?” he said.

Khalid, who gave only his first name, said he doesn’t approve of targeting civilians and views the Sept. 11 attacks as an injustice to the American people. But he was quick to argue that it is no more unjust than what happens every day in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

“What about people dying in Palestine?” he said.

“What about them and their children and their houses being destroyed? Aren’t they human too?”

To Arab -- and many Western -- governments, the U.S. focus on Iraq looks like an almost willful avoidance of the elephant in the Middle East’s living room.

“It’s on everybody’s agenda with the United States,” said a senior Western diplomat in the region. “It would take the sting out of Iraq if, after the event, they [the Americans] took the time and effort to get back to peace negotiations.”

The U.S. also runs the risk of alienating Arab allies such as Jordan, which continues to work with the Americans but clearly feels a measure of betrayal that the one issue most important to Arabs has been relegated to the back burner.

“Without war in Iraq, the peace process for everyone in the region remains No. 1,” Marwan Muasher, Jordan’s foreign minister, said in an interview. “But when you add the Iraq war, it would be catastrophic to have two open wounds at the same time. Nothing the international community does in Iraq will ease the pressure without movement on the peace process.”

Muasher, a soft-spoken but determined diplomat, paused and then added: “Not only movement, but movement to end the conflict, to reach a settlement in three years -- nothing short of that will ease the tensions.”

With the possibility of war in Iraq growing closer, President Bush announced Friday that the U.S. was prepared to move forward on the Middle East peace process.

Bush said he would unveil details of a “road map,” which among other steps would call for the establishment of a Palestinian state by 2005, after a new Palestinian prime minister takes office this week.

Before Friday’s announcement, Taher Masri, a former Jordanian prime minister, said he had spoken repeatedly to high-level U.S. State Department officials about the Palestinian issue but had been told it would have to wait until after a war with Iraq.

The lack of resolution brings home Arabs’ sense of impotence and can lead to extremism, Masri said. “What does a young Arab man do?” he said. “He closes himself, he reverts to religion, and some become more extreme.”

A number of terrorists, such as recently captured top-level Al Qaeda operative Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, were drawn to fundamentalist Islam because of distress at the Palestinian situation, according to reports.

In Jordan, more than half the population is of Palestinian origin. Daily accounts of deaths in Gaza and the West Bank are essentially news of “home.”

But the sense of injury to Arabs is strong throughout the region.

For Majeda Shehadeh, 42, a Syrian, there is a sense of empathy with the Palestinian mothers she sees on television whose homes have been demolished by Israeli forces.

Her tears are in part the grief of memory. Although she is now a mother of five living in a comfortable house in Amman, the Jordanian capital, the pictures of homeless Palestinians send her back to her childhood when her family fled the Golan Heights, which the Israelis occupied in 1967.

“The ground where we played, our lands where we lived, our farm was destroyed. So we grew up on the Palestinian issue from the time we opened our eyes into the world,” she said.

For Sultan, the teenager dreaming of studying in California, and many of his classmates at an elite Amman high school, a conversation with an American quickly turns into a rain of rhetorical questions, then a demand that their views be publicized. They all say they do not hate Americans but ask why the United States is allowing Arab civilians to be killed in the Middle East.

Zeinab Chalaby, an articulate 16-year-old whose family fled Iraq and who hopes to study in Britain when she graduates from high school, feels as passionately about the Palestinian issue as about the plight of her troubled Iraqi homeland.

“If one American dies, it makes history,” she said, “but thousands and thousands have died in Palestine, and no one names their names.”