The New York Times · 5 January 1986

CP-1986-026

In West Bank, Israeli Policies to Improve the ‘Quality of Life’ Get Mixed Reviews

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Scan 890 × 1252 pixels

Transcribed from the clipping

NABLUS, Israeli-occupied West Bank — Since Prime Minister Shimon Peres's national unity Government came into office 16 months ago, it has viewed an improvement in the “quality of life” of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as one of its achievements.

Interviews with Israeli military officials and experts on the West Bank, however, as well as with Palestinian lawyers, teachers, editors and business officials, suggest that its record in this area is ambiguous at best. The term “quality of life” was used by Secretary of State George P.

Shultz, and is also used by the Israeli authorities, to refer to a wide range of conditions — economic, political and those involving development — in the day-to-day existence of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. Mr.

Shultz has said an improvement in the “quality of life” of the West Bank Palestinians would be an important contribution to advancing the peace process. Some areas of daily life have clearly been improved, the experts note.

But many others, they say, show virtually no change for the better — particularly public works, an area in which the Israeli Government continues to collect more in tax revenues from the Palestinian residents of the West Bank than it spends on programs to serve them.

More important, in some key aspects of daily life — such as the imprisonment of Palestinian activists or the reunification of families — residents of the West Bank assert that there has been a change for the worse. “Improvement in the quality of life?” said Zafer el-Masri, the new Mayor of Nablus. “I have not even seen the minimum yet.

The things that really matter to people have not been touched. If I had to give this Government a grade, I would give it an ‘F.’” Col. Ephraim Sneh, the head of the Israeli Army Civil Administration, which runs day-to-day affairs in the West Bank, says he sees the situation differently.

He said that for the vast majority of the population, the authorities were making improvements in every field, from health care to roads. Israeli officials point to the appointment of Mr. Masri as Mayor of Nablus in December as the most prominent symbol of their intention to improve living conditions for Palestinians.

Non-Cooperation Under Military Rule [...] can be arrested by the army and held in jail for six months without trial. Since the summer, 106 Palestinians — most of them student leaders, labor organizers and suspected P.L.O. sympathizers — have been put into prison for three to six months without trial. Ten others have been deported.

The detention orders handed down by the army must be reviewed by a judge, but defense lawyers are not allowed to see most of the evidence against their clients — the part collected by Israeli secret agents or through informers. “It is the same every time,” said Mona Rishmawi, a Ramallah lawyer who has represented many of the detainees.

“I go to the court and say, ‘What is the evidence against my client?’ They say, ‘This is all we can show you; the rest is secret.’ How can I plead for someone if I can't see the evidence? My clients all ask me the same thing: ‘Why am I here?

If they have real evidence against me, why don't they put me on trial?’” Administrative detention, Miss Rishmawi says, seems to have become a convenient tool for the military government to punish some activists and deter others without going through time-consuming legal proceedings that might not produce convictions. [...] Israeli Note Some Improvements [...] military officials point to several other areas in the West Bank where they maintain they have improved the quality of life.

They contend that direct international dialing and new telephone switching systems, installed for the first time in major Arab towns, have eased the sense of isolation. The number of censored books has been reduced from 1,500 to 300, and some new medical equipment has been installed in hospitals in Ramallah and Nablus, according to Israeli officials.

In addition, greater flexibility is being shown in approving economic projects that do not compete with Israeli industries. Israeli officials also say that private aid organizations that help Palestinians develop services are no longer being obstructed.

West Bank residents acknowledge these improvements but argue that they must be viewed in the wider context of the occupation as a whole. [...] In the field of political expression, newspaper editors report a slight reduction in censorship that they consider insignificant. The general ban on Palestinian nationalist activism continues. The same week that Mr.

Masri was being reinstated as Mayor of Nablus, 14 West Bank moderates led by Hanna Seniora, editor of the newspaper Al Fajr, were turned down in their request to the military government for permission to go to Amman to try to persuade the P.L.O. chairman, Yasir Arafat, to recognize Israel's right to exist.

From the Palestinian perspective, all of this is taking place against a backdrop of expansion of Jewish settlements and restrictions on Palestinian town planning and land use. Although only one new settlement has been opened in the last 15 months, the 114 existing settlements and new towns have continued to expand.

Between October 1984 and October 1985 their total population increased from 42,500 to 52,000. “The Israelis want to have it both ways,” Miss Rishmawi said. “They want to have more settlements and still be able to claim to be improving the quality of life of Palestinians. Sure, they build new roads and put in new phones. But it is not to improve our lives.

It is to better integrate the West Bank with Israel. That doesn't improve my life. It deprives me of my future.”

How this transcription was made

Confirmed on the page: the running head reads 'THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, JANUARY 5, 1986', and the byline block reads 'Special to The New York Times'. — Printed in the running head: 'THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, JANUARY 5, 1986'. Jan. 5 1986 was a Sunday. This matches Maria's second label for the slide, not her first. — Maria's slide label reads 'New York Times July 3 1989 * another version of censorship / New York Times Jan 5 1986', but the images run the other way: s078_1 is the Jan. 5 1986 Friedman piece. The censorship material she flagged is in fact present in THIS clipping too — two passages, quoted below — so if her note was meant for the 1989 clipping, this one earns the flag as well. — The clipping is a full broadsheet page dominated by a full-page fur advertisement; the article runs in narrow legs around it. The marks [...] show where I have skipped passages rather than transcribe text I could not read with certainty at the resolution this compressed scan supports. Everything between them was read at 11x to 22x. One figure is soft: 'Since the summer, 106 Palestinians' — the third digit does not fully resolve at maximum magnification and could be 5, 6 or 8. It should be checked against a better scan before the number is used anywhere. The settlement population figures '42,500 to 52,000' are also at the edge of legibility; the first reads 42,500 and the second 52,000, but both should be re-checked.

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