The New York Times · 4 October 1990

CP-1990-031

Palestinians Struggling To Rebuild Their Lives

By CHRIS HEDGES

Scan 1468 × 712 pixels

Transcribed from the clipping

Two years ago, Issam F. Muala was studying civil engineering at a university in his hometown of Ramallah, on the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Today, he is working in a small grocery store in Brooklyn. Suffering from a self-imposed economic boycott in the occupied territories and the recent loss of thousands of jobs in the Persian Gulf states, many young Palestinian men like Mr.

Muala are immigrating to America. By the thousands, they are arriving in places like the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, looking for jobs and a little breathing room after three years of struggle in the Palestinian uprising, or intifada.

Thousands of miles from the Palestinian diaspora of the Arab world, they are finding themselves equally estranged in a new Palestinian diaspora. Back home, despite broad support for their struggle against the Israelis, the Palestinians are stateless, widely scattered and often resented.

To many Arabs in America — Yemenites, Egyptians and others — the young Palestinians are traitors for abandoning the fight. Nor do the Arabs look kindly on the allegiance many Palestinians have lent President Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

Tortured by Guilt Palestinians, who with many Lebanese are among the best educated and most liberal people in the Arab world, frequently resent going to work as grocery stockers. They chafe under a lack of affordable educational opportunities and the loss of their social and political prestige. And many say they feel tortured by guilt for having left.

How this transcription was made

Transcribed from the slide scan by a reader working off magnified crops, not by optical character recognition. The clipping carries no masthead, no folio and no dateline — the story is reported in Brooklyn. The newspaper is printed on it, in the photograph’s credit line “Angel Franco/The New York Times”. The date is derived from a boxed notice printed in the same column: “Because of Succoth, the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles, alternate-side parking rules will be suspended today and tomorrow in New York City.” Succoth began at sundown on 3 October in 1990, so a notice saying today and tomorrow places the paper on 4 October 1990, a Thursday; the year is independently fixed by the article’s references to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and to the intifada in its third year. The clipping ends mid-quotation at a jump line, so no quotation on it is complete.

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