Palestinians gamble for homeland with weakened hand

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SAFWAN, Iraq — For decades, this highway through hell has been the road of hope out of Palestine. The narrow slice of blacktop, which cuts through the desert out of Basra and winds through the rich oil fields of Kuwait, was built in the 1960s by the fledgling construction company of Yasser Arafat when the Palestine Liberation Organization was being hatched.

Palestinians since have traveled the road from Amman, Jordan, to the Persian Gulf when they ran out of hope at home. But now, time has run out on the other end.

For many Palestinians, the journey ended this spring where it began, in Safwan, a ramshackle town on the Iraqi-Kuwaiti frontier — a spot on the road home from the gulf for thousands of Palestinian exiles, deportees and refugees of the gulf war.

“We haven’t food, we haven’t water, we haven’t anything,” said Gassen Mutlaq, 23, the son of a Palestinian who emigrated to Kuwait in 1968, as he and nine Palestinians stood, aimlessly, at the road’s side one recent afternoon.

Taken prisoner by the Iraqis during the war, the men later had made it back as far as Kuwait City’s outskirts before Kuwaiti authorities intercepted them. They were shipped back across the border. Now they could not return to Kuwait, feared to go on to Baghdad and were uncertain how to get home — wherever home was.

“My father, my mother, my wife, my brother in Kuwait. What do I do? After 23 years I live in Kuwait. Now, no. Why not? Because I am Palestinian,” Mutlaq said. Ibrahim Mohammed Awad, a Kuwait University student, interrupted him, adding: “Our dream is broken. There is nothing. There are no dreams after this moment.”

Palestinians compare the occupation and subsequent deportations, arrests, torture and harassment that are driving Kuwait’s 400,000 Palestinians from the gulf to the “catastrophe,” the Palestinian exodus from Israel when the Jewish state was created.

For Palestinians, Kuwait “is a paradise lost that will never be gained again,” a senior Kuwaiti official said. “Let them be relegated to the forgotten. . . . Every one of them is a ticking time bomb.” The end of the gulf war has left the Palestinians in a political and economic crisis.

Four decades after Israel was carved out of Palestine, the 3-year-old uprising, or intifada, is stagnating. The Palestinians are no closer to finding a permanent homeland than they were in 1948.

The economic losses stemming from the PLO leadership’s controversial support of Iraq during the war now exceed an estimated $12 billion, according to the group’s official estimates. Factional violence in the Israeli-occupied territories has taken a dramatic upswing, with more Palestinians being killed by other Palestinians this year than by the Israeli army.

For the Palestinians, the war is not over yet — a proposition with grim prospects for the region.

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"Palestinians gamble for homeland with weakened hand," The Birmingham News, 7 July 1991, p. 4C. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1991-054. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1991-054