After Joy, What's Next In Middle East?

Trudy Rubin, Philadelphia Inquirer editorial board, Gaza City

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Transcribed from the clipping

“GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — On Wednesday, the day that Israel turned over control of the occupied Gaza Strip to the Palestinians who live there, I saw something that summed up the hopes and fears invested in this dramatic step toward peace.

The leading Israeli peace group, Peace Now, started a demonstration just outside the entrance to Gaza in support of Palestinian self-rule and mutual co-existence.

Several hundred Israelis of all ages showed up, though Gaza is a good distance from central Israel… Gaza — a tiny, impoverished dot of land crammed with 800,000 Palestinians — was a hotbed of fevered resistance to Israeli rule.

However, two leading Gaza activists from Yasir Arafat’s Fatah group circulated among the demonstrators, shaking Israeli hands and making brief remarks. Both had been recently released from Israeli prisons after serving, respectively, 21 and 24 years for organizing armed resistance to the occupation.

One, Hishm Abdul Razk, insisted to me, ‘I really believe there can be peace between an Israeli and a Palestinian state.’… A small group of Palestinian farmers — mostly men but with three women, two small children and a donkey — had gathered on the other side.

One of them was waving a flagpole bearing both an Israeli and a Palestinian flag… The rest of the Palestinians were waving their arms and shouting ‘salaam’ (peace) while the women ululated… One man tied a Palestinian flag to the Israeli banner he had been carrying. A woman beside me wept, saying over and over again ‘It’s beautiful.’

Some Israeli teenagers started chanting ‘Israel-Palestine, Two countries for two peoples’ and both sides waved madly at each other… Latif Dori, a well-known Israeli peace activist, shouted furiously, ‘Rabin and Arafat meet in Cairo and we can’t meet those people’… A Palestinian woman beside me nodded, adding, with a glance toward a raucous Israeli counter-demonstrator, ‘There are maniacs on both sides who can cause hurt.’… So Zucker began urging the angry Israeli crowd to move back.

But as he did, he grabbed an Israeli flag and walked deliberately toward the fence.

Cutting through the police line — with legislative immunity — and dodging the police cars, he reached the barrier and passed the flag across the barbed wire and was given a Palestinian flag in return… all around I heard Israelis saying, ‘We have waited for this for so many years.’… But in the meantime, as the Israelis pull out, Arafat has failed to assign Palestinians to positions of authority to keep services and security in Gaza in operation… uncertainty breeds grumbling, or jokes, about Arafat’s theatrical performance at Wednesday’s signing ceremony in Cairo and his autocratic ways.

And more serious complaints can be heard widely about the Palestinian leader’s effort to exert control over every charitable or social or educational institution in Gaza.

Many Gazans worry that international donations to build the infrastructure will disappear into private Fatah hands… Ex-prisoner Abdul Razk tells me firmly, ‘I don’t believe Arafat will press unfairly on local Palestinian leaders.

But any undemocratic action will cause a reaction from us.’… As I leave Gaza, an Israeli soldier checking cars entering his country asks me anxiously what I have seen in Gaza. When I tell him people are celebrating, he smiles and says, ‘This has to be good for both sides.’”

Context added by this archive

The paper spells him Hishm Abdul Razk. It says the two released men served “respectively, 21 and 24 years” and names only one of them, so which term is his is not on the page.

Cite this clipping

"After Joy, What's Next In Middle East?," Rutland Daily Herald, 8 May 1994, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1994-004. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1994-004