Chapter One

The Military Governor Has Moved Buildings

If the soldier in the sentry tower noticed the couple passing by down below, he apparently found nothing about them to arouse his suspicions. On that summer night in 1985, the headlights of the cars on Omar al-Mukhtar Boulevard in Gaza City and the light spilling from the building that housed the Israeli Northern Gaza Battalion illuminated a scene that seemed perfectly natural and normal: a woman in her final months of pregnancy, leaning on her short, skinny companion with the heaviness of intimacy, as, arm in arm, they sauntered along the length of the perimeter fence of an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) base in the heart of the city. The building, referred to by the people as the Majlis (Council) or al-Majlis al-Tashri'i (Legislative Council), was the seat of the Israeli military governor. It was also called al-Jundi al-Majhul (the Unknown Soldier) after the memorial erected by the Egyptians at the end of the boulevard. Of that, only the pedestal remained, since, as most Gazans recall, the statue was blown up by Israeli soldiers in June 1967.

Just a few hours before the couple took their stroll, the man, A.S., had thrown a hand grenade at the building's sentry tower. For the previous couple of days, he and two comrades had been monitoring the movements of the soldiers there. "We set the zero hour and drove by very fast. I threw the grenade. But we hadn't noticed that the top of the fence had been raised by a meter or more the very same day." The grenade hit the wire mesh and bounced back onto the sidewalk. "We kept driving and waited for the explosion. But there was no explosion. We suddenly got really scared that the soldiers would see the grenade, send it to the laboratory, find our fingerprints, and arrest us. For a couple of minutes we couldn't think straight. Our one thought was to go back, get the grenade, and hide it. Had we been thinking clearly, we'd have realized that the only thing the soldiers could do was to blow the grenade up. But we were panicking. I suggested getting B., my pregnant wife, and going back with her to look for the grenade--no one would suspect her. The others objected but I insisted."

It was then that B. first learned her husband had belonged to an armed Fatah cell for the past seven years. A.S. briefly explained the problem to her and she immediately agreed to his plan, joining the men in their car. About 200 meters from the spot, the couple got out and began to walk toward the fence. First time around, they found nothing. Fewer and fewer cars were now traveling along the boulevard. One by one the lights went out in the windows of the nearby houses, and fear gnawed at the four: where was the grenade? To the couple's relief, on their second pass B. spotted the grenade. A.S. picked it up, they walked to the waiting car, and got in.

"I wasn't afraid for myself," B. recollects. "I was afraid for A. I held on to him tightly and thought to myself that as long as I held him, the grenade wouldn't blow up." Off they drove, with A.S. holding the grenade out the window. In truth, the three men had no experience with explosives--that is, in disarming them. "We knew how to throw them," A.S. recalls ironically. In the training camp in Jordan there were no live grenades. The only thing he and his comrades had learned was how to pull out the pin. "So now our one idea was to throw the grenade into the sea. We drove to the shore and, somewhere between Gaza City and al-Shatti camp, I tossed it into the water."

A.S., today a civil servant employed by the Palestinian Authority, feels no regret for his action in 1985: he still believes that occupation by a foreign power demands countermeasures. Two days after the incident, however, he was plagued by remorse for having enlisted his wife. He suddenly grasped the danger in which he had placed her and their unborn child. "Even now I can't forgive myself," he says. His wife had not been surprised, though, to hear that for years--as he continued working by day at odd jobs in Israel--he had been involved in military activities against Israeli soldiers.

Between 1983 and 1987--until the outbreak of the intifada --gunfire and grenades hurled at soldiers were a daily occurrence. "It was the usual thing," A.S. recalls. "In every Palestinian home they were struggling against the occupation," B. adds. "A.S. comes from a family of fighters. Two of his brothers were killed in the struggle, one in 1956 and the other in 1969. In my family, too, there were fighters and prisoners." And it was always understood that other family members, the women and children, were not to be let in on the secret. Nevertheless, B. had joined that particular mission without a moment's hesitation: "I told him that it was all up to fate. Even if we went to jail or died as martyrs, we still had to struggle against the occupation. But actually, I wasn't thinking about the consequences. All I cared about was protecting my husband. I was sure that he wouldn't die as long as I was with him."

A.S. was caught about one month after the abortive action. Someone had fingered him and he was sentenced to twenty-seven years in prison for throwing the grenade and on three more counts. To this day he won't speak about other operations, except to say, "They were always against soldiers." After nine years A.S. was granted early release along with a group of prisoners freed as part of the Oslo Accords. He was released in July 1994, on condition that he not leave the confines of the Gaza Strip for Israel or the West Bank. Spared eighteen years of his sentence, A.S. was still freed too late to witness the IDF evacuate al-Majlis al-Tashri'i, his grenade's target.

I go by this building almost every day, and thoughts of A.S. and his pregnant wife strolling through the quiet night are never far away. The grenade he threw would have barely dented the building's massive walls; rather his act was a symbolic protest, an act of defiance against all that the building stood for. For decades al-Majlis al-Tashri'i, the military governor's building, had served as the heart of the Israeli occupation in the Strip; it was where hundreds of men in uniform, empowered by arms and the force of their state, determined every last aspect of A.S.'s life. The men in that building vetted the schoolbooks, imposed heavy taxes and fines, hired and fired the local Palestinian civil service, decreed curfews, recruited collaborators, conducted interrogations, and sent soldiers to carry out fearsome night patrols, lethal hunts for suspects, and humiliating street searches. Day and night, outsized jeeps would come and go with engines revving, and loudspeakers would blare folksy Hebrew songs that could be heard in the distant Saja'ya neighborhood. The soldiers would shout and joke and backslap in a display of arrogance that probably hid their fear as well.

All this not only demonstrated Israel's omnipotence and military superiority but was a permanent reminder of the long history of dispossession that had begun in 1948, when more than 700,000 Palestinians (of a population of some 1.3 million) became refugees, forced to leave their land as the Jewish national home came into being. About 200,000 of them found shelter in the Gaza Strip, then controlled by Egypt, and A.S. was a child of one such refugee family, born in an impoverished and overcrowded refugee camp. Like all Palestinians, he grew up with the longing to return home and the growing desire for national independence.

In 1967 the Israeli occupation added one more painful link to the chain of deprivation, bringing as it did even greater constrictions on individual and communal freedom. For years people believed that only armed struggle against Israel would break the chain and reverse the effects of loss. For years people like A.S. and his wife dreamed only of overthrowing Israel and expelling what was to them a foreign entity. But in time, A.S. must have realized that his one hand grenade posed no real challenge to such a solid, fortified structure. He must have been aware as well of the poor, amateurish military training he and his comrades had received in the Jordanian training camps--insufficient to present a real strategic threat to the State of Israel. Perhaps in retrospect his act seems pathetic--throwing a grenade that failed to explode and then nearly getting caught. Almost as pathetic as the delusion--born of ignorance, isolation, and poor political analysis--that Israel was a passing phenomenon, easily disposed of. But A.S.'s act and all those like it carried reverberations far beyond their immediate result: this core of defiance nourished and bolstered the Palestinians' emancipatory drive, which grew as it would among any oppressed people and culminated in the popular uprising, the intifada , which erupted in December 1987.

A.S. has undergone a passage that is both personal and yet, to a high degree, shared and emblematic: from proud but embittered refugee to ill-equipped underground soldier; from prisoner held in Israeli jails (where, while his wife and children were taking part in the uprising, he learned to come to terms with Israel's permanence even as he clung to his desire for freedom), to civil servant employed by the Palestinian Authority, which administers the self-rule areas. This book is an attempt to chart that passage, to relate the ideological, cultural, and emotional histories that make up the human story of the Gaza Strip--histories that are bound together by the common quest for freedom.

The Egyptians, who controlled Gaza after the war in 1948, had refrained from annexing the Strip, and in 1957 al-Majlis al-Tashri'i was built as the seat of the local Egyptian governor. In 1962 it housed the very first partially elected Palestinian Legislative Council (hence the building's name in Arabic), a governing body set up by the ruling Egyptians. Although just ten of the Council's forty members were elected (ten were appointed by the governor and the rest were senior civil servants), its establishment reflected Egypt's intention to grant the Palestinians considerable freedom to administer their own civic affairs, especially in the areas of health, education, and labor relations. Palestinians welcomed the step, but their national aspirations already went well beyond both the physical boundaries of the Strip and the limitations of municipal management, and it was in the Council's sessions in this building that the idea to found a movement for Palestinian liberation was first put forward.

The Council stayed in the site for only five years. After Israel occupied the Strip in 1967, it was dissolved and the building became the base for the Israeli military governor and the IDF's Northern Gaza Battalion and remained so for almost thirty years. In all this time, while Israel referred to the structure as the military governor's building, Gazans persisted in calling it "the Council"; thus the very site itself came to represent two profoundly opposing views of government--one imposed, the other elected. Finally, in March 1996, the newly elected Palestinian Legislative Council, formed as the result of the Oslo Accords, took possession.

The building sits at the western end of Omar al-Mukhtar Boulevard, the main shopping street in Gaza City and its principal traffic artery connecting the city's densely populated, older neighborhoods--Saja'ya, Zeitun, and Darj in the east--with the modern, upscale Rimaal development, nestling on the Mediterranean shorefront in the west. The boulevard starts at the disused railway station, which once served the line that linked Haifa to Cairo and since 1995 has become a marketplace for clothes and cloth and household goods and a haven for the street stalls that once blocked the sidewalks. From the station, the boulevard climbs up Gaza Hill, the highest point in the city, before swinging down to Faras, the old market. By the time it reaches Rimaal, Omar al-Mukhtar Boulevard is lined with rows of eucalyptus trees planted in the pre-1948 days of the British mandate. Like an honor guard, they direct one's eye toward the imposing building.

On May 18, 1994, al-Majlis al-Tashri'i fulfilled its symbolic function by being the last facility in the Gaza Strip to be evacuated by Israeli troops. The soldiers' departure was the result of two agreements: first, the Declaration of Principles, signed on September 13, 1993, by two old foes--the State of Israel and the PLO--which affirmed the general terms of limited Palestinian self-rule in Gaza and the West Bank, beginning in the Strip and the West Bank city of Jericho; second, the Cairo agreement (popularly known as the first Oslo Accord or Oslo 1), signed on May 4, 1994. This document formally initiated self-rule, elaborated on the principles of mutual recognition already signed, and set forth a detailed plan for Israeli redeployment in Gaza and Jericho, in which most military bases and installations were to be evacuated and then handed over to the just-formed Palestinian police.

In the weeks following the Cairo agreement, building after building in the Gaza Strip was emptied of its hated occupants. Generally, the Israeli soldiers cleared out under cover of night during the curfew and thus people were denied the joy of watching the Israeli flag being lowered and folded for the last time. One by one, the evacuated buildings were thrown open to groups of uniformed Palestinian police--aged twenty to sixty--who came from Egypt, Yemen, and Algeria, all over the Arab world; some had been born in the diaspora and some in Jerusalem or Haifa, but each gray hair on their heads had been acquired, it seemed, in a different part of the world.

On May 11 the first group settled into the building in Dir al-Balah, south of Gaza City, formerly occupied by representatives of the Israeli civil administration. There I witnessed a meeting between a Palestinian coastguardsman returning from exile and family members he had never known. It had taken his relatives, who lived in the nearby refugee camp, only a few hours to learn, from neighbors of friends, about the new arrival who shared their name and came from the same village. They had hurried to the building to meet him. The guardsman, returning from outside the country, preferred not to malign the Israeli officers who had turned over control of the building to him and his fellow police. "Today is the day of our birth. Arafat, our commander in chief, had bidden us to speak well, to forget the past." But having lived through the occupation and the intifada , his newfound family could not forget so easily. "This building brings back all the painful memories of humiliation, interrogation, and beatings," one relative said bitterly. His brother summed it up: "All these buildings should have been demolished."

Then three days later, at the crack of dawn on May 14, the soldiers quietly moved out of Jabalia camp. The Jabalia refugees were especially disappointed to miss their departure--the storming of the military post in the heart of the camp had marked the beginning of the intifada some six years earlier. The night before their scheduled evacuation, the soldiers were still searching houses and chasing youngsters who had violated the curfew--a curfew that every evening for years had imprisoned hundreds of thousands of people in their cramped homes from dusk to daybreak. But the morning after the soldiers had gone I was there with the hundreds who trampled the wire mesh of the building's fence beneath their feet, touched the walls of the outpost as if in a dream, and raised the Palestinian flag over the sentry tower. "If only we'd been able to throw a few parting stones," a couple of boys joked.

I spent that evening with friends from the camp. They left their houses determined to stay out all night for the first time in years. Using my privileged Israeli status I had, on occasion, traveled through the dark, deserted streets of Jabalia and Gaza City and Khan Yunis and so had something to compare with this evening, and the vision was stirring. From a dusty shantytown where testy dogs barked at any shadow that dared to move and rats scuttled in the piles of garbage and junk, Jabalia was transformed overnight into a bustling Mediterranean quarter--light spilled out from every door and window; men in djelabas sat in the street on low straw chairs, sipping coffee; young married couples, some with children, made a bashful effort to be seen together in the evening outside their stifling refugee shacks. The barbershop, the furniture store, the grocery, another store that sold shutters, a makeshift garage--all were open at ten o'clock at night; even though they didn't expect customers, the shop owners just wanted to see what life was like after eight in the evening. Here and there snatches of song were piped out from a raspy tape player. Falafel and carob-juice carts decorated with colored paper or plastic flowers opened for business in the corners of alleyways, and the aroma of falafel crackling in oil seemed fresh and new.

After taking in the scene, my friends and I drove southwest from Jabalia to Gaza City, a distance of three or four kilometers. The closer we got to the city, the fewer people we saw and the darker and emptier were the streets, since the main military posts there had not yet been evacuated and the curfew was still in effect. A small number of pedestrians and a few dozen cars had dared to violate the curfew, but the soldiers--perhaps on orders--were not stopping anyone moving about in the streets. On Omar al-Mukhtar Boulevard we passed the military government building, only part of which was lit up. Several soldiers were still patrolling the unlit street; to us they looked small and frightened, clinging to their own shadows.

We got out of the car and walked around. Two soldiers on guard in a sentry tower evidently felt more secure on their elevated perch than did their fellows on foot patrol. "Just look at them strolling about," I heard one of them say, as if some physical defect had prevented Gazans from walking outdoors on past evenings.

Four nights later, on May 17, only the military governor's building remained to be evacuated by the Israeli army. The curfew had still not been lifted, but it was as if a collective decision had been made to ignore it; thousands began streaming along the boulevard to witness the exodus of the last Israeli troops. Many climbed the base of the memorial to the Unknown Soldier to get a better view. Circles of laughing, jeering people closed in on the armed but subdued and frightened soldiers, who wouldn't let anyone approach the high fence. " Yallah , go on, get out of here!" some kids yelled at the soldiers in army Hebrew.

The circles grew tighter and tighter, hemming in the soldiers. Some self-appointed marshals, members of Fatah, tried to come to the soldiers' aid and move people away. But around two in the morning the tension got out of hand, and suddenly there was an exchange of tear gas and stones and broken glass. It's not clear who started it--the soldiers, feeling threatened or merely wanting to make sure that no one watched their pullout, or youngsters whose fingers were itching for a little stone throwing. More than anything, this last exchange was probably a final reaction to Israeli power and the impotence it evoked, a final act of defiance and of rage over friends shot and killed, over children blinded by rubber bullets, over parents beaten and shamed in front of their families. Even moments before the evacuation, when the future seemed so promising, no order, not even from Arafat, could compel people to forget what the soldiers stood for.

The tear gas at dawn was the soldiers' parting gift. As always, it spread in all directions, seeping into the houses fronting the boulevard, forcing people to their back windows where it was less concentrated, and scattering the crowd far and wide. Teary-eyed, people fled as far as Saja'ya, coughing and covering their mouths and noses with their shirttails or kaffiyehs. Under cover of the tear gas, the IDF soldiers withdrew from the building, having turned it over to the commanders of the Palestinian police force in a brief ceremony. The police fired several joyful (and alarming) rounds to mark their take-over, and then everyone thronged back to the boulevard, climbing to the roof of the building, lifting several commanders on their shoulders, dancing and firing their rifles, and celebrating. In the midst of the noise and confusion, someone found a bunch of keys thrown in the yard and came to me to ask what was written on the Hebrew tag: "Administration Rooms: Entrance." Another wanted to know what was inside two boxes stamped "IDF" that had been left in a corner. A third, his throat still burning from the tear gas, made a path through the celebrants and asked me to translate an inscription on the walls. It was a quotation from Vegetius, the fourth-century explicator of the Roman military system: "Let him who desires peace prepare for war."

The falafel vendors showed up with their speedy carts. So did the men selling carob-juice, whose stands managed miraculously to stay upright under the mob clambering over them; to me, those carts would always represent Mediterranean color, the brightness of Gaza and its people that had for so long been dulled by the gloom of military rule. Perhaps the soldiers' departure enabled Gazans to throw off the drabness, or perhaps the gaiety was just the natural reaction of people ground down by years of resistance, mourning, and privation.

One afternoon several months earlier, I had witnessed in quick succession two sights that revealed some truth about both the weariness and helplessness bred by the occupation and, conversely, the yearning for change that it fosters, a yearning that finds expression in grand actions--clashes and demonstrations--as well as in small individual gestures. I was walking downhill on Omar al-Mukhtar Boulevard, toward the sea. The protest strike declared during the intifada was still being strictly observed, which meant that except for food stores all places of business were closed after one or two in the afternoon. Very few people--and no women at all--were out on the streets; there were hardly any cars either. Some schoolchildren were returning home from the morning shift while others had already begun the afternoon shift. The military governor's building loomed as menacing as ever, surrounded by a fence that during the intifada years had gradually eaten up wider and wider strips of the boulevard and the side streets at either end of the building. Cars were not allowed to drive around this imposing edifice and pedestrians were also kept away. An old Bedouin shepherd watched over some scraggly goats that chewed at the grass growing around the Unknown Soldier.

I passed a kiosk on the boulevard and saw that the owner had been so bold as to put out a dozen new plastic chairs of various colors, as if to say, "I'm tired of the dullness." The chairs--I checked them--were made by the Israeli plastics firm Keter, even though intifada directives called for a boycott of nonessential Israeli products. An act of this kind--inviting passersby to sit back and relax, to publicly enjoy their moments of leisure--couldn't have been more surprising. The sight provided a flicker of Mediterranean color peeking through the gray, of normalcy, even optimism.

I continued on my way and near a corner of the fence, in the shadow of the sentry tower, I saw two soldiers sitting on a bench. Nothing unusual about that. I walked a few more steps and noticed two young men kneeling beside the soldiers, heads bent, hands manacled behind their backs. What had they done--thrown stones? One soldier got up, walked a few steps, and nonchalantly urinated on the fence near the two Palestinians. Mesmerized, I watched this silent tableau of occupation for twenty or thirty minutes while other pedestrians walked by, showing little interest. Some children asked me if one of the young men was my son or my brother, as if only family would take the trouble to wait there and watch; anyone else would be too weary. And then the colored chairs seemed absurdly out of place--a broken plea against such routine powerlessness.

* * *

"Look at them. Why are they staring at me with such hatred?" an Israeli soldier once asked me. I have forgotten the circumstances--it might have been the soldier I chatted with one evening as he was checking people leaving the Strip or the guard who reluctantly exchanged a few words with me as he watched a building on Omar al-Mukhtar Boulevard. In any case, I was stunned by his genuine sense of victimization and persecution, undoubtedly typical of many soldiers. Truly astounding was his ability to detach himself from the political and military context and expect the person he had stopped--to check an ID card, say--to view him as a private individual despite the threatening rifle and the uniform. And despite a catalogue of abuses, great and small: soldiers shooting at the rooftop water tanks just for fun. Soldiers chanting loud, offensive slogans while patrolling the refugee camps or pounding on the fragile tin doors to frighten the children. Soldiers confiscating identity papers for such bogus reasons as the card's frayed edges or faded type, even though it is illegal for Palestinians to be without identification. And soldiers were not the only culprits. There were also the tax officers who would take hours-long breaks, leaving people standing in the hot sun; the border guards who would kick over a vegetable stand as the desperate stall owner tried to salvage a few tomatoes; the military base that would dump its garbage in the middle of a residential neighborhood. "Break their bones," Yitzhak Rabin allegedly said when the intifada began, and many of the troops took him literally.

Boaz Nagar of the IDF's Golani Brigade served in the Jabalia camp in 1991. "Boy, the things we did there," he told reporter Shaul Bibi. "If we caught one of them we'd make him play backgammon, and whoever won would get to beat the hell out of him." Nagar's fellow soldier Yigal stood out for his ability to catch children on the street during a curfew. "Once he caught this guy and saw in his papers that he'd been in jail, so we all really went to town." The same Yigal perfected the practice of tearing down washing lines hanging between the houses, using his rifle to pull down the clothes. "He kept telling everyone to do it until the platoon sergeant finally asked him to stop, on orders from the company commander." The soldier was Yigal Amir, who went on to assassinate Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995. In the end, Amir, who had brutalized Palestinians as if born to it, turned his animus on Rabin, who had once given him license to do so.

After the transfer of authority to the Palestinians in May 1994, some positive changes were felt right away. For one thing, the soldiers were gone from the streets, along with their guns and their noise and their condescension. "We aren't afraid now to let the children play outside," people would say. "We don't run around looking for a child who's a little bit late coming home. We've stopped having nightmares about a son or a daughter shot in the head." Within weeks after the pullout, as if someone had waved a magic wand, bands of small boys suddenly materialized in Gaza City, riding bicycles in the middle of the roads, even against the flow of traffic, thumbing their noses at the honking cars. Beside them strode groups of chattering girls. I even began to see girls riding bikes.

"We can finally sleep without pajamas on hot summer nights," said S. from Rafah, who spent some three years on and off in an Israeli detention camp. He had long dreamed of discarding his pajamas in the summer. Even when he was briefly home between one prison term and the next, he could not go without them in case soldiers broke in at night. "We couldn't give them any reason to embarrass us," he said.

In addition, the afternoon siesta was reinstated. Before the soldiers withdrew, their presence in the streets and the intrusive noise of army jeeps induced profound anxiety. Anyone with common sense tried not to stay outside too long, and yet people also felt trapped indoors. In the afternoons they shut themselves inside and sank into an uneasy sleep from which they had little desire to wake up. Now Gaza has returned to the natural rhythm of the Mediterranean coast. Between two and four in the afternoon a collective lethargy settles over the city and the camps. All at once the cars and crowds disappear, the steaming streets become empty, and for two hours the world slumbers serenely. After the siesta, traffic once again begins to move--cars, bustling pedestrians, and people just taking a leisurely stroll. And when night falls, lights from the stores and the vehicles give the streets an air of liveliness and normalcy.

The media in Israel and throughout the world were quick to praise the changes. Gazans' trips to the beach in the evening, the crowds that filled the streets to overflowing, the lights on Omar al-Mukhtar Boulevard--all were noted enthusiastically as triumphs of the peace process. So, too, was the potential for commercial enterprise, for building and development. But in the Strip itself people were less impressed. Many were indignant at the television networks' inordinate interest in the cheery spectacle of Gazans drinking coffee by the seashore. Whoever was setting the tone in the media reports, they felt, was playing off the scenes frozen in the mind of the Israeli soldier, for whom Gaza was a dark, deserted maze of narrow, twisting alleys and its denizens the angry young men he had viewed through the sight of a gun or the windshield of a jeep.

The Palestinians, on the other hand, were making a different comparison altogether, between their lives now and before the intifada , between their lives in the Strip and life as they knew it in Israel. For people familiar with the beachside restaurants and enticing shop windows of Ashkelon and Tel Aviv, for people who had played a central role in Israel's construction boom, the comparison was grim. Who better than a nation of construction workers could understand the injustice of the restrictions on building and development in their own territory? And who could better understand that the frenzy of construction in the Strip that so impressed the entire world was only a belated and partial compensation for years of nondevelopment? For twenty-seven years one community had watched daily how their neighbors lived as a free people in their own country.

In the early 1960s, during Egyptian rule, the military governor's building was the site of the earliest expressions of Palestinian yearnings for national rights. Some thirty years later, in 1994, the world watched Israeli troops leave the building and believed those rights were being realized. The Israeli pullout was referred to as a "withdrawal," but mistakenly so: the IDF battalion headquarters, with the same officer in charge, simply moved north a few kilometers and set up near the Jewish settlement of Nisanit. Other Israeli military bases relocated to the vicinity of the Jewish settlements in the Katif Bloc, which effectively cuts the Strip in half. And legally and politically, the IDF continued to have the final say in the Strip.

Summarizing the terms of the Oslo Accords, Joel Singer, a former legal adviser to the Israeli Foreign Ministry and one of the legal architects of the Cairo agreement, affirmed Israel's continuing military role in an article he published in 1995:

The nature of the regime established in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip for the duration of the transitional period is that of Palestinian autonomy under the supreme authority of the Israeli military government. Israel will continue to be responsible for, among other things, the external security as well as the external relations of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.... Unlike the Civil Administration, the military government does not dissolve. Instead, it simply withdraws physically from its former location and continues to exist elsewhere as the source of authority for the Palestinian Council and the powers and responsibilities exercised in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

In the same spirit of paternalism, Singer commented on the need for elections to the Palestinian Legislative Council, saying that Israel "recognized the importance of establishing a democratic and accountable system of self-government." Furthermore, "driven by its desire to see a fully democratic Palestinian society," Israel went beyond the provisions of the Declaration of Principles (in which the Council, as a single body, was intended to carry out legislative and executive functions alike) by agreeing to the Palestinian request for a separation between the legislative branch--the Council itself--and a committee of the Council charged with executive authority. "Such a division would ensure the existence of over-sight and accountability, two pre-requisites for a democratic regime." Finally, Israel agreed to another exception, permitting "separate and simultaneous elections for the Council and for the position of Chairman [or Ra'ees in Arabic] of the Executive Authority of the Council."

Israel's willingness to accede to these changes, especially the separation of the executive and legislative branches, enabled the Palestinian political structure to move closer to the desired democratic model of a freely elected representative body. Still, the way in which the date of elections was chosen and announced was a concrete manifestation of Israel's superior decision-making role vis-à-vis the subordinate Palestinians. At a joint press conference called by Yassir Arafat and Shimon Peres, Israel's foreign minister, in October 1995, Arafat thanked Peres for having proposed "positive initiatives," and noted that he and the foreign minister had agreed to continue their cooperation. Then, Peres, looking quizzically at his colleague, reminded him of the elections. "Ah yes," said Arafat, "the elections," and went on to announce the date: January 20, 1996.

The information came like a bolt from the blue. It seemed as if the date had been set that same day, with some moderate pushing and prodding on Peres's part. The Palestinian candidates and organizations that were to participate--including Fatah, Arafat's own movement--found themselves with just three months to prepare for the first general elections in Palestinian history.

A number of prominent Palestinians had decided not to participate in the elections or declare their candidacy, but they reversed their position when Israel agreed to allow a separate executive authority. One of those was Hayder abd al-Shafi, a surgeon by profession, who had a long background of representing his people. Elected chair of the first Palestinian Legislative Council in 1962, he received the highest number of votes of any candidate in the 1996 elections--a testament to his enduring popularity and to the high degree of respect he inspires. Palestinians trust him for his judicious manner, for his receptivity to all complaints and all views, and especially for his political stance, his outspoken criticism of the Oslo Accords and the new Palestinian Authority. Indeed, abd al-Shafi enjoys a reputation as something of a contrarian. In 1947 he was one of the few Palestinians to support the UN Partition Plan (which called for the division of Palestine into two separate states); he understood the reality of the Jewish presence in the country, a stand that was shared only by the Palestinian Communist Party. After 1967, he was one of the first to establish open political contacts with Israelis when such a step was still considered taboo. At the end of 1991, he was asked by Yassir Arafat to head the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid talks, where the Israeli delegation complained to U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Edward Djerijian that abd al-Shafi spoke in a peevish tone of voice and addressed himself only to issues of "human rights in the territories and not the substantive matters on the agenda."

Abd al-Shafi's opposition to the Oslo agreement was primarily the result of the concessions Palestinians made in regard to the Jewish settlements in the occupied territories. Allowing these to remain while establishing self-rule in other parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip was, in his view, a fatal mistake. He disapproved of the agreement to postpone discussions on that issue until the final-status negotiations. The Palestinian people, he pointed out, would always regard the Jewish settlements--and the military presence installed to guard them--as a source of provocation and an infringement of their right to self-determination. Postponing deliberations on the settlements effectively altered the status of the West Bank and Gaza Strip from occupied territories, where Jewish settlements were illegal, to disputed ones, over which both sides possessed an equal right to bargain. And in a bargain based on might alone and not on principles, the stronger side--that is, Israel--would inevitably triumph. Even so, when Israel agreed to changes in the Council's composition, abd al-Shafi was moved to swim with the current and seek election.

"What will you be able to do for the people who elect you?" I asked him a week before the vote. "Our primary concern is that they be treated fairly, by the Palestinian Authority and by the Israelis," he said. "We won't lust watch from the sidelines and keep quiet--our top priority is to put democracy into practice. We'll demand that the Executive Authority be answerable to the Legislative Council. We'll insist on our right to question it and oversee its behavior. People are already frustrated by the way the Authority acts. They complain about the Palestinian security forces, which are not subject to the law or to clear-cut regulations. They resent that it takes pull to get a job. Of course they're frustrated by the economic damage caused by Israel's policy of closing Gaza's borders whenever it feels like it. And they're very angry about the free hand Israel still has in inflicting collective punishment."

Palestinians hailed the Legislative Council--an independent body of popularly elected representatives who would give voice to their needs--as a tangible, qualitative change in their lives. Although the press in Gaza barely covered the Council's fractious weekly sessions, everyone in the Strip knew within a day who had quarreled with whom, which representative had dared bring up some touchy subject that had been on everyone's mind, and which promises the Executive Authority had made and then broken. During the Council's first few months, it stood out as the only segment of the new Palestinian political system that was more than a rubber stamp, that openly and consistently opposed Arafat.

But for all the Council's enthusiasm and dedication, it was quickly stymied by the most basic obstacles. Following its first session in March 1996, the Council set up eleven different committees, many of which were to meet in the West Bank. By May and June that year, however, the weekly sessions, along with the committee meetings, had been disrupted several times because the Council members required Israeli travel permits to move between Gaza and the West Bank. In mid-May, the members had been set to attend sessions in Bethlehem but their permits, good for one week, were valid only between 5:00 A.M. and 7:00 P.M. In other words, Council members would need to return to Gaza every afternoon and miss the evening sessions. Furthermore, the permits did not mention the Palestinians' parliamentary status--which would have spared them the inevitable delays at Israeli roadblocks--noting only that they were traveling for "personal reasons." The permits were sent back and new ones were issued, in which the time restrictions had been removed but the "personal" designation was still in place. The permits went back yet again and were reissued correctly--to all but three legislators: Jawad al-Tibi, a Fatah member and former prisoner, instrumental in setting up the Palestinian peace movement; Rafat al-Najjar, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), threatened with expulsion during the intifada ; and Hayder abd al-Shafi.

This was not the first time that abd al-Shafi had been denied an exit permit. He had been prevented from leaving the Strip the previous year, and an Israeli official had explained that he was not, of course, suspected of smuggling arms, it was just that "he speaks out against the accords." The Palestinian in charge of processing exit requests was furious. "How do you expect us to become a democracy when you won't let abd al-Shafi go to the West Bank to express his opinions?"

Now only the angry intercession of Arafat himself produced the three missing permits. He gave the Israelis fifteen minutes in which to produce them or threatened to cancel the Council meetings. The permits arrived just in time. In my pre-election conversation with abd al-Shafi it had not occurred to either of us that, with all the urgent work before the Council, with the desperate needs of its constituents, legislators would be required to invest so much time and energy in securing the simple right to move freely between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

The army had relocated, the buildings had been evacuated, some Palestinians had returned from exile and had even cast their votes, but before they could begin to exercise their new autonomy, the first Palestinian parliamentarians were still obliged to wait for Israeli travel permits.