Press Room

Must Read News

All-System Failure

By Ben Caspit
Ma'arive
Posted on Friday December 20, 2002

In the meantime, just beyond the fence, a tragedy is unfolding. A human, social, national tragedy. The entity known as the ‘Palestinian Authority’ has long since collapsed. The security establishment and the Foreign Ministry have more than a few documents that state, unequivocally, that there is no Palestinian Authority. Now the systems are crashing, one after the other.

One needs only to read the daily reports of the coordinators of activities in the territories to comprehend the dimensions of the crisis on the Palestinian side. Harsh phenomena, heart-rending, of an entire people that has lost its way, left dangling somewhere between heaven and earth, without any way out, without hope.

All around, everyone is busy: Israel with its elections, with Iraq, Europe is fighting invisible Islamic terror, America is trying to pull out of its recession, to find bin Laden and to get rid of Saddam Hussein. The cry of the simple, hard-pressed Palestinian, who has to feed quite a few children’s mouths, goes unheard.

This is understandable, but not justified. Because after the Palestinian people crash for good and Palestinian society is swallowed up by regional gangs, when the commander of the Hebron Brigade, for example, has to deal with 20 different armed gangs and has 20 ‘snake heads’ to worry about, we will understand the enormity of the problem and of our mistake.

The economic situation in the territories is growing worse. The number of those working is swiftly decreasing, the number of hungry mouths is growing correspondingly. The latest worrisome phenomenon is prostitution. It is flourishing and spreading. Married Palestinian women, mothers, some of whom are older women, go into the alleys and become street prostitutes to put food on the table. Their husbands, who would normally slaughter them for desecrating the ‘family honor,’ look the other way. You have to eat. Family units are unraveling, social codes are disintegrating. The society is declining, the central authority has vanished. There is no judicial system. It is a return to the regime of local, wild clans.

Parents sell the contents of their home to get food, to buy books for the children. Masses of simple workers ‘seep’ out of problematic areas under constant curfew (Jenin and Nablus, for example) for other areas, close to Ramallah and to Jerusalem. They set up temporary camps there, become day laborers and push out the more established Palestinians because they are willing to work for pennies. Prostitution and violence flourish in these improvised camps.

The residents plead to the remnants of the Palestinian police to keep Hamas and terror figures away from the neighborhood, but the latter do not lift a finger. Recently this happened in Rafah, when local residents asked the Palestinian police to keep Hamas away from an area in the city. Arafat was asked to authorize this, but refused. The simple Palestinian citizen gets up in the morning and doesn’t know if he will be able to bring food home.

The banking system is on the verge of collapse. The health system functions only thanks to the IDF and to the coordinator of activities in the territories. Sanitation is on the brink of collapse. The residents are convinced that Israel will exploit the war in Iraq to deal it a final, winning blow.

With this the situation, it looks like our future partner to a peace agreement, for a solution that both sides agree on, is fast sinking into an irreversible catatonic state. It is likely that by the time we reach the conclusion that the time has come to talk with them, there will be nobody to talk to.