Palestinian Defiance

A Movement of Movements?—17 mustafa barghouti PALESTINIAN DEFIANCE Interview by Éric Hazan Could you tell us about your origins and early trajectory? was born in Jerusalem, in 1954, but I spent my childhood here in Ramallah. My family is from Deir Ghassaneh, a village about fifteen miles away, near Bir Zeit; but after 1948, my father became the municipal engineer for Al Bireh, adjoining Ramallah. The IBarghouti family, a large one, has always been very political, very active. Under the Mandate, my grandfather and his brother were jailed by the British. During the 1950s, the whole village was part of the left opposition to Jordanian rule. It was the beginning of the Nasserite movement, of Pan-Arabism; the influence of the Jordanian Communist Party and other left forces was also very strong. I grew up surrounded by internationalist, progressive literature—our family’s viewpoint was always shaped by opposition to social injustice, rather than by nationalism. My father used to speak to us of his Jewish comrades in Tiberias or Acre. All through my childhood, I heard talk of prisons. I’ve been told that the first time I went to a prison I was two years old, taken to visit one of my uncles who’d been jailed—for political reasons, of course. Then during the 1960s there were many waves of mass demonstrations and protests. You were fourteen at the time of the 1967 war. What were its effects for you? Those few days reshaped me. I felt a huge amount of responsibility. My childhood ended then. We were now under occupation. It was the new left review 32 mar apr 2005 117 118 nlr 32 beginning of a life mission: how do we become free? The feeling of injustice was very strong. Though still a child, I felt the whole world sitting on my shoulders. There was also the sense of failure—that the Nasserite approach had failed, and we had to find something else. How had such a tiny country as Israel been able to beat all the Arab armies? How to explain the gap between the grand speeches and the reality? It was a lesson never to be cheated by propaganda again. Some gave in to defeatism—Nasser had it wrong, it was better to adopt a pro-American stance—but our position was: no, we have to resist, but in a stronger, better way. I’ve never felt I was fighting for the liberation of the Palestinian people on purely nationalistic grounds, one people against another. It was a fight against oppression, against occupation. Where did you study medicine? In Moscow. I went in 1971 and had to stay there for the whole seven years to complete my training, because the Israeli army would harass anyone studying abroad if they tried to come back, and I’d been very active in the student movement. Naturally I followed the events at home—it was a very harsh period. I came back as soon as I’d finished my training, in 1978, and specialized in internal medicine and cardiology at Maqased Hospital in Jerusalem, the best one in Palestine at the time. I was still politically active, of course, in the Palestinian Communist Party, but at that time all political activity was banned, every movement was under- ground. We were part of a new form of resistance to the Occupation that developed after Jordan crushed the Palestinians during the ‘Black September’ of 1970, putting an end to the first phase of armed struggle. The new movement was one in which the people were democratically involved in decision-making. This is a period that has not been properly studied, as the media’s attention was concentrated on the plo’s adven- tures in Lebanon or Tunis. People did volunteer work, helping with the olive harvesting or assisting the medical crews. By the end of the 1970s, several resistance committees had been formed: the National Guidance Committee, which coordinated activities, the Palestinian National Front, as well as local committees across Palestine. This was where the embryo of the first Intifada took shape. An important turning point came when Sadat addressed the Knesset in 1977 and the Camp David Accords were signed the following year: a ‘peace’ agreement, without solving the problem of the Israeli Occupation! barghouti: Palestine 119 We realized then that we couldn’t rely on Egypt, Syria or any other country, that we could expect nothing from outside. We would have to be self-reliant, self-organized. Resistance would have to mean defying the Occupation, defying the Israeli rules. How did you come to set up Medical Relief? At Maqased I soon realized that, under the Israeli Occupation, even the most basic health needs were not being met—unsurprisingly, since yearly government spending per person was then $600 for Israelis and $18 for Palestinians. Three quarters of the Palestinian population lived in villages or in refugee camps without proper water and sanitation sys- tems, let alone medical provision. In 1979 the Israelis imposed a very long and severe curfew in Hebron. A group of progressive doctors from Maqased set off to help the people there, but the Israeli army wouldn’t let us through. Instead of turning back, we said: ‘We can’t get into Hebron, but we’re still going to do something’. We went to Deheishe, the nearest refugee camp. The welcome they gave us there—I’ll never forget that day. The people couldn’t believe that doctors were actually coming to them, to treat their problems. We went back the next week, and the next. This was the origin of Medical Relief, a volunteer organization founded with five or six colleagues. Since then, we’ve set up a whole network of pri- mary health-care centres, mobile clinics and outreach programmes. We also try to publicize the effects of the Occupation on health provision— the ambulances turned back at checkpoints, medical staff detained or arrested, the helicopter gunship attacks on the Medical Relief centre in Gaza, ambulances coming under fire from Israeli Occupation forces. It’s very common for ambulances to be held up for many hours at Israeli checkpoints; women have gone into labour and delivered babies there, without being allowed through. The Israelis refused to recognize mr as an organization, but we decided to take no notice. By 1986, on the eve of the first Intifada, there were mr committees all over the Occupied Territories, including Gaza. When the Israeli military governor came in person to the Jabaliya camp to arrest our medical staff, on the pretext that they were infringing a 1911 Ottoman law—a common tactic: they invoke a whole range of laws, Ottoman, British, Jordanian, Israeli, and if that doesn’t suffice they create a military order—we sent a fresh team; they were also arrested, and we sent in more, week after week, bringing in foreign and Israeli doctors, too. 120 nlr 32 Meanwhile, our colleagues were appearing before the courts in Israel. After a while the Israeli authorities simply couldn’t cope, especially when articles about Jabaliya began appearing in the international medical press. Characteristically, they closed the case without withdrawing charges. Initially, the Palestinian medical associations were also against us. They were dominated by the most traditionalist layers, whereas most of our people were from poor backgrounds or refugee families, and had become doctors in order to help people, not to make money. They called us Berbers, because we travelled to the camps with our doctor’s bags. But the work we did then laid the basis for a modern public health policy. Since 1980, infant mortality in Palestine has fallen from 150 to 20 per 1,000. It’s one of the reasons for the country’s demographic growth, which is also a form of resistance. You say the first Intifada grew out of these types of self-organization. How did the uprising start, and what were its outcomes? It was sparked in December 1987 when an Israeli military truck rammed a car near the Jabaliya camp, killing the passengers, who were Palestinian workers. The Intifada spread rapidly from Gaza throughout the West Bank. It was a mass popular uprising: everywhere, people flooded into the streets, unarmed—a few stone-throwers, that’s all. The idf’s response was extremely harsh: 120,000 were arrested in the first two years. Rabin, the Defence Minister, gave the order to ‘break bones’. He meant it liter- ally. I remember young men arriving every day in Ramallah hospital with shattered hands—Israeli soldiers would line them up with their palms pressed against a wall and then smash their wrists and fingers with rocks. Many of our doctors were arrested. They organized health workshops in jail and formed Medical Relief committees; the prisons were becoming popular universities. The resistance movement reached its peak with a huge demonstration in Jerusalem at Christmas 1989. Activists arrived from all around the world, as well as the Israeli peace movement, which was not what it has since become. Thousands of people formed a human chain around the city. This event, together with American pressure, forced Yitzhak Shamir to accept talks in Washington and Madrid. I am convinced that in 1988–89 there was a historic opportunity to resolve the situation on the basis of a two-state solution. We had reached the point where, to para- phrase Lenin, the Israeli army could no longer maintain the Occupation, barghouti: Palestine 121 and the Palestinian people were no longer prepared to tolerate it. The costs for Israel were outweighing the benefits.

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