The Guardian (of Truth)

It may be war, but Raeda Ghazaleh, unusually amongst Palestinians, is still going to work each morning. A theatre director, she has been performing a play for schoolchildren in her home town of Bethlehem. The play is The little Match Girl; the sad and dreamy match seller imagines a world where she can go to school, eat good food, find somewhere safe to live. The parallels are painfully close. The schoolchildren in Bethlehem some of only a handful whose schools are still open are in shock, says Ghazaleh. They know that more than 100 Palestinians, many of them children, have been killed; all they talk of is blood and shooting, they jump at loud noises. A four-year-old came to school yesterday wearing five T-shirts, one layered on top of the other, because he thought it would protect him from the bullets.
Of course there is fear amongst Palestinians; and of course there is anger. Every reporter this week has commented on the extent of the rage of those throwing stones in Gaza and Ramallah and Galilee; but why did it take the world by surprise? Palestinians on the ground as opposed to those involved in peace talks have been saying for years that they are disillusioned with this peace process, and for tangible reasons of poverty and exclusion, rather than simply politics. If the world had listened to the warnings, it might have 'been able to tackle the causes of the uprising before it was too late.
A report by church charity World Vision stated it baldly back in May 1999. "an increasing sense of disillusionment with the peace process by Palestinians may well ignite future violence" The figures are startling: Palestinian GNP has fallen by 35% since the start of the Oslo peace process in 1993; unemployment ,has reached record levels,, up to 401/16 in some areas; the average income is $1,500 per head in the West Bank and Gaza, compared with $2,500 in 1987, and with $17,000 in Israel. The closure policy, whereby cities are cut off from each other, has had disastrous economic and social consequences disrupting trade, but also feeding a mounting sense of injustice. As a tourist with a British passport, you are free to travel wherever you like in the West Bank, Gaza and Israel; but a Muslim Palestinian from Ramallah may not visit Jerusalem's al-Aqsa mosque, 10 miles away; and a Christian Palestinian from Bethlehem may not visit the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the site of Christ's crucifixion, a distance of seven miles.
About 18 months ago, I visited the Amari refugee camp between Jerusalem and Ramallah. The makeshift homes are poor and far too small for the large families who live in them, but inside they are neat, with wall-hangings of Mecca and mosque-shaped clocks. A Palestinian woman there, while bringing me tea, apologised for the fact that her children had dirty faces and clothes; it was because the camp received water only twice a week, she said. I looked up the hill to see a gleaming settlement, Bet-El, illegally built on Palestinian land outside of Israel, the grass on its lawns green and lush, watered with sprinklers. No wonder there is rage. Ordinary Palestinians always felt that the peace process was weighted against them, a fact apparently reflected by an anony- mous Israeli government source quoted this week in the Independent: "The Palestinians always complain that we know the details of every proposal from the Americans before they do," he said. 'There's a good reason for that; we write them''

The Palestinians have always known that they are the racial underclass, but the overwhelmingly unequal nature of the conflict is so often left out of the peace equation. This is not a Balkan-style confrontation of two ancient hatreds. It was European Christians, not Muslims or Arabs, who led the persecution and ghettoisation of the Jewish people for most of the past 2,000 years. This is a modem conflict over land between an occupier and a subject people, the occupation long accepted as illegal by the United Nations; between a state with all the cards (a hugely powerful army, the support of the world's only superpower, control of electricity, water, most of the land) and a population with none. It is not a war between 6quals, and it is overwhelmingly Palestinians who are being killed.
An end to conflict must be the priority. But peace does not happen just because we want it to - if the Palestinian population does not believe it has received justice, it's clear that there will not be peace. Ehud Barak, the prime minister of Israel, may have gone as far as he could at Camp David, and his public may not allow him to go further in the current circumstances. But in its own interests, Israel will have to do so, sooner or later. The "East Jerusalem" earmarked for the Palestinians at Camp David did not include the Arab part of the Old City, the bustling Damascus Gate, the shop-lined Salah-al-Din Street or the Mount of Olives - all of which are currently Arab sections of the city. The 'East Jerusalem' on offer at Camp David in fact effectively constituted the suburb of Abu Dis and the village of Bethany - like asking for Trafalgar Square and being required to settle for Croydon. No Palestinian leader could accept it and survive.
There is a solution, probably still some way off, although the peace process went some way towards it. Yesterday I asked a Palestinian in Ramallah bow this will end. "The only end would be the end of the occupation" he said, his phone conversation broken up by the sound of shooting. If Palestine becomes a state, if Israel withdraws from all of the West Bank, Gazza and East Jerusalem, if the UN provides protection for and access to the religious sites, and if the issue of the right to return for refugees is addressed, then the Palestinian community seems likely to accept the loss of pre-1967 Israel and a permanent peace has a chance.
Next week, if the Bethlehem schools are still open, Raeda Ghazale's theatre company will be performing another play; about a boy's search for his grandfather, and how this helps him understand himself. like him, we must understand the history of the Palestinian people and the reality of their conflict with Israel if we are to understand their situation now, and if we have any hope of finding a solution.
katharine.viner(@guardian.co.uk

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