WASHINGTON — As Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates head out Monday on a rare joint trip to the Middle East, it's not clear what they can accomplish.

Aides to Rice and Gates say the trip has three primary goals, each crucial: to persuade Iraq’s neighbors to do more to help stabilize the country, to counter Iran’s growing ambitions and to try to get real movement on peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

But America's credibility in the region has plummeted. The U.S. has failed to stabilize Iraq, destroy al Qaida, pacify Lebanon, isolate Syria or bolster moderate Palestinians. Instead, its policies have fueled Sunni Muslim extremism and emboldened Shiite Iran, which America's moderate Arab allies consider the two greatest threats to their rule.

So far, its support for Israel's ill-fated war in Lebanon and its efforts to undermine popular radical groups such as Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in Lebanon have borne little fruit. Along with its support for autocrats such as Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, such actions have undercut American claims that it's championing Muslim democracy.

Meanwhile, the clock is ticking on the Bush administration’s time in office. Leaders of friendly Arab states have lost confidence in President Bush’s ability to deliver on his promises and are wary of sticking their necks out too far to cooperate, according to diplomats and some U.S. officials.

“Our credibility is in tatters. They are not going to commit because they don’t trust us. That doesn’t mean they are not concerned about Iran. It just means they just don’t know what we are going to do,” said one senior State Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak to reporters.

There are also signs of disarray within the administration.

On the eve of the trip, unnamed U.S. officials told The New York Times that Washington believes Saudi Arabia has been unhelpful in Iraq by not supporting Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki's government. The administration publicly disavowed the report, but said that Saudi Arabia could do more to help. The leaked complaint seems unlikely to make life easier for Rice and Gates when they arrive in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, early in the trip.

The Bush administration also is divided over Iran, with Vice President Dick Cheney’s office pushing for an aggressive military response to Iran's reported aid and training for Shiite militias attacking U.S. troops in Iraq, senior officials said.

Gates and Rice will attend meetings together in Sharm al Sheikh, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. Rice will then head for Israel and the Palestinian territories to meet with Israeli leaders and Mahmoud Abbas, the weakened Palestinian Authority president whose administration was run out of Gaza by the Islamist group Hamas. Gates is scheduled to visit other gulf states.

Senior Pentagon and State Department officials said the trip is intended to reassure Arab leaders that the U.S. will uphold its security commitments in the region, even as Congress debates pulling troops out of Iraq.

But Arab diplomats in Washington said their governments need more than reassurance. They said that while the U.S. has promised a more active role, they haven't seen a clear plan for Middle East peace or regional security.

Indeed, after Bush called two weeks ago for an international Middle East peace conference, some Arab leaders concluded that the speech lacked specific goals and simply repeated the broad hopes that he's articulated before — stability in the region and moderate, inclusive governments.

“There is no clarity,” one Arab diplomat said on condition of anonymity because he didn't want to disagree publicly with the administration. “The trip in and of itself is not important. What’s important is that the administration commit to dealing with the substantive issues.”

The gulf states want to know how a possible drawdown of troops in Iraq would affect their security and whether it would lead to fewer troops in other parts of the region.

More than what Rice and Gates say on the trip, “people are monitoring the debate in Washington. Everybody is watching that very closely and then will draw their own conclusions,” an Arab official in Washington said.

Sunni-led gulf states fear Iran, but aren't confident that the United States has a strategy for dealing with Tehran, the diplomats said. U.S. officials say they're in the early stages of building an alliance with the gulf states.

“Iraq may be an immediate destabilizing influence. But Iran is something we collectively need to deal with in the long term,” said Geoff Morrell, a Pentagon spokesman.

On the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and other U.S. allies in the region want the United States to reach out to Hamas, which now controls Gaza. But Rice has repeatedly ruled out dealing with the group, which is on the U.S. list of terrorist organizations.

"The strategy is based on the assumption that you could isolate, weaken ... Hamas," while strengthening Abbas and his Fatah faction, said Shibley Telhami, a Middle East expert at the University of Maryland. "It cannot succeed. ... Everybody agrees that you can't simply isolate Hamas."

Gates and Rice will encourage Arab leaders to attend the international meeting on Middle East peace that Bush called for in a July 16 speech. The gathering is tentatively scheduled to take place this fall.

Israel and the United States hope that officials from Saudi Arabia, other Persian Gulf states and Morocco — none of which recognizes Israel — will attend. But that appears far from assured.

Before the Iraq war, Washington had strong ties with the gulf states, especially Saudi Arabia. But the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-dominated government and the rise to power of Iraq’s majority Shiites shifted the balance in the region. With an unstable Iraq and their own Shiite minorities politically awakened, many governments feel U.S. actions have weakened their grip on power.

Some countries, such as Egypt, have maintained close ties with Washington, but Saudi Arabia and others have begun to distance themselves.

Rice and Gates have their work cut out for them. With 18 months left in office, it will be difficult to reshape the way the region sees the United States, said William Quandt, a professor of international relations at the University of Virginia, who as an aide to President Jimmy Carter helped craft the 1978 Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt.

“I don’t think they have a real strategy that has much chance of working,” Quandt said. Gates, who joined the administration in December, “may be able to calm things down a little. But that won’t change the course.”

First of two parts

On a recent November morning, in between his administrative hospital rounds and amid various workers’ strikes, continuing political uncertainty and growing worry that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was on the verge of yet another cycle of spiraling violence, Dr. Tawfiq Nasser pulled out his wallet and showed a visitor his identification cards.

“In this country, we have a habit of collecting cards,” the Palestinian doctor said dryly.

He held up three cards in quick succession: a magnetic security card to expedite his way through Israeli checkpoints; an identification card issued by the Palestinian Authority; and a third card certifying that he works for a nongovernmental organization: in this case, for the Lutheran World Federation, for which he serves as head of the Augusta Victoria Hospital in Jerusalem and also oversees the hospital’s program of village health clinics in various parts of the West Bank.

Nasser’s main focus, and worry, however, was about a permit due to expire the next day that allowed him to enter Israeli territory and return to his office in Jerusalem. A strike by Israeli bureaucrats was suddenly complicating his life -- without a new permit, he and his staff would be stranded.

The sudden concern about the permit overtook Nasser’s rapid-fire explanation about the fragmented health care system in the Palestinian territories. He argued that as long as an occupation exists, with its attendant checkpoints, delays and transportation snafus, villagers closer to one city to will be forced to go to another for their basic health care. And as a result, their health will suffer.

With a sudden, unexpected snafu about permits added to the mix, Nasser began to lose patience, becoming increasingly impassioned and angry as he spoke to a visitor. “All of our lives are run by bureaucrats in a settlement. You tell me this is no occupation, that it this is just security,” he said.

“Tomorrow, I don’t know if I can go to work,” he said, his voice rising. “And who is punished? The patients. Hamas, they’re not punished. It’s my patients.”

Declarations of impatience, frustration and outright anger are becoming increasingly common among Palestinians these days -- particularly those whose faces and voices are too rarely seen or heard in depictions of Palestinian reality in the West.

The “moderate” sector of teachers, academics, students, government officials and doctors -- the vanguard of Palestinian “civil society” who are not questioning the permanence of the state of Israel, even though they are clearly fed up with the politics of the Israeli occupation -- have, by dint of professional training and patience, kept day-to-day Palestinian society running. They have done so amid an ongoing political stalemate between rival political factions, militants and the Israeli government, and a humanitarian situation that has been worsening by the week.

Weary of politics but keenly aware that just about everything in their contested land is highly political, they are increasingly pessimistic about any resolution to their plight.

Something of their situation was summed up recently by Latin Patriarch Michel Sabbah of Jerusalem, a longtime champion of Palestinian rights, when he met earlier this month with a group of American journalists who write for Catholic publications.

Speaking of the situation in the Gaza Strip but also about the fate of Palestinians generally, Sabbah said: “They are not terrorists; they are people who are living under oppression and who are reacting. And not all of them are reacting. There are Palestinians who don’t react at all, who go on living their lives in despair and humiliation and poverty. They go on living under occupation without any reaction.”

Others feel similarly -- with a pronounced touch of pessimism. “We’re going nowhere,” Rafik Husseini, the chief of staff to President Mahmoud Abbas, said during an interview at the Palestinian Authority’s headquarters in Ramallah.

Sulieman Harb Shalaldeh, the mayor of the municipality of Sier, near the city of Hebron, expressed the hope that he could soon govern normally.

“Let us keep the politics outside so that our people can continue their lives,” Shalaldeh said recently to the group of journalists. Shalaldeh has to deal with competing political claims, day-to-day-tensions, and now strikes by frustrated Palestinian workers who have not been paid since U.S.-led international sanctions and cuts to the Palestinian Authority by the Israeli government were imposed in March. The cuts by the Israelis alone have resulted in a monthly loss of $50 million in customs receipts.

The mayor’s comments were echoed by a teacher who greeted her American guests with fresh fruit, cakes and tea. “The majority of Palestinians, 90 percent, have no relationship with politics,” she said. “But politics are reflected severely in their daily life.”

So is history. To an outsider what is perhaps most striking in Palestinian refugee settlements and other public spaces are murals depicting uprooted villages lost for 50 years or more, with some still clinging to keys and land titles of areas now occupied by Israeli homes, public spaces and even shopping malls.

Given the overwhelming sense of history and grievance that prevails here, the teacher’s name is all the more revealing. The woman speaking was named Palestine Hussein.

Facts on the ground

The phrase “facts on the ground” is often used to describe the reality of what Palestinians see as the things that make a viable Palestinian state and society difficult if not outright impossible: Israeli settlements, outposts, settler roads, checkpoints, the routing of a 420-mile separation barrier. But it just as easily could describe the deleterious humanitarian situation in the Palestinian territories themselves.

The territories’ gross domestic product stands at $1,183 per capita, according to the World Health Organization. Unemployment rates overall stand at 25.3 percent, while rates of poverty overall are 56 percent. The poverty rate in the impoverished Gaza Strip stands at an astonishing 80 percent.

“The population’s socioeconomic conditions and access to health care are severely affected by lack of contiguity between the West Bank and Gaza and restrictions on movements,” the World Health Organization said in a recent summary.

Current conditions -- exacerbated by an unsettled political situation -- are believed to have worsened humanitarian problems: Chronic malnutrition has long been a problem in the territories and has been particularly acute in Gaza, where a 2003 study by CARE International indicated that 13.3 percent of small children in Gaza suffered from chronic malnutrition -- 11 percent higher than a “normally nourished” population would suffer.

What precipitated the current crisis was the January victory of the political faction Hamas in Palestinian Legislative Council elections. Hamas’ victory in turn led to international sanctions that have cut assistance to the Palestinian Authority -- a move that Palestinians have decried as unfair and unjust.

“You wanted democracy and now when you see the fruit of our democracy you say, ‘No, we will boycott you.’ ” Sabbah said about the popular reaction to the move: “This is wrong, unfair and unjust for the Palestinian people.”

The Israeli and U.S. governments said sanctions are justified because Hamas is a terrorist organization. Palestinians -- and this includes those aligned with the rival political faction Fatah -- acknowledge and even embrace Hamas’ militancy. But they have also stressed what they say is Hamas’ political and humanitarian roots and argue that Hamas is no al-Qaeda. In fact, they contend, beginning in the 1970s, Israel itself helped foster the creation of Hamas as an Islamic alternative to the secular Palestine Liberation Organization.

The Israeli and U.S. governments have interpreted the Hamas victory as a worrisome sign of growing Palestinian and Islamic militancy, while Palestinians have tended to view the Hamas victory as a protest vote and a referendum on what they say was a corrupt and out-of-touch Fatah elite that had, the sentiment went, cravenly compromised with Israel during the 1990s. (While Hamas controls the Palestinian legislature, President Mahmoud Abbas is aligned with Fatah.)

Over dinner at a Ramallah restaurant, Nader Said, a development studies specialist who teaches at Birzeit University, said public sentiment went something like this: “Let’s try Hamas; we know Hamas won’t work, but let’s stick to our identity.” He said that Hamas had hit a deep public nerve.

However one defines Hamas and interprets the elections, the results proved a smashing blow in at least one respect: Western sanctions remain in place against the Palestinian government, with assistance being cut off until Hamas recognizes Israel’s right to exist and renounces violence against Israel.

These demands form the core of contention between various the Palestinian factions and were cause for continued dispute recently between Hamas and Fatah over a new compromise prime minister. The current prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas, has said he would resign if it would help restore international assistance to the Palestinian government.

The practical result of all of this is that salaries for some 140,000 government workers are not being paid -- prompting a joke by Husseini, the presidential chief of staff. He said recently on a Sunday evening that he was beginning his second work shift, at no pay. “I knew this would be a 75 percent reduction of pay,” he said. “I didn’t expect it would be 100 percent.”

Jokes aside, the sanctions have not only caused obvious hardships but also prompted a 70-day teachers’ strike, as well as walkouts by other public employees. Worsening day-to-day public services have become the norm.

“The boycott has had a devastating and cumulative effect,” said Tom Garofalo, the Jerusalem-based country representative for Catholic Relief Services. “Things are declining geometrically.”

Maybe not indefinitely, however: The end of the teachers’ strike Nov. 11 proved a major relief, and Arab nations that had joined the boycott have announced they will drop it, in part because of anger over a recent Israeli military attack in Gaza.

Nonetheless, reminders of what has been a stark, confusing and dispiriting time are everywhere: A school built with assistance from Catholic Relief Services in the village of Sier recently stood empty. A group of school administrators and parents huddled around a small administrative office and said both they and students have felt stranded and isolated by the strike and the international boycott, which they said have worsened the day-to-day hardships imposed by the occupation.

“What can we do?” said headmaster Ahed Mohid Jebreen who, like the parents, spoke about their coping mechanisms in an economy that has stalled -- be it borrowing from shop owners (and piling up debts), or selling family jewelry to pay bills.

“All the world is punishing us for our democracy, and that is not fair,” Jebreen said. Such punishment, he and the others stressed, is not punishing Hamas, but punishing the struggling Palestinian middle class and poor people.

A recent survey spearheaded by Said’s Development Studies Program confirmed those anecdotal observations: Of 1,200 persons surveyed in September, nearly three-quarters said their daily lives and living conditions had become worst since the January elections.

The survey also revealed that while Hamas’ popularity has declined precipitously -- from 50 percent in April to a mere 31 percent five months later -- a majority of those polled still thought Hamas should form a coalition government. And a majority, 62.3 percent, also said Hamas should not be expected to recognize Israel immediately. The poll also found that distrust of the United States was as widespread and deep as could possibly be: a full 94.4 percent said the United States had not played a constructive role in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian standoff.

This tense environment has also affected the response of American humanitarian agencies, such as Catholic Relief Services, that receive U.S. government funding for projects in the Palestinian territories. Catholic Relief Services has to abide by a no-contact rule with all Hamas officials, though it can still keep contact with such national bodies as the Palestinian president’s office.

As a practical result, that means the Catholic agency “has had to roll with some big changes,” Garofalo said. It has also made it occasionally difficult for local staff who, like any “on-the-ground” humanitarian workers, must deal with local authorities and governments no matter what their political affiliation. “We can function, but it has been difficult for our staff who work in Hebron, Bethlehem and Gaza,” Garofalo said.

These and other difficulties have changed a society that despite its many challenges was, in Said’s words, vibrant and hopeful. Now, day-to-day life seems more fragmentary and pinched, with horizons eclipsing. “The whole dream of a Palestinian state is in danger,” he said.

“We’ll do the small things we do each day,” he said. “But the big picture is desperate.”

He paused for a moment. “We’re asked, “Why do you have fundamentalists?” he said. His response: “It’s because you are closing all of the windows of fresh air.”

That is perhaps nowhere more evident than in Gaza, a place other Palestinians call everything from a prison to a mental asylum.

Potential powder keg

It doesn’t take long to learn that Gaza can break your heart.

A sunny Mediterranean outpost that contains some of the most crowded and densely populated urban areas on the planet, Gaza is an impoverished and dispiriting place until you listen to college-age students and young people speak passionately about furthering their skills in computer sciences and English -- although they do so amid the more-than-occasional and not terribly distant cracks of gunfire rounds.

Kidnappings are common here -- though it is said that they often stem more from boredom than from any political or even monetary motivation -- and have added to the sense of a powder keg in the making.

Now in the hands of the Palestinian Authority after a series of well-publicized withdrawals by Israel, Gaza is distinctly different from the West Bank, where Israeli and Palestinian communities collide and jut into each other. In Gaza, a sense of isolation and even imprisonment has taken root, resulting in ennui at best, contempt and extremism at worst.

“Throw whatever you want at us” is how presidential chief of staff Husseini describes popular sentiment in Gaza. “They are desperate. They have no hope. And they have nothing to lose but their chains.”

It is from Gaza that small, homemade rockets are often fired into Israel, prompting what Palestinians have called Israeli overreaction, but what Israel has declared as justified security measures of self-defense.

“I know the Gaza people are suffering,” said Bahij Mansour, a one-time member of the Israeli diplomatic corps who now heads Israel’s department of religious affairs and who spoke on Israeli policies recently to a group of Americans. But he said that Israel feels justified in protecting its borders along the Gaza Strip.

It is Gaza, in the town of Beit Hanoun, that drew worldwide focus recently when Israeli artillery killed 18 Palestinians -- including 13 members of a single family -- in a military operation that was criticized internationally and resulted in a United Nations Security Council resolution of condemnation that was vetoed by the United States. Israel, apparently embarrassed by an incident that killed primarily women and children, called the shelling “a mistake.” The move prompted new threats of suicide bombings, as well as fury throughout the Arab-speaking world and even talk of a third intifada within the occupied territories.

If the long-term ramifications of the Israeli action and the Palestinian response remain to be seen, it is not hard to imagine that the voices of Palestinian moderates in Gaza may become harder to hear.

Mohammed Ismail, 22, is one such voice. Active in a Gaza youth leadership program, Ismail is a one-time English student, an avid reader of Ernest Hemingway, and has hopes of studying English at the graduate level. He acknowledged that Gaza residents have reached a level of anger where they are “not afraid of losing everything.”

At the same time, though, he knows there are liberals in Israel who do not support their government’s policies toward the Palestinians and wishes there was a way for them to make common cause with Palestinians like himself.

One reason he believes that should remain a priority is because of a simple truism, recognized by many but maybe by not all on both the Palestinian and Israeli divide.

“We are here, they are there. We’re not leaving, and they’re not leaving.”

Chris Herlinger, a New York freelance journalist, recently traveled to Israel and the Palestinian territories as part of a prize for Catholic Relief Services’ Eileen Egan Award for Journalistic Excellence, which he won for reporting on Darfur for NCR in 2005. Photographer Paul Jeffrey, also an Egan Award winner, assisted with the reporting for this article.

We are either living in a reverie or in denial. When someone you know gets injured in this conflict, you expect to have feelings of outrage, deep sadness, or at least the manifestation of these feelings should be the normal outpourings of grief, sorrow and concern. And yet, news of casualties of a latest Israeli atrocity or an inter-factional battle does not faze people as it once did.

I want to be in hysterics. I know it is not something ordinary to say, but the truth is, this conflict has made people accept as normal, things that elsewhere would elicit deep reactions of wailing, or at least tears, or the momentary satisfaction of venting anger by breaking dishes across a room. Are the restrained reactions that many Palestinians have are merely a self-defense mechanism? Or are we really in denial about what is going on in down town Ramallah or on the beaches of the Gaza Strip? Has the daily dose of grim stories become such an ordinary thing in our life that we wake up each morning, wanting, needing a fix of the usual blood-drenched front page that we pour over while doing something as normal as having our morning coffee and scrambled eggs?

So, shouldn’t I be in hysterics? When I heard that a photojournalist that I know, Osama Silwadi, had been shot while doing something quite unexciting as to look out his office window during a procession on Ramallah’s main street, I cannot describe the feelings that went through my head. Funny, but I thought emotions are not supposed to be cerebral, and yet, I block feelings, like so many Palestinians (and even some foreigners living among us) have become used to doing, in order not to allow myself the luxury of sinking into a depression every time I hear a story of a child killed or a family annihilated, because there are far too many to count. Many of us have learned over the years that if you allow yourself the slightest chance to let the situation overcome you, you are done for and you will be unable to function.

Osama used to be a photojournalist for AFP and Reuters before he decided to become a freelancer and create a Palestinian image bank (www.apollo.ps). He is a father of three children, who now lies in a coma in a hospital bed in Tel Aviv, so far away from his family and friends in Ramallah that no one can visit him or offer his wife the support she needs at this time.

As Osama watched the procession below on Ramallah’s main street from his office window this past Sunday, boys were shooting into the air to commemorate a fallen comrade. I say boys because my (female) mind cannot accept the fact that mature men would be so irresponsible as to shoot in the air in a densely populated area, where the chance of a stray bullet hitting someone is not a remote possibility, but a certainty. And so, the bullet traveled from the barrel of one of those boys’ guns into Osama’s now non-existent spleen, up near his heart to lodge finally in his spinal cord.

The prognosis is not good and we all hope and pray for his recovery, knowing that when he finally wakes up from his coma, he will find that his reality has changed so dramatically around him and he will have to grapple with whether or not he will be able to resume his life as he had once lived it. All those times in the field when he knew that he was a taking chance on life by snapping shots of stone-throwing youths confronting soldiers, or non-violent protestors against the Wall, did he never stop to think that life is so fragile in any case that even a simple walk under rickety scaffolding or taking the wrong turn in a road can result in a fatal accident?

Not to sound like a cliché, but such is life, whether you have lived in a conflict zone all your life or not, you cannot cower in your house forever in the off-chance that you might be struck by lightening. Perhaps, however, people who have gone through trauma feel invincible and the sense of danger is blunted and lightly brushed aside, and so it could quite have possibly been those thoughts that went through Osama’s mind seconds before the impact of the bullet ripped through his body.

It is odd how yesterday morning, when I heard the news, all I could think about is how ordinary this news sounded, despite the fact that Osama had been on my mind quite often these past few days, because I was looking at some recent photos I had taken with his voice about light, lines and frame running through my head. I realized with some unease that I lost the ability to be shocked, indeed a friend told me once that he also lost the ability to be astonished by such things as the first flowering of spring or the birth of a child and that is how I feel sometimes, like I am a car in neutral mode most of the time. And while I am deeply saddened by what has happened to Osama, I am unable to reach down into that deep place where I will allow myself to feel more than the very superficial of feelings and I know that tears will not come.

It completely worries me, this sense that we are becoming a nation of zombies, who have turned off the tap of basic human responses to bad and good news alike that something like the recent inter-factional fighting is not so shocking or unexpected. Once you stop being shocked, then you stop being afraid, and once you stop being afraid, you can do anything out of the bounds of acceptable human behavior. The signs of intimidating armed men running unrestrained among the population should be dealt with immediately and decisively.

More importantly, the indications that we are heading toward a civil war that so many are trying to suppress and deny, will become a full-blown reality if this is allowed to continue and then there will be no turning back to a time when Palestinians put the national interests before the factional, if ever there were such a time. If that should happen, there will be more innocent bystanders like Osama, who will pay the heavy price of the craziness that we have sunken to in recent months, and ultimately Palestine will hemorrhage outwards and be drained of its wealth of people, who today still have the ability to save it from becoming yet another tragic tale for the history books.

The kids piled on my lap once they saw that I had a camera. More than an everyday camera, it was digital and possessed the unique ability to display the immediate results of what I was attempting to capture around me. I showed them the last picture I had taken, and they squealed. It was of one of the nine children swarming around me – a handsome, almond-eyed boy facing the camera with a simple, and distinctively sorrowful, expression. He was holding his hand in a gesture that crosses all boundaries of language, politics, geography, and religion: “Peace.”

Mrs. Al-Iwiwi and her husband and nine children live in the center of the Old City in Hebron, and if there is anything they do not experience in abundance, it is peace. What they do have in abundance is violence and harassment – at the hands of the ultra-radical Jewish settlers who have infiltrated this neighborhood as well as the Israeli forces here to protect them.

Mrs. Al-Iwiwi tells us about life here. She has nine beautiful children around her, but that does not assuage the loss of a tenth child. The city was under curfew when Mrs. Al-Iwiwi was ready to give birth, so she could not leave the house to get to the hospital. The ambulance could not reach her either, and her baby was born dead. Just 17 days later, the settlers who live no more than an arms-length away tried to burn down her house. The family has no phone so they shouted out the windows to neighbors for help, and as they ran to the stairs, they passed out from the smoke. On an average day life is simpler, but still Mrs. Al-Iwiwi must insist that her children stay indoors, because the settlers next door have been known to entertain themselves by throwing stones or even shooting at Palestinian children.

Mrs. Al-Iwiwi’s story is unique, but not just for the degree of violence and harassment she and her family experience. It is also unique because hers is one of the few Palestinian families left in the old city. Most others have been pushed out – either by force, by home demolition, by poverty, or by pure exhaustion. Mrs. Al-Iwiwi will not leave. She says staying in their home, on their land, is their form of resistance.

The largest city in the West Bank after Jerusalem, Hebron is the home to 140,000 residents. Of those, just 450 are Jewish settlers, who are guarded by some 2,000 Israeli soldiers (though they themselves are often already armed to the teeth). In all of the West Bank, settlers number about 200,000 – with another 200,000 in East Jerusalem and 6,000 in Gaza – but there is something unique about the Hebron settlers: Unlike elsewhere, settlers here have positioned themselves in the heart of this Palestinian urban area.

The first Jewish settlers came to Hebron in 1968, shortly after Israeli occupation of the West Bank. As the location of the tomb of Abraham, Hebron was seen by Jewish settlers as a city allocated to them by some kind of divine real estate decree, and they were inspired to start settling when a radical Zionist posted an advertisement in a newspaper inviting “Families or singles to resettle [the] ancient city of Hebron.” At first they settled at the edge of Hebron, and in 1971 this became Kiryat Arba, which is today the home of about 6,000 settlers. Slowly, settlers started to inhabit the Old City, where today they are the source of the worst tensions in perhaps all of the West Bank. The result of Jewish settlement here has been not just tensions but also displacement of Palestinian residents, along with continual, major disruptions to daily life in the form of shop, school, and hospital closures due to strangulating curfews.

Once bustling in the manner of the lively souqs of Cairo, today the Old City is nearly deserted. Almost every shop is shuttered. Yet a few survive, and besides being notable for sporting signs pockmarked with bullet holes, they have few customers. One formerly wealthy restaurant owner points out his establishment to us, now completely stripped of its stove, tables, and chairs. All that remains of his business is a small portable griddle situated at the front door, which he fires up only occasionally for the rare hungry customer who has some spare change to spend.

A butcher recounted his story with a flair for the humorous, making light of his suffering. (We are reminded that laughter is sometimes the only way to face a life so difficult.) He told us he is the most popular man in town. His friends nearby nodded in agreement. Why? Because when a curfew was imposed, he could not reach his shop to sell meat. When it was lifted for a few hours, he would hustle to the shop, chop up the meat, and give it away to his neighbors before curfew was exacted again. This happened over and over, and the butcher’s popularity soared. But what was a boon for his friends spelled ruin for him, and he could not go on. Today, you will find the butcher sitting, like most of the out-of-work shop owners, at the entrance of his shop, passing time near his once-thriving business place. The store is vacant, except for the huge metal meat hooks that hang imposingly above the window. Unadorned, their sharp ends symbolize the starkness of what the Israeli curfew policy has left behind for these Palestinians. We laughed at the story to lighten the moment and to participate in the Palestinian bid to find sweetness in the sad. But the humor of the moment vanished when I later learned that the butcher has leukemia, no access to medical treatment, and a large family to support.

Tired from trudging around in the heat – not to mention that a small ache in my heart had formed during the conversations with these Hebron residents – I was ready to retire to the village of Sa’er, where we would be spending the night. Even that would prove to be not just difficult but also representative of the traumatic effects of the presence of illegal Jewish settlers on Palestinian territory. First we got in a taxi. It left the paved streets of busy, downtown Hebron and onto a bumpy, rocky dirt road. We held on to our seats as we jostled up and down. Then we got out and walked down the same uneven, dusty road for a quarter mile. Here we got another taxi. Then out again and another 10 minutes’ walk of more irregular road. Now we reached our hosts’ car, and from there drove to his home. For us, the trip was inconvenient and moderately irritating. But for the elderly men and women on the same path, it was near impossible. So why did we have to take this complicated route, when our host lived just two kilometers from Hebron? Because the fine, new paved roads of Hebron are not allowed to Palestinians. Only Jewish settlers can drive down these roads.

That is not the only problem that an apartheid road system causes. The next day when we found ourselves sitting in the Hebron Governate office, I could not stay focused on the instructive briefing we were receiving; my eyes kept wandering to a figure sitting near us. He was here for help, because an Israeli military order had recently been issued to demolish his home. It is located between two settlements, and plans have been laid to connect them with a road. Of course, the officially stated reason, common to all Israeli act of aggression, was “security.” I didn’t talk to the man, but I’ll never forget the look in his eyes. They were big and glassy and trenched in bags that belied sleepless nights. He was slouched and quiet. He looked beaten.

As we left the desolate streets of Hebron, I silently mourned so much loss – the loss of income for families dependent on shopkeeper’s revenues, the loss of a vibrant economy, the loss of stability and homes, and above all the loss of childhood. The children here are a generation growing up in despair. When we asked them about their lives, they told us about their schools that have been closed, their friends who have been killed by Israeli soldiers, or they did not say anything at all. When we asked children here what they want to be when they grow up, they could not answer. “What is your dream?” we asked them. “We don’t have dreams,” they responded.

Leila Saad is a graduate student at Harvard University at the John F. Kennedy School of Government.

“We come from here,” said my cousin’s wife, emphatically gesturing toward the ground, when an Israeli woman picnicking in the park with her family asked us where we were from. I looked down at the ground, seeing it as something more than just a piece of land, and those words echoed within me. We were standing in a park in the northern part of Israel. It is a park that was once a village – not 200 years ago, or 100 years ago, but just over 50 years ago – and this is where my father is from. The Israeli woman responded politely, “Have a nice day,” and turned away.

My father comes from the village of Kufr Bir’am, located in the Galilee in what is now Israel. I came here from the United States to discover my roots. Like all children of Palestinian refugees, I also uncovered a lot of pain in this place. Arriving at the edge of the village my curiosity was overwhelmed by emotions. I had steeled myself for what I would see, but there was nothing to prepare myself for what I would feel.

We stepped into the park, and my cousin directed my eyes to a leafy tree sitting on a well-manicured lawn and told me it was the location of his mother’s house. Today nothing of it remains. The symbolism of a house vanished long enough that a fully grown tree has replaced it did not escape me. I looked at the tree and my cousin and his wife and his two brothers, all once residents of this village, and tears flooded my eyes. All the stories that I had heard became real. The story that my father, as a little three-year-old boy, was swept up in his mother’s arms when the Israeli forces evacuated them from their home. They were promised that they could return in two weeks, but fifty years have now passed and their return is still barred. The events of his life rushed through my mind: His family’s flight to Lebanon, their plight as unwanted refugees in a foreign country. How they arrived penniless in the new country, but by good fortune were helped by a nun to reach a mountain town. So many Palestinian refugees did not have this luck. They lived out their days in pain and poverty in the refugee camps of Beirut and southern Lebanon.

The journey to my father’s village was heart wrenching because it signified something much bigger: the 1948 displacement of some 700,000 Palestinian families, whose crime was nothing more than living on the land that their fathers and grandfathers had passed down to them. And all the sorrow that I felt the day that I visited my father’s village was accompanied by a sharp, bitter taste in my mouth – the taste of injustice. Because to this day, the injustice suffered by the people of my father’s village remains in place, official.

Injustice and the response it has engendered is evident in the village. The first thing you see when you enter Kufr Bir’am is a sign explaining its significance. It mentions the seventh century Jewish community that lived here. It discusses the remains of a synagogue found here and its excavation. It even mentions the Baram Kibbutz, which was established on village lands after the ousting of the Palestinian villagers in 1948.

But the sign makes no mention of the village of Kufr Bir’am and Palestinians who lived here for hundreds of years. There is no mention of the fact that on November 20, 1948, Israeli forces evacuated the entire village, promising return to its residents in two weeks. There is no mention of the fact that those villagers were never, not even to this day, allowed to return. And there is no mention of the bitter fact that in September 1953, Israeli Air Forces deliberately bombed the village, demolishing all of its houses, leaving only the church standing in one piece, to ensure that the villagers would never return. There is no mention of the fact that the crumbling stone remains of the houses which dot the park are the destroyed homes of Palestinian families – my father’s family, his aunts, uncles, cousins, and neighbors.

Time stands still in Kufr Bir’am – not because, like the entrance sign implies, it was an ancient Jewish village, and what remains are old, historic ruins discovered through archeological excavation. Time has frozen here because for centuries this was a vibrant Arab village until its life was halted, as if the blade of a guillotine tore through it and, when the blade fell, the village’s life ended. The Israeli forces sliced through the life of Kufr Bir’am and left it still and empty.

What used to be my grandfather’s house was once inhabited with children and the delicious smells of Palestinian cooking and sounds of relatives being welcomed into the home. The village was full of people working and praying and sleeping and eating. It was a living, breathing village until it was evacuated and destroyed. When tourists come to this village, perhaps they are struck by the lack of life here. The stone ruins of houses look ancient. They may feel they are stepping into something old and poetic. But when I looked at those crumbled houses, I saw families and laughter and warmth. I saw my father as a child surrounded by the people of the village.

The uprooted families’ struggle to return to Kufr Bir’am has been a long, drawn-out one, and as recently as 1995, an Israeli Ministerial Committee agreed on the right of return of its uprooted residents. However, it simultaneously stated that the Israeli government would keep the confiscation order of the village. In 1996, when the Labor party was defeated, the negotiations between the Kufr Bir’am families and the Israeli parliament came to an end. So the struggle continues, and even Pope John Paul II, in a meeting with Ehud Barak on March 24, 2000, requested justice for the families of Bir’am. Yet still they are not allowed to return.

Today, the uprooted families of Kufr Bir’am hold tenaciously to their village in other ways. They return to the village en masse every Easter, to celebrate family, community, and their village together. They continue to hold weddings and baptisms at the village church. And they visit often, sharing stories with their children and passing on the legacy of their home. Nearby they keep a cemetery, another means for the uprooted families of Kufr Bir’am to hold on to their heritage. Today, all loved ones from the village are buried here. And those who die in exile are memorialized in a beautiful monument at the edge of the cemetery. The monument reads: “I have spent my life a stranger to my home and people. And today the heavens of the lord have become my home.” The name of my grandmother, who raised seven children and worked every day of her life until her death, is here. The name of my uncle, killed as a young man by the Israeli-backed Phalange during the civil war in Lebanon, is here. And the name of my grandfather’s sister, a woman I never met, is here. My grandfather died two years ago, but the monument was already built, so his name is missing from the Saad family portion of the monument, but it lives on in the hearts of all the Saad family members, just as the village of Kufr Bir’am is a part of our collective memory.

Later, when we returned from the village, my cousins asked me about the visit. Before I could say a word, the tears flowed again. They replied, “Now we know there is no doubt that you are from Kufr Bir’am, because you feel it.”

I will always feel Kufr Bir’am inside of me.

Leila Saad is a graduate student at Harvard University at the John F. Kennedy School of Government.

With the advent of meetings yesterday in Gaza between Hamas leaders and Egyptian diplomats that produced no results, it was announced that hopes for a possible ceasefire were once again dashed. (It was a ceasefire, mind you, that Israel announced it would reject, even if Hamas agreed to it.) This comes after several days of the Americans and British laying blame for the halt in the road map over the past week nearly entirely in the machine-gun toting hands of Hamas. When President George Bush laid it on Hamas, he laid it on thick, saying, among other things that "it is clear that the free world, those who love freedom and peace, must deal harshly with Hamas and the killers" of Israelis. But when Bush condemned Israel last week for its attempted assassination of Abdel-Aziz al-Rantissi, he only just grazed the tip of the iceberg. Because Israel’s assassination policy is just one in a slew of extreme policies of the occupation that result in acute frustration for not just Palestinian militants but also for all Palestinian civilians.

In alphabetical order, these policies include: annexation, apartheid wall, checkpoints, closures, collective punishment, curfews, detentions, excessive force, expulsion, house demolitions, incursions, landmines, tree uprooting, racial profiling, refugees, settlements, shelling, torture, water.

Need I say more?

Yes. Because sadly, for much of the international community – most importantly, the United States – the devastating effect on the lives of ordinary Palestinians goes unacknowledged. Yet these brutish occupation policies have combined to create an atmosphere that merits utter frustration by Palestinians. A simple thing like traveling from one village to another can be a difficult, painful, and humiliating event in the daily life of a Palestinian, because it means planning far in advance, leaving plenty of extra travel time for checkpoints, and suffering the humiliation of a 18-year-old Israeli soldier ordering you around and making you wait for what could be hours.

And that’s on a good day. On a bad day, the average Palestinian may also suffer from serious intimidation and even straight-out violence, not to mention unannounced closures of checkpoints, leaving civilians stuck in (or out of) cities for hours, or even days, at a time. Men – and women – have died, and been killed, at these checkpoints. For example, the 95-year-old Palestinian woman named Fattier Mohammed Hassan who was shot dead by Israeli soldiers in the backseat of her taxi while waiting to cross a checkpoint at the outskirts of Ramallah last year. She was just one of the 2,303 victims of Israeli violence since the outbreak of the Second Intifada. Is this the policy of a country ready to make peace? Is this the policy of a country that deserves no censure?

It is time that President Bush and the rest of the world add this catalogue of occupation policies to its list for condemnation. Indeed, direct killing (whether by suicide bombers or Israeli shelling or shooting) deserve strong denunciation, but it must also be acknowledged that these drastic policies of the Israeli occupation are responsible for deaths, not to mention major damage to the financial stability, the health, and the psychology of ordinary Palestinian civilians in all aspects of their lives. These are real roadblocks to peace.

Leila Saad is a graduate student at Harvard University at the John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Written by the author exclusively for MIFTAH.

Supporters of the Palestinians were pleased to hear Mahmoud Abbas (also known as Abu Mazen) frankly and clearly condemn Israel’s helicopter attack that wounded Hamas leader Abdel-Aziz al-Rantissi yesterday as both “criminal and terrorist.” More surprising, however, was President George W. Bush’s condemnation of Israel for the attack as a “troubling” development that would not help Israeli security.

It is surprising, because this is not the Bush we are accustomed to. This is a different kind of “W” – one who is criticizing Israel for weakening the peace process, not praising Israel for bearing the brunt of peace, for making “painful concessions,” and for exercising “restraint” with the Palestinians. Indeed, Bush would have been hard pressed to ignore the attempted assassination of the Hamas leader, given that Abu Mazen has devoted himself to reaching out to Hamas at this crucial juncture (not to mention the fact that although Rantisi was hardly injured, two other Palestinians were killed and others injured.)

Yet the Bush Administration has praised Israel so often in the past – even in the face of some of its most egregious actions against Palestinians. So why now? The Bush Administration simply cannot face another PR disaster in the Middle East. The war in Iraq – especially with its resulting lack of evidence of weapons of mass destruction – has been a blow to the perception of American policy not just for Arabs, but for Europeans and people the world over. Palestine – probably the single-most important political issue to most Arabs – is a ticking bomb (no pun intended) plopped on Bush’s lap.

Could this apparent policy change for the Bush Administration be genuine or, even more important, long-lasting? Might Bush and his largely neo-con administration deliver on its promises for a fair end to the conflict, resulting in a truly viable Palestinian state in the not-too-distant future?

Though we may hope it is true, the evidence suggests otherwise. Let Bush’s record over the past two years speak for itself.

On April 19, 2002, Bush lauded Ariel Sharon as being a “man of peace.” Yet he made this statement smack in the middle of vicious Israeli incursions into the West Bank, which resulted in numerous deaths and injuries, not to mention destruction of homes, NGO offices, and government property and records. Then, on April 30, 2002, Israel announced that it would refuse to let a team of UN inspectors investigate the massacres at Jenin refugee camp. How did the Bush Administration respond? With silence. Bush made no effort to denounce Israel’s action nor to impose sanctions via the UN.

Then in June, Bush waxed eloquent about his new Middle East policy, and in the course of his speech he mentioned terrorism (i.e., Palestinian) 18 times but did not once mention human rights abuses (i.e., against Palestinians). Bush has a policy of turning a blind eye to Israel’s actions, and instead, the ever-loyal American president argued, in February 2003, for a $2.64 billion aid package to Israel for fiscal year 2004 (which does not even include the billions of dollars of grants and loans provided for Israel’s economic recovery).

In other words, Bush has little experience sparring with Sharon. So will he continue to square of with the Israeli prime minister as they travel down the road map to peace? That remains to be seen.

Leila Saad is a graduate student at Harvard University at the John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Written exclusively by the author for MIFTAH.