Unrest Sparks Restructuring of Arab Society

RAMALLAH, Israeli-Occupied West Bank — Throughout the West Bank, schools have been closed by Israeli military order since Feb. 1. But that didn’t stop more than 50 youngsters who last week sat cross-legged on the floor in a vacant apartment building while volunteer teachers drilled them in the Arabic language and general science.

A few blocks away, at Ramallah’s government hospital, two young men came to have their blood typed and noted in special logs kept by their voluntary neighborhood medical committee.

Other Ramallah residents were cultivating collective vegetable plots, the Palestinian equivalent of America’s wartime “victory gardens.” In Arab East Jerusalem, dozens of businessmen have “adopted” families whose income has been interrupted by five months of Palestinian unrest in the occupied territories.

These are just a few examples--there are hundreds--of an emerging trend toward grass-roots organization among the 1.5 million Palestinians living in the occupied territories. They illustrate an aspect of the intifada , the Palestinian uprising, that is little understood by outsiders, even by many Israelis, for whom the violent street clashes seen on television have come to symbolize the uprising.

Factious Society

Yet potentially at least, these social expressions of the uprising may be far more important in the long run than the stones and burning-tire barricades. For they are repairing the fabric of what has been a notoriously factious society and immeasurably strengthening its self-image.

“For the first time, (the Palestinians) have created a very strong network that goes beyond the extended family into the community as a whole,” Meron Benvenisti, a West Bank researcher and former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, said the other day. “In a way, what we’re witnessing is the birth of the Palestinian people.”

Dean Hanan Mikhael-Ashmawi of Birzeit University referred to the phenomenon as “social restructuring” and called it “the invisible heart of the intifada. “

Its message, Mikhael-Ashmawi said, is a powerful one: “To tell the Israelis not only that we’re staying but that we’re perfectly capable of organizing our own lives.”

Restructuring Society

Whether this new-found unity and activism among the Palestinians can survive the pressure Israel is exerting to break the uprising remains to be seen. Although the unrest has already lasted much longer than anyone here believed it could, five months is a short time in terms of restructuring a society.

Still, the change is striking, if only in mood. Palestinians used to complain bitterly about all they have suffered; now they talk more about what they are doing to help themselves and their neighbors. And the more local leaders the Israelis arrest, the faster new leaders seem to emerge.

There have been trade unions, young people’s and women’s organizations in the West Bank and Gaza for a decade or more, but they have tended to be aligned with specific, in many cases rival, political movements. And their activities tended to be dictated more from the top down than vice versa.

In the last few months, according to most experts, Palestinian activity has been far more widespread and genuinely democratic than anything that had gone before.

‘New Spirit’

“It’s a new spirit altogether,” said Yehuda Litani, the Arabic-speaking Middle East editor of the Jerusalem Post.

Amal, a Jerusalem office worker who for fear of Israeli reprisals asked that her last name not be used, said that “a year ago if you had told me to mobilize for action, I would have told you there was no use in even trying.”

Amal is one of the principal figures behind the so-called Brotherhood Project in which businessmen help needy families.

“The society was factionalized,” she went on. “Politics had permeated people’s lives, and everyone’s politics interfered with his activity.”

But it was not politics alone that divided residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. There were acutely felt divisions between Christian Palestinians and Muslim Palestinians, between rich and poor, between members of different clans--the large extended families around which so much of Palestinian life has traditionally revolved.

Those divisions have severely weakened the society and made it easier not only for Israel but, earlier, for Jordan and the British to rule the Palestinians.

‘Drugged Cockroaches’

Rafael Eitan, the former army chief of staff who is now a member of the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, once described the Arabs in the occupied territories as being like “drugged cockroaches in a bottle.” Now, office worker Amal said, “everybody feels that those youngsters at the barricades led the way.”

She and others like her are trying to turn the temporary alliances of the street into permanent bridges across the old social divides. The Brotherhood Project, for example, is designed to go beyond charity.

“We were very opposed from the beginning to the idea of a fund,” Amal said. “The importance of the project is not just to give money but to establish contact between people, so they find out how others live.”

Businessmen are encouraged to visit the families they adopt. Instead of giving them money, they are expected to find out what the family specifically needs and to supply it.

Adopted Family

“I felt very funny,” a well-to-do Jerusalem businessman admitted after his first visit to his adopted family in a refugee camp. Because it was Ramadan, the Muslim time of fasting, he said, he was unable even to have coffee with his host, who had been dismissed from his job in Israel after too many uprising-related absences. But he said that he plans a second visit and that he is committed to the project.

Amal said she has enlisted about 100 individual merchants or business offices in the Brotherhood Project and that she works with local committees in poor neighborhoods to identify the families most in need of help.

The project apparently has been successful enough to attract wider attention. The latest underground bulletin of the Unified National Leadership for the Uprising in the Occupied Territories, dated May 12, calls for the “creation of sponsorship families so that well-to-do-families can sponsor needy families, thereby encouraging social equality.”

The idea of local committees began at the grass-roots level but is fast becoming a characteristic of the intifada . Now committees are sprouting like weeds, in villages, towns and refugee camps.

“They’re being formed daily,” Amal said. “Without them we really wouldn’t have access to the people at all.”

‘Still on Paper’

An Israeli security source sought to minimize the committees as a publicity stunt. “Most of them,” he said sarcastically, “are still only on paper, mostly newspaper.”

But if Ramallah is any measure, the Israeli source is either misinformed or trying to mislead. There are no statements for the press, only computer printouts advising students and teachers of times and places for classes in the underground intifada schools arranged by neighborhood education committees.

Mikhael-Ashmawi, a leading community activist, said there are 30 neighborhood committees active in Ramallah alone, involving hundreds of volunteers. In addition to education and medical care, they organize emergency food supplies for needy families, legal aid for people who have been arrested and security and guard duty to provide early warning when soldiers or Israeli settlers enter a neighborhood.

Najwa, 22, a woman who has been active in various committees, told an interviewer that the movement started in the refugee camps and then spread. Asked if Ramallah was unusual, she replied: “Nablus is even more developed than we are. They started earlier.”

16-Year-Old Teacher

One morning last week, a reporter visited four underground schools in Ramallah and neighboring Al Birah. At one, in a private home, 9-year-olds sat on a porch and faced a blackboard propped against an old sofa. A 16-year-old high school girl taught them basic arithmetic.

“I think it’s very important,” said Sarine, the mistress of the house. “The children are taught not only mathematics and geography; they are taught also how to be related to their homeland on all levels.”

In the shut-down government schools, she said, “national education doesn’t exist, but here it does.”

In contrast to the rigid structure of the regular classroom, the students in the intifada schools are encouraged to ask questions. If the settlers attack the town, where did they come from and why did they attack? Normally, Sarine said, “you can’t find answers to these questions in school, but here in these free classes, they do.”

School Reopenings Planned

The authorities are reportedly planning to reopen some regular elementary school classrooms later this week, but activists here say they intend to keep at least some of their underground classes going after hours to deal with subjects like Palestinian theater and art. Also, commented one, “we want to keep the whole program on hold in case anything more happens.”

Mikhael-Ashmawi said that the social restructuring has an impact on patterns of thought as well as patterns of life in this traditionally conservative, male-dominated society.

“Many of our most active organizers are women. Women are not just active but are making decisions. And the men are willing to go along.”

Unlike the government schools, the intifada schools are coeducational.

It is not yet clear how much the Israeli military authorities can do, or will do, about the new Palestinian activism. Palestinian sources said there have been scattered army attempts to harass students and teachers, including the search of at least one home being used as a classroom.

A spokesman for the military government said the schools are not illegal unless they are intended as a political demonstration. In the West Bank, he pointed out, political demonstrations are illegal.

The authorities have cracked down hard in some cases in which local committees have tried to take over from Israeli-appointed Palestinian administrators. Last month troops surrounded the village of Salfit, just north of here, and arrested 70 residents in what Israel Radio’s Arabic-language service called an attempt to break up the local committee.