The 41st anniversary Tuesday of the United Nations decision to partition Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states found the Palestinians in this ancient town angry, confused and with little hope that their situation will improve in the foreseeable future.
Their anger is directed against Israel and the United States, Israel’s most powerful supporter.
They are confused by the tug-of-war being waged over them between Islamic fundamentalists and the less extreme Palestine Liberation Organization, headed by Yasir Arafat.
Their sense of hopelessness arises from the fact that just 10 days from now, the Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza Strip will be one year old, with little to show for it but bloodshed and the presence of Israeli security forces on an unprecedented scale.
The streets here were jammed with people Tuesday. That is because workers did not go to their jobs and shops and businesses were padlocked.
Hebron was on strike, by order of the Hamas movement, the Moslem fundamentalist underground, and an unlikely bedfellow, George Habash’s Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
The strike has been an annual event to protest the U.N. General Assembly’s partition resolution of Nov. 29, 1947.
This year, however, the joint underground command of the uprising, under the influence of Arafat’s wing of the PLO, decided the strike should be held a day earlier, on Monday.
The reason was that the partition decision, Resolution 181, is no longer considered a calamity by the PLO. In fact, 181 was invoked by the Palestine National Council, meeting in Algiers this month, as the basis for a political settlement of the Arab-Israeli dispute.
ISLAMIC STRIKE OBSERVED
But in Hebron, and in most of the administered territories, Palestinians obeyed the fundamentalists’ orders to stage the strike Tuesday. The strike was almost total.
Nevertheless, the PLO has the support of the people here. Anger is running high against the American refusal to grant Arafat a visa so that he could address the United Nations General Assembly in New York this week.
“What the hell do they want?” demanded Mohammad Jaabari, a toothless elder sitting with fiends outside a locked coffee shop.
Jaabari, as good an example as any of the Hebron “man in the street,” was furious with both the United States and Israel.
“For years, they said that the Arabs refused to accept the partition plan. Now they do. So what do you want?” he asked.
“There was also despair in his voice and a sense of powerlessness. The Israel Defense Force holds the territories in an iron grip. No one can turn his head or move in any direction without literally bumping into heavily armed soldiers.
Along the main Hebron-Jerusalem road, IDF units regularly stop Arab cars and thoroughly check them.
Near Khadr village, local youths, their faces veiled, approached the road Tuesday and began stoning soldiers. They were scattered by a barrage of tear gas. The unrest in Khadr was triggered by the demolition of four houses the IDF said belonged to terrorists.
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