|
From Oct. 28-Nov. 7,
I conducted a fact-finding mission in Israel, the West Bank,
and Gaza, focussing on how U.S. taxpayer dollars are being
spent to promote the Middle East peace process and
Palestinian democracy.
I met with members of
the Palestinian Legislative Council, including Nablus deputy
Hussam Khader, who has been fiercely critical of Palestinian
president Yasser Arafat and the corrupt government that has
grown up around him.
Mr. Khader works out
of a small office in the Balata refugee camp in Nablus, the
largest city in the West Bank north of Jerusalem.
 He
shares an office with the Yafa Cultural Center, an arts and
cultural center that helps more than 170 disadvantaged
children escape the squalor of refugee living through
expressive art and theater.
Mr. Khader is also
involved in social works on a very personal level. While we
were meeting in his office, a young Palestinian man affected
with Downs syndrome walked in and began talking to us in his
broken Arabic. Mr. Khader took his hand, and sat him down
with us, and listened, and corrected him as he mispronounced
the word "Sheikh" (an honorific title).
If more of Arafat's
men cared about their communities the way Hussam Khader
cares about his, the U.S. would be privileged to contribute
to building their democracies. Unfortunately, Mr. Khader is
in a minority.
Down in Gaza, local
Palestinians point to the huge palaces built by Yasser
Arafat's wife, Suha, and by other regime officials such as
Abu Mazen, and shake their heads in wonder. "Min ayna laqa
haza?" (Roughly translated: Where did they get that?). As
one Arab village leader complained, "when Arafat and his
cronies arrived from Tunis they were so poor we had to give
them bread. Today, they live in palaces and drive big cars.
How?"
Arafat's security men
are extremely prickly when it comes to this ostentatious
show of wealth. Shortly after I took these pictures of the
front and back of Suha Arafat's Palace
a group of palace
guards attempted to seize my camera and arrest me. Only my
Reader's Digest press card kept them from a much longer
sojourn in Gaza that I might have liked.
Next door to the
palaces, ordinary Palestinians still live with sandy
streets, open sewers, and broken hospitals, despite more
than $3.5 billion in foreign aid poured into Gaza and the
West Bank since 1994. Only in the past year have any
improvements really begun to show, as the paved road in this
picture.
But my favorites of
all are the children. Whenever I go to refugee camps, as I
have been doing since 1982, I am always followed by groups
of children, who are bursting with curiosity to find a
foreigner strolling through their midst. This visit was no
exception. So I thought I'd include a picture of my soccer
team, from Hussam Khader's neighborhood in the Balata
Refugee Camp in Nablus. Who knows, in a few years, one of
them may play in the World Cup!
You can read more
about my trip to Gaza and the West Bank in the Reader's
Digest magazine, where my expose of Arafat's corruption will
appear in the next few months. |
