Word: arafats
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...Arafat and his colleagues, exiled in distant lands, were losing touch with the Palestinian reality. By 1987 Omar and thousands of youths like him had grown impatient waiting for their saviors and launched their own uprising against the Israelis. The spark for the intifadeh, as it became known, was a Gaza traffic accident in which an Israeli driver killed several Palestinian laborers. Revolt spread all over the Palestinian territories, including Jalazon. "We burned tires in the road and threw stones," recalls Omar's friend Ismaeen, who wears a muscle shirt and has the dark, heavy-lidded eyes of an Egyptian...
Omar's boyhood hero, Arafat, finally came home in 1994, a year after Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed the Oslo accords, ending hostilities in exchange for Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza. The accords were meant to give shape, at last, to that sense of national identity that had been growing since the war and to lead rapidly to a Palestinian state. But for Jews and Arabs alike, Oslo and its aftermath proved to be new disappointments. Israel sped ahead with yet more settlements in the West Bank, and Arafat, the Nobel Peace Prize winner...
...butcher's feelings toward the former Palestinian leader are contradictory. Omar has heard the tales of the corruption that dogged Arafat and his entourage, of the missing millions in aid money. But he remains loyal to Arafat and insists, along with his friends, that I tour a museum in the camp whose showpiece is a photo display of Arafat in his many guises, from bug-eyed terrorist to statesman. Omar rushes me past a photo of Arafat shaking hands with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin; he thinks Arafat gave away too much to the Israelis, as do many Palestinians still...
Many Palestinians are less charitable than Omar about Arafat and his successors in Fatah, plenty of whom have become millionaires--and some of those Palestinians have taken their disaffection in a direction hardly imaginable in 1967. Let down by the secular Old Guard, younger Palestinians are turning to radical Islam as an alternative. In the West Bank, shops sell DVDs of Iraqi insurgent attacks against U.S. troops and songs of praise for the Lebanese Hizballah militia leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah for withstanding Israel's siege of Lebanon last summer. The last words of suicide bombers, preserved by video cameras...
...Jalazon and other camps, a generational divide splits the Palestinians. The older ones, of Omar's age, belong to Fatah, the organization run by Arafat's hapless successor, Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority. Those in their 20s and younger support militant Islamic groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. These radicals led the charge during the second intifadeh, which began in 2000, sending suicide bombers to blow up hundreds of Israeli civilians. Militants say that in the camp they have no shortage of young volunteers eager for martyrdom. As a parent, Omar says the last thing he wants...