In the Shadow of the Six-Day War

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But 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 pop star. Ismaeen boasts that from age 15 onward, he spent five years inside Israeli prisons. "For throwing stones?" I ask. "Well, stones and Molotov cocktails," Ismaeen says, grinning. Serving time in Israeli jail is a rite of passage for young Palestinians, though Omar says--with chagrin--that he himself spent only "a little time" in prison: a year.

Omar was one of 700 Palestinian youths from Jalazon rounded up during the first intifadeh. (At the worst of that struggle, which ran from 1987 to 1993, Israeli troops sealed off Jalazon for 45 days, cutting off electricity and shooting holes in water cisterns.) When he was released, Omar was swept right back into the violence. One day, he remembers, he was throwing rocks at Israeli solders: "I was shot in the hand. My friend next to me was hit in the chest. He died, and I survived. It could have been me."

The Palestinians' sense of identity--and their rage--was sharpened by the spread of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories after the war. (There are now some 250,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank and an additional 182,000 in East Jerusalem, which Israel has annexed.) Crowning the hill above Jalazon is the Beit El settlement. Remove the barbed-wire fencing, the security gate and guard towers, and Beit El's tidy rows of red-roofed houses and gardens could be mistaken for an Arizona suburb. A friend of Omar's named Yousef, a crude map of Palestine tattooed on his wrist, says, "All I know is that the Jews took our village, chased us away, and now we see them living up on top of the hill in their beautiful houses with flowers and swimming pools." He adds, "One person up there in the settlement uses more water than an entire family down here."

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, secretly signed off on terrorism directed against the Israelis.

The 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 holding keys to their families' old houses. (Israel has never accepted that all Palestinian refugees have the right of return to their former land, since such a right would constitute an existential threat: if all Palestinians returned to what is now Israel, Jews would soon be a minority in their own state.) Was there ever a moment when Omar thought peace was attainable? "Never," he says flatly.

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, are given play on local TV news. As a youngster, Omar threw stones at Israeli tanks and ran away; youngsters of the new generation seek to annihilate themselves as well as their Israeli enemy. In his butcher shop, Omar points outside to a boy brandishing an exact plastic replica of an M-16 assault rifle. "Children today, they're tougher, more aggressive than we are. They have less to believe in, fewer opportunities," he says. Raja Shehadeh, a Palestinian writer and lawyer in Ramallah, later told me, "I'm reminded of that saying 'When you lose a nation, you resort to your church.' That's what's happening to young Palestinians. They're turning to Islam."

In 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 is for his young kids to heed the fatal, seductive call of the suicide-bomb recruiters.

Like many other Palestinians, Omar is impressed by the honesty and focus of the Islamists. But he has doubts that the new, religious thrust of the resistance movement will lead to peace or a fair deal with Israel. For now, he says, it has only led to fighting among Palestinians. "The Koran says that if you kill your brother, you go straight to hell--and this is what we're doing," he says, outraged by recent news reports from Gaza of Hamas and Fatah militiamen killing each other in a power struggle. He thinks Palestinians should "try to fix our own problems before we take on the Israelis." Those problems are real enough. Because of international sanctions against the Hamas government, salaries aren't paid, and most Palestinians are broke. As it has been since 1950, it is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency that provides basic humanitarian aid to Jalazon and other Palestinian camps.