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TITLE: University on a Troubled Road - Sharon Blockade Cuts Off College, Sparking Clashes |
AUTHOR: Lee Hockstader |
PUB: Washington Post |
DATE: March 12, 2001 |
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Since the Palestinian revolt began last fall, one place that has mostly skipped the event is Bir Zeit University, which fancies itself the Harvard of the West Bank. With its breezy American-style campus, classes in English and high academic standards, Bir Zeit, which sits on a scenic hilltop north of Jerusalem, was aloof from the fighting and bloodshed elsewhere. But since Ariel Sharon became Israel's prime minister last week, Bir Zeit has been dragged into the fray. About three hours after Sharon took the oath of office late Wednesday night, a bulldozer flanked by Israeli army jeeps rumbled in after midnight to dig a 12-foot-deep trench and erect an earthen barricade, severing the main road leading to the university and 30-odd Palestinian villages. The move is the first real clue as to how Sharon hopes to achieve his main goal: snuffing out the 5 1/2-month-old Palestinian uprising and restoring a sense of security for Israelis. In addition to cutting off the university, the roadblock completed the Israeli encirclement of Ramallah, just to the south, the main Palestinian city in the West Bank, and turned it into what some residents are calling an immense open-air prison housing tens of thousands of people. Israeli officials said the road was cut as a security measure, to block a planned car-bomb attack in Jerusalem and to prevent terrorists from seeking refuge in Palestinian-controlled Ramallah. At the same time, Israel announced it would ease the blockade on four smaller Palestinian cities that lately have been relatively peaceful. "The responsibility is only on [the Palestinians]," Sharon said. "Our basic goal is that wherever there is quiet there will be relief. . . . Wherever there is the danger of a terrorist attack, we will take all the necessary measures." But the blockade of Ramallah and the severing of the Bir Zeit road created a point of friction where before there was none. Blocked from access to the university on what was supposed to be registration day for spring semester, a few hundred students tried to reopen the road and clashed with Israeli troops today, with bloody results: At least 40 Palestinians were injured by Israeli gunfire, and one was killed. "We've never had this kind of siege, even during the worst of times," said Rima Tarazi, 69, an elegantly dressed Palestinian composer and member of Bir Zeit's board of trustees who, with arthritic hips, hobbled toward the demonstration. "They want to break our bones and break our will. . . . It's really evil." In what seemed at times a surreal tableau, pipe-puffing professors, Palestinian American students and the wife of the university president -- a classically trained opera singer -- took cover as Israeli troops did battle with a handful of stone-throwing Palestinian youths. Troops shot rubber-coated bullets and lobbed tear gas and stun grenades in an attempt to stop a Palestinian bulldozer from reopening the road at the village of Burda, halfway between Ramallah and Bir Zeit. An Israeli tank and armored vehicle stood watch from a hilltop. In the weeks leading up to his inauguration, Sharon said his strategy for restoring calm would be to make life easier for ordinary Palestinians, while putting the squeeze on Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority. But today around Ramallah and Bir Zeit, the political, economic and intellectual hub of the West Bank, all evidence pointed to a very different policy. Hiyam Farres Amin, 30, the mother of a daughter born Saturday night in Ramallah, was unable to return to her village near Bir Zeit with her baby. "We don't know what to do," she said. "They released us from the hospital, and now we can't get home." Just up the road was Ali Aroury, 30, part-owner of a sewing factory in a village near Bir Zeit that does piecework stitching T-shirts for an Israeli partner. With the road from Bir Zeit closed, the one-hour trip from his village to pick up a sack of cloth from the Israelis and bring it back to his sewing shop had become a nightmarish half-day's odyssey, much of it on foot. "We're just trying to make a living and get some work," Aroury said. Palestinians and their advocates called the blockade of Ramallah collective punishment by strangulation of a city that has been a focal point of Palestinian organization and militancy during the uprising. "If Sharon thinks that with such procedures, he can bring the Palestinian people to their knees or bow to him, then he is living in illusions," said Ahmed Qureia, speaker of the Palestinian parliament. Mindful of the storm of criticism that gathered in the morning, Israeli officials regrouped this afternoon to defend their clampdown on Ramallah, and announced a relaxation of the blockades on four smaller Palestinian West Bank towns: Bethlehem, Tulkarm, Kalkilya and Hebron. Following the first meeting of Sharon's full cabinet, the government also said the action around Ramallah did not constitute a change in policy, but rather was a response to "specific reports" of a planned car-bombing in Jerusalem. Several members of a terrorist group planning the attack had already been arrested, the government said, and searches were underway for the others. Palestinian security sources denied any such attack was planned and accused Israel of inventing the story as a pretext for its blockade. Many Israelis seemed unsettled by the army's blockade of Ramallah and Bir Zeit, including human rights groups, opposition lawmakers and even some members of Sharon's government. "We must not reach a situation where the Palestinians are starving or vital services are not provided to them, such as medicine," said Justice Minister Meir Shetreet of Sharon's own hard-line Likud Party. "Using such methods would ultimately hurt Israel's interests and would give Arafat the tools to obtain international support. So it is not smart from any point of view." Shimon Peres, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who is the new government's dovish foreign minister, on Sunday called for a "reassessment" of the blockade policy. Today he switched gears and defended the policy, but gave the distinct impression that he was uneasy about it nonetheless. "I am against collective punishment," he said. "Their pain causes us pain, not pleasure. . . . There is no dispute that we have to fight terror and have to be able to distinguish between those involved in terror and those who are not, and we should not hurt people who are not engaged in terror attacks. That policy has not changed." But Arab foreign ministers meeting in Cairo today asked the U.N. Security Council to convene for an urgent session to examine how to provide international protection for Palestinians against what were termed Israel's "barbaric" measures. END |