Protect Palestinians now

The 3.5 million Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Gaza urgently need international protection. Now facing humanitarian disaster, they need protection to ensure access to the basic requisites of human life. They will need it even more if they prepare – as President Bush has requested – for early elections across the territories.

"How can we hold elections under current conditions?" asks Khalid Amayreh, a journalist who lives in the West Bank village of Dura. When I visited the village in mid-June, all the roads into it – as into all the other Palestinian villages I saw – were blocked by six-foot dirt barricades that the Israeli military had heaped across them. Access was possible only for healthy individuals able to cross them.

In January 1996, Mr. Amayreh and all other residents of the West Bank and Gaza participated in a vote which met international criteria of "free and fair elections." (Voters gave Yasser Arafat a sweeping majority as head of the Palestinian Authority, and also elected a Palestinian Legislative Council.) Back then, Palestinians could travel relatively freely around the West Bank to meet with candidates and other voters. Now, Amayreh cannot even enter the nearby city of Hebron, which is surrounded by a ring of steel fencing. All West Bank cities except Jericho have now been thus encircled, with almost nobody allowed to go in or out. An area-wide economy that used to link those cities and East Jerusalem has been chopped into fragile, nonviable pieces. Families have been summarily split up. Thousands of Palestinians needing healthcare have been cut off from hospitals. Aid workers report that moving emergency food shipments to where they're needed is an expensive nightmare, subject to constant uncertainty regarding Israel's latest military regulations.

To the south, the once-bustling Gaza Strip was long ago fenced completely off from Israel (and Egypt). The Israeli government has now further cut it into three separate "sectors," with the Palestinians' ability to move between them tightly restricted. In both Gaza and the West Bank, the Palestinian economy has been forced to a standstill. In late June, Gaza starting seeing food riots.

In these circumstances, President Bush's call for the Palestinians to engage in "honest enterprise" and "economic reform" seems Kafkaesque. Emily Mnisi, a South African visiting the West Bank for the first time, said that the Palestinians' situation there is far worse than that of South Africans placed in "Bantustans" during the apartheid years. "At least, inside the Bantustans you could travel around a bit," she said. These days, the Palestinian population centers seem more like the former Jewish ghettoes of Eastern Europe.

For now, most Israelis seem to support actions by their military that, in the name of trying to forestall suicide bombers, impose punishing collective restrictions on the whole of Palestinian society. There is, however, a clear cycle of violence in play. Even Israel's tough-guy defense minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, admits that the restrictions themselves, and the Palestinian desperation that results, seem only to spawn more suicide bombers.

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