When is this going to end?

With its own newspaper and hot line, a group run by Palestinian kids attempts to create hope from despair.

By Jason George
Source : www.salon.com

  We are standing in the town of Ar-Ram, part of Jerusalem's northern sprawl, a strip of crumbling buildings and dust between two checkpoints that divide Israel from the occupied West Bank. A trash fire next to the road has been burning for five days. From here, the road goes through at least one more checkpoint on the way to Ayysh's house in the West Bank town of Biedo.

    With a well-paved road and no roadblocks it would be a 10-minute drive, but for Ayysh the journey has taken much longer. Biedo, like most of the West Bank, is under curfew and Ayysh's orange West Bank identity card prevents him from entering Israel. But Ayysh has taken four taxis through back roads and walked three miles -- and, he says, been shot at by Israeli soldiers -- just to attend a meeting.

Oct. 14, 2002 | AR-RAM, Israel -
- Ahmed Ayysh points to the horizon and smiles
 broadly for the first time all day. "There's my home,
" says the 23-year-old Palestinian. "You see that mountain there?
 That's where I live."

   The meeting that has drawn Ayysh and other young Palestinians to Ar-Ram is being held by a group called PYALARA, which stands for the rather cumbersome title "Palestinian Youth Association for Leadership and Rights Activation." The group was founded three years ago to give Palestinian young people something in desperately short supply here: constructive work, a vision of the future, hope. With a budget of just $144,000, most of it from UNICEF, the International Red Cross and various European Union groups, its tools appear modest -- a youth newspaper with a circulation of 10,000, counseling for Palestinian youth by their peers, various seminars and training sessions. But judging by the young Palestinians who say the group has saved them from despair -- even from becoming suicide bombers -- and given them some purpose, they are effective.
 

   The situation in the occupied territories has recently become catastrophic. Massive Israeli military incursions, curfews and economic closures following Palestinian suicide bombings have devastated the feeble Palestinian economy and brought normal life to a standstill. The U.N. estimates that about half the population is now living below the $2-a-day poverty line. There are fears of widespread malnutrition.
 

   At least a third of all adults are jobless -- much higher by some estimates -- and those who have jobs are frequently unable to get to work. Schools are frequently closed, hospitals and medicines often unreachable. Hundreds of thousands of people are confined to their houses around the clock, except for a few hours when Israeli authorities let them out to go shopping, by the curfews which have now been in place for three months in most West Bank cities.

   The situation has taken an especially severe toll on Palestinian young people, who make up half of the three million Palestinians living in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Part of that toll is literal: Of the 1,888 Palestinians who have been killed since the start of the Al-Aqsa intifada two years ago, 306 were under the age of 18.

But part is invisible

   In a recent piece in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, the Palestinian writer Sam Bahour wrote, "If my youngest daughter exemplifies the effect of the curfews on Palestinian children, then her first set of words -- dabbabeh (tank), naqelet jonnood (armored personnel carrier) and tayyara (fighter airplane) -- depict the challenge of rehabilitating an entire generation that we now face. A ray of hope may be seen in the fact that she sometimes refers to the Israeli soldiers as ammou (uncle)."

   The problem is not unique to Palestinian children: Israeli kids, too, have been scarred by the conflict, but they suffer from a different problem, according to Dr. Asher Ben-Arieh of the Israel National Council for the Child, one of the largest children's aid groups in Israel. "It's not a lack of hope here," says Ben-Arieh. "Here it is a development of hate."
 

   Says Pierre Poupard, UNICEF special representative for Palestine, "Seventy-five percent of Palestinian children are facing psychological problems. We have growing frustration and no hope that is turning into despair." Poupard says UNICEF supports PYALARA because of the worsening crisis and because no other organization in the West Bank offers its programs.

   "We are a lot of unique things," said Hania Bitar, founder and director general of PYALARA. One of the few adults working at the center, Bitar stressed that it is the 300 active members and countless other participants, not she, who make PYALARA what it is. "The organization is truly founded and run by the children," she said.
 

   PYALARA participants range in age from toddlers at summer camps to young people in their mid-20s. The group maintains that it has no political agenda, and as a recipient of UNICEF aid it is forbidden to have one, but the idea that any group in the West Bank could be completely apolitical is nothing more than a fantasy. A picture of Bitar with Palestinian Authority head Yasser Arafat looms over her desk, and the PYALARA Web site is filled not with the innocuous tales of self-discovery or bland feature reporting one might expect to find in a publication by young journalists and writers. Instead there are anguished tales filled with fear, anger and sorrow. The viewpoints expressed are the stuff of bitter argument, but the passion, sincerity and urgency in the essays cannot be mistaken.

Source : http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2002/10/14/youth_group/index.html