"We Must Have Liberty'

Kalkilya is a Moslem community of 10,000 on the West Bank of the Jordan River, 13 miles northeast of Tel Aviv. During the Six-Day War, Israeli soldiers overran Kalkilya, destroying half the town and uprooting many of its lush, productive citrus groves. With help from Israel's government, the town has since been largely rebuilt, but it remains under what its inhabitants regard as enemy rule. TIME Jerusalem Bureau Chief William Marmon recently visited Kalkilya and sent this report:

FEW scars now remain in Kalkilya of that blistering June day in 1967 when Israel almost wiped it off the map. The old frontier is a rusting jumble of barbed wire and garbage, and the village has the same sleepy, slightly disheveled air that it had before. Men wearing the keffiyeh, the traditional black and white checkered headdress, sit around in circles drinking muddy Turkish coffee and playing shesh-besh (backgammon). The muezzin of the large Moslem mosque snoozes on a straw mat, waking periodically to give the wailing call to prayer.

Nonetheless, Kalkilya's residents have undergone profound social, economic and psychological changes since 1967. Although Israeli rule has been relatively unobtrusive, the grenade-proof headquarters of the military governor and his platoon of soldiers serves as an irritating reminder that Kalkilyans do not control their own destiny.

Still, the situation is not all bad. Kalkilya's economic links with Israel have brought the community a degree of prosperity that it has never known before. Early each morning, several thousand men assemble near the marketplace and pile on to scores of buses and trucks that take them to work in Israel. There they earn up to $17 a day in construction work and other manual-labor jobs--four or five times what they used to make in the citrus groves. So prized are the skilled Arab hands that some Jewish foremen in the nearby Israeli town of Kfar Saba pick them up in taxis to take them to work.

Later in the morning there is a surge of traffic in the other direction as shoppers from Kfar Saba and other Israeli towns pour into the Kalkilya market to buy vegetables, fruit and textiles, which cost 20% less than comparable items in Israel. One Arab merchant, when asked if he had been able to make any Israeli friends, smiled and said: "Oh yes, I have many Israeli friends. They come and buy in my shops every week."

All this has resulted in a vastly improved standard of living for the people of Kalkilya. The town was tied into Israel's electricity grid last year after Kalkilya's old generators broke down and there was no way to get new ones from Jordan. And laborers can now afford such luxuries as television sets and gas stoves. About the only ones who have not profited are the citrus growers, who complain that they are unable to compete with Israeli industries in the high wage market. "If we speak sharply to the workers," complains Mustafa Hussein Nazzal, Kalkilya's Arab mayor and a prominent orchard owner, "they quit and find jobs in Israel."

Sentiment in Kalkilya is overwhelmingly in favor of a return to Arab rule, though some people worry that Israel's economic lures may dampen the desire in time. Says one prominent Kalkilyan: "I hope those Palestinians who go to work in Israel every day remember who they are." For the moment there seems little question of that. As one landowner puts it: "Yes, more people have work now, and the economic life is better. But economic life is not the aim of man. We must have liberty."

Over in Kfar Saba the Israelis sense that discontent without quite knowing how to dispel it. Says Avraham Druyan, 71, a Palestinian-born Jew who speaks Arabic as well as he does Hebrew: "I have been feasted in Kalkilya and I have almost been murdered in Kalkilya. They can be our best friends and they can hate us. I know how they feel. They have never been better off--except for one thing. They live under a Jewish government. There can be no alternative to that. We Israelis must do the governing. But in my heart I am not happy about the problem."

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