When the PLO took charge last year, Israeli biochemist Rose Bilbol cheerfully hung a Palestinian flag next to the Israeli one in her lab and got on with her research on papayas.
Bilbol, 83, the only Israeli to stay on after the Israeli troop pullout, felt she had nothing to fear from the new rulers.After all, townsfolk affectionately called her "Dr. Papaya," and she made friends over the past two decades by dispensing free medicine and running interference with Israeli military bureaucrats.
But last month, the PLO city government refused to renew her lease and cut off the water that she needs to grow her next crop of papaya. It said the owner of her two-acre plantation wants the land back.
The Hungarian-born scientist, who lost her parents and five siblings in the Holocaust, said Thursday she felt she was being pushed out because she is Jewish. It hurts to see friends become enemies, she said, tears brimming in her pale eyes.
Switching from English to heavily accented Arabic, she said, as if to an imaginary adversary: "What is the difference between you and me? You believe in God and I believe in God."
If Bilbol is forced out, it will send a disturbing signal to the 135,000 Jewish West Bank settlers, some of whom are considering staying in their homes as Palestinian subjects.
Palestinian Local Affairs Minister Saeb Erakat denied Thursday that she was being harassed. He said he was looking for an alternative plot for her.
"We want her to stay in Jericho," he said.
Today, Erakat noted that a Jericho court had ruled in favor of the owner and ordered the municipality to cut off the water. He also said that Jericho had 120 properties whose owners fled in the 1967 Mideast war, and that in most cases the homes have been returned to their owners and the tenants evicted in the past year.
Bilbol, who has a home in Jerusalem, commutes six times a week to her lab and cosmetics factory in Jericho, tucked away in a one-story garden cottage where she spends most of her time.
She first made the half-hour drive from the hills of Jerusalem to the desert town below in 1940. At the time she was still Rose Perl, refugee from Nazi-occupied eastern Europe and doctoral candidate at the Hebrew University.
In Jericho - then a town of mud-brick houses - she saw an Arab in the market selling orange-green, football-shaped fruit. She paid 1 shilling, equal to a laborer's weekly wage, for the papaya because she wanted to show it to her botany professor.
On the drive back, Bilbol and her friends saw an overturned jeep in a ravine, and pinned beneath it a British major bleeding profusely from the right thigh. She had no bandages, so she broke open her prized papaya to use its clean interior to press against the wound. By the time she and her friends got the major to a hospital, the bleeding had stopped.
Intrigued by the papaya's healing powers, she rented two rooms in Jericho in 1941 and set up her first lab, where she developed papaya-based skin creams, shampoos and medicines. On Saturdays, she held open clinic, and the line of patients often snaked around the block.
Bilbol stayed until 1947, when she married and moved to Beirut. She and her husband were forced out of Lebanon when Yasser Arafat's PLO gained a foothold there in the early 1970s.
Returning to Israel, Bilbol rented from the new Israeli military government in Jericho a five-room house whose Jordanian owner was barred from returning after the 1967 Mideast war.
She planted 300 papaya trees and resumed her experiments. For the past 24 years, Bilbol has whipped up creams in a large mixer in one room and studied papaya seeds under a microscope in another. She came even during the 1987-1993 Palestinian uprising.
But now she is at the end of her road. She sent a plea to Arafat, writing that "my presence is the best possible testimony to the ability of Israelis and Palestinians to live together."
But he has not responded, and Bilbol has given up hope.