 |
Al-Ahram Weekly 18 - 24 May 2000 Issue No. 482 
|
||
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
|
Al-Ahram Weekly 18 - 24 May 2000 Issue No. 482
|
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Features Heritage Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Dousing the flames
By Graham UsherThere are moments in the Israel-Palestine conflict when events so come together that the two peoples that inhabit this fractured land fall apart in a national and violent confrontation. This happened in December 1987 when -- after years of cumulative national oppression -- Palestinians exploded in popular revolt and the intifada against Israel's military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza took hold. A similar, if smaller, thing happened on Monday, 15 May.
For Palestinians -- whether in the occupied territories, Israel or the diaspora -- 15 May is Al-Nakba day, the term used to describe the "catastrophe" of Israel's founding in 1948 and their dispossession, flight and expulsion from most of what was Palestine. This year the memory was made especially urgent and poignant both by the onset of the final status negotiations on Palestinian refugees and by a number of "symbolic returns," some of these made to the sites of their homes in destroyed Palestinian villages inside the Green Line.
But 15 May was also the fifth consecutive day of Palestinian demonstrations in solidarity with 1,600 Palestinian political prisoners still interned in Israeli jails, including 650 now on hunger strike. Of these, 400 are long-term prisoners and supporters of Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement whose release has been recommended by Israel's intelligence service, but repeatedly refused by Israel's government.
The mix of these two elements proved utterly combustible on Monday. At the end of the worst violence in the occupied territories in nearly four years, at least five Palestinians were dead (including two children run over by a settler car in Qalqilya) and 400 were wounded, 87 from live ammunition. More clashes followed on Tuesday, though with neither the ferocity nor the toll in injuries.
In the west Bank town of Hebron a Palestinian demonstrator hurls stones at Israeli troops during Monday's outbreak of violence, the most severe in the occupied territories for four years
(photo: AP)
There is little doubt that Yasser Arafat encouraged the protests of his people. At a meeting of the Palestinian leadership last week he alerted all, and especially Fatah, that the prisoners should be the "central focus" of the Al-Nakba commemorations. But he almost certainly did not expect them to degenerate into the heavy gun battles that erupted between Fatah activists -- sometimes in police uniform, sometimes not -- and Israeli soldiers in Ramallah, Jenin and Nablus.
What caused the resort to arms remains a moot point. Some say the Palestinians only fired in response to the excessive live ammunition the Israelis used to quell the demonstrations or when Israeli soldiers mounted incursions into Palestinian-controlled territory, as they did in Ramallah. Others suggest that guns were used to throw a cover of "friendly fire" over the protesters. Whatever the cause, the Israelis responded with helicopter gunships in Ramallah and the readying of tanks outside Nablus. On Monday night and throughout Tuesday, it took the strenuous efforts of Palestinian and Israeli military officials and US diplomats like Dennis Ross to avert a major military confrontation.
It is one of Arafat's well-honed tactics to resort to mass, and sometimes violent, protests in the occupied territories to "soften up" the Israelis at the negotiating table. Nor is there much dispute among Palestinians that Israel could do with a bit of "softening up" on each and every one of the final status issues. But a no less important aim of Arafat's sanctioning of the confrontations is to unite Palestinians behind his leadership, especially at a time when Palestinian discontent with both the direction and methods of his rule have reached their highest-ever ratings.
The fact that the protests did eventually subside on Tuesday suggests that, for now, even the more militant cadre of his Fatah movement are again prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt. But Arafat's credit among them is no longer unlimited. Should, after such sacrifices, prisoners not be released -- and should there not soon be a general sense of tangible gain from an Oslo process most Palestinians have long experienced as a sham -- Arafat may find that the next time he heats up the occupied territories he may not be able to dowse the flames. The auguries are already there. At one point during the fighting in Ramallah the Palestinian Authority's head of Preventive Security in the West Bank, Jibril Rajoub, tried to get his men from Fatah to stop shooting. But some opened up with their machine guns, and they were not aiming at the Israelis.
