17 - 23 May 2001
Issue No.534
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 17 - 23 May 2001 Issue No.534 |
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Meeting the resistance
Oslo's old infrastructure of security cooperation lay buried beneath the devastation visited on Gaza and the West Bank and the new Palestinian resistance flowering amid the ruins. It may prove impossible to repair. Graham Usher reports from Rafah
It looks like a still from the apocalypse. A leaning heap of pulverised concrete, twisted iron, broken glass, discarded bedding and the bloody entrails of dozens of dead chickens, fed on by ravenous dogs and a swarm of flies.
It had been a patch of the Brazil Quarter, a Palestinian refugee area between Rafah city and the Gaza Strip's southern border with Egypt. On 2 May, Israeli bulldozers and tanks, covered by helicopter gun-ships, smashed through the Quarter's walls, levelling 20 Palestinian shelters, three chicken farms and about a dozen greenhouses. There have been incursions since, the latest on 13 May, when two more homes were razed.
The army call the raids "engineering", ridding Brazil and like areas of Palestinian guerrillas who had hidden and fired from its warren of houses and side-streets. The 2 May blitz left 150 Palestinian refugees homeless for the second or third times in their lives and 15 injured from live ammunition or shrapnel. One Palestinian was killed trying to defend the camp: 19-year old Mohammed Akel, an activist in the Palestinian Resistance Committees (PRC).
The next day his corpse was swept aloft by thousands at his funeral in Rafah, alongside the body of Mohammed Jazer, a Palestinian Authority police officer killed on 1 May when the army mounted its first, failed incursion into Brazil." They are brothers in arms," said one mourner.
They are, though the PRC are the younger siblings. Formed in Gaza's southern areas as a "creative" response to the Palestinian uprising last October, the PRC are a grassroots militia "from all factions and from none", who define themselves as the "last line of defence" for the Palestinian people.
In the intifada's chaotic first months, their resistance was confined to firing on Israeli positions from the bullet-scarred houses, mosques and shops that line Gaza's old road to Egypt or threading mines along the Israeli-patrolled border.
By November, they were laying explosives and setting ambushes on the settler only by-pass roads that criss-cross Gaza and imprison its million or so Palestinian inhabitants within four enclaves. In December they unveiled their latest weapon, home made mortars that can reach each of the 17 Jewish settlements within the Gaza Strip and, on occasion, kibbutzim and Israeli towns beyond it.
The escalation is necessary to strike a "balance of terror" with the Israeli occupation, says Abu Bakr Qassim, spokesperson of the PRC's "political wing" in Rafah. " For us every Israeli action requires a Palestinian reaction. So if the Israeli army attacks our cities and civilians, we will attack their cities and civilians".
We meet Abu Bakr not on the frontlines, but rather within the incongruous setting of a kindergarten in downtown Rafah. Some of his followers seem barely out of school themselves. One has a first growth of beard. With his right hand he carries a tray of teas. In his left he grips a Kalashnikov.
Abu Bakr is a good deal older, with a trim beard and open white shirt. He could be from Hamas or Islamic Jihad, but is probably aligned with Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement. Abu Bakr is certainly not his real name. The ambiguity is deliberate and extends to the origins of the PRC.
"We were established to maintain the popular character of the uprising," he says. "Our leadership comes from former prisoners in Israeli jails and all the Palestinian political factions. But we are independent of the factions."
Maybe, but it is no secret the bulk of the PRC's fighters belong to Fatah, with a good many doubling as officers in one or other of the PA's police and intelligence forces. So is the PRC a wing of the PA or an organisation independent from it?
"We don't live under the PA," answers Abu Bakr. "We live under Israeli occupation. And as long as the occupation continues on our lands, so will the Palestinian resistance."
It is a fine distinction rejected by Israel, whose army now rockets PA and Fatah installations and leaders in Gaza and the West Bank with the same ferocity and frequency as its bulldozers flush out guerrillas in neighbourhoods like Brazil. There are signs too that Arafat wants a little less ambiguity about the PRC.
Last month, after several violations of an order that his forces stop firing from Palestinian civilian areas, the Palestinian leader reportedly ordered the PRC be dissolved and their members "return to their original security positions."
The PRC met the challenge with its own. It continued to return mortar fire for Israeli assassinations of their fighters or incursions into PA controlled territory. It offered their people's collective resignation from the PA's security institutions, if the Palestinian leadership was "embarrassed" by their membership of them.
Finally, it led several popular marches in Rafah, denouncing all security cooperation with Israel as "treason" and demanding the release of Hamas political leader Abdel Aziz Al-Rantisi, jailed last month for speaking out against the Egyptian-Jordanian peace initiative.
Al-Rantisi was released without charge on 13 May and Arafat's dissolution order dissolved before it reached the ground. "It's all media talk," says Abu Bakr. "There was never an official order to disband the PRC."
But tensions remain. And will grow once and if Arafat decides to steer the national revolt of his people through the diplomatic channels laid out by the Egyptian-Jordanian initiative and the recent report into the causes of the intifada by former US Senator George Mitchell. Both essentially call for a "cease-fire" or resumption of Israeli-Palestinian security cooperation in exchange for an Israeli freeze on settlement construction.
"These initiatives serve Israel," says Abu Bakr, dismissing them. "We can have security cooperation if it is between equals. For example, Israel wants us to hand over the list of Palestinians who killed Israelis. Fine, we want Israel to give us the list of soldiers and settlers who killed 150 of our children and assassinated 20 of our leaders."
It is a position at one with the mood of the Palestinian people, in Rafah or elsewhere in the occupied territories. But it is a measure of the task facing Arafat should he, as the price of a minor diplomatic achievement like a settlement freeze, be required to once more pour the fuel of the resistance back into the broken reeds of the Oslo "security" infrastructure. It may even be beyond him.
Supposing the dissolution of the PRC ceases to be "media talk" and becomes an official order from the President? "We would never take action against the PA," answers Abu Baker. "Our role is to protect the PA, not oppose it." So what would you do? "We would take action against Israel."
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