7 - 13 June 2001
Issue No.537
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 7 - 13 June 2001 Issue No.537 |
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Under siege
Last Friday's suicide bombing in Tel Aviv placed Yasser Arafat with the most unenviable of choices. Graham Usher reports from Ramallah
In politics -- as in war -- there are moments whose impact is so severe they can make daylight night and pull attrition to the edge of catastrophe. The explosion by a Hamas claimed suicide bomber outside a Tel Aviv discotheque on 1 June was one such moment.
Even by the bloody annals this "martyrdom operation" was a pretty inhuman affair. Aside from the bomber -- 20-year old Said Hutari from Qalqiliyah -- the bombing left 20 Israeli civilians dead and 120 injured. Of the dead, 12 were women, all were aged between 14 and 32 and two were teenage sisters.
It produced a slow train of funerals where the grief was every bit as raw as that which accompanied the cortege of the eleven Palestinian policemen, killed in Nablus two weeks before in a similar bout of random, nihilistic violence. It also produced rage, expressed in the most visceral, ethnic violence when a Jewish mob trashed a mosque and all things Arab in Jaffa the day after the bombing.
Finally, it brought Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to the very cusp of a mighty military retaliation. Following two cabinet meetings on 2 June that lasted nearly six hours, the Israeli government announced it "would do whatever is necessary to protect its citizens."
There were of course other "undisclosed" decisions. Among them -- according to Israeli media sources -- massive air strikes against the Palestinian Authority's "military infrastructure", slash and destroy incursions into PA-controlled territory and assassinations, especially of Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders.
Of these decisions, one was executed immediately -- a peerless military blockade that carved the West Bank into eight separate enclaves and Gaza into four, decanted 20,000 Palestinians from their jobs in Israel and barred all imports into the Palestinian areas save food but including fuel. The other executions were stayed, temporarily, and for two reasons.
One -- according to a chilling account of the cabinet meetings in Israel's Yediot Aharonot newspaper on 3 June -- was that a delay in the military strikes was urged to "let the people of the Palestinian [security] forces return to their bases." (The PA had ordered the evacuation of all public institutions on news of the Tel Aviv bombing). The other was a major diplomatic intervention aimed at stopping the conflict from sliding irretrievably into "a very deep hole," in the phrase of US Secretary of State Colin Powell.
The scene of the deadly bomb attack in Tel Aviv shortly after the blast (photo: AFP)
In Tel Aviv at the time of the bombing, German Foreign Minister Joschker Fischer dashed to Ramallah to impress on Yasser Arafat the severity of the crisis. He reportedly told the Palestinian leader he "would lose all", including European economic and political support, unless he declared "in his own voice" an immediate and unconditional cease-fire in line with the Mitchell report recommendations.
Under inordinate pressure, on 2 June Arafat read out a statement drafted for him by Fischer, European Union representative Javier Solana and UN special envoy Terje Larsen. "We exerted -- and will exert -- our utmost efforts to stop the bloodshed of our people and the Israeli people and to do all that is necessary to achieve an immediate, unconditional, real and effective cease-fire," Arafat told reporters in Ramallah.
In Washington, Powell said Arafat's call contained "new language," specifically the phrase "unconditional" which translates as a cease-fire uncoupled from Mitchell's other recommendations of a lifting of the siege on Palestinian areas and a freeze on all Israeli settlement construction. Sharon was less impressed. "I'm not interested in words but action," he said.
Faced with an international consensus with the Israeli leader, Arafat acted, instructing his police forces to take up positions on frontlines throughout the occupied territories for "immediate implementation" of the cease-fire decision. He also moved to get endorsement from his Fatah movement, which not only staffs the PA security forces but also has led the uprising.
The endorsement came, conditionally. Following meetings of the National and Islamic Forces in Gaza and the West Bank on 3 June, 13 Palestinian factions made no mention of a cease-fire but confirmed "the right of the Palestinian people to defend themselves against [Israeli] aggression, occupation and colonisation."
According to Fatah sources, what the factions' decision meant in practice was the end to "individual" armed actions, no more firing from Palestinian civilian areas and, above all, an end to all suicide and other operations inside Israel proper.
What it did not mean was an end to armed resistance against soldiers and settlers in the "occupied" parts of the West Bank and Gaza. Nor did it mean acceptance of Sharon's cardinal demands vis-à-vis the "cease-fire": the re-arrest of the 100 or so Hamas and Jihad prisoners freed from PA jail over the last eight months and the imprisonment of any Palestinian active in operations that involved the killing of Israelis.
It was in the wake of this refusal that, on 4 June, the armed wings of Hamas and Fatah issued a joint statement vowing to refrain from military operations inside Israel on condition Israel "ceases its terrorism against the Palestinian people and withdraws from Palestinian lands." The definition of "Palestinian lands" was left purposefully vague.
Vague or otherwise, such a "cease-fire" is utterly unacceptable to Sharon and probably the US, which is also pressing Arafat to re-incarcerate Hams and Jihad members. There are also clear indications that Sharon will pursue "localised" offensives to ensure that the Palestinians cannot keep the cease-fire their leader has ordered.
For example, on 4 June -- in what Palestinians insist was an unprovoked attack -- Israeli tanks shelled Rafah refugee camp, eliciting defensive fire from Palestinian guerrillas. Palestinian police initially tried to stop the firing but in the end could do no other than join the guerrillas -- some of whom work for the same police -- in defending their people. The upshot was a six-hour armed skirmish on the border with Egypt that left 25 Palestinians wounded, six of them critically.
Sharon thus has the PA and the Palestinians exactly where he wants them, levelling unparalleled oppression while being praised by the world for his "restraint". Against this the Palestinians would seem to have one of two options.
One is to enforce the cease-fire on Israel's terms and fracture the national unity of the factions. The vain hope behind such a step would be that the US and Europe would now exert the kind of pressure they exerted on Arafat on Sharon to freeze the settlements and lift a siege that is rapidly becoming a permanent geo-political reality in the West Bank and Gaza.
The other alternative -- and one increasingly aired among Fatah cadre as well as the other factions -- is to end the game of chasing diplomatic chimera like Mitchell. And, instead, take measures that will invest the intifada with a popular character, maintain (and confine) the armed resistance to the occupied territories and, above all, forge a society that is capable of sustaining both.
This at least would demonstrate that the intifada is not "a card to be bargained with", in the words of West Bank Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti, but a national struggle for independence. It would also show that the only cease-fire likely to hold is one which involves the removal "of every Israeli soldier and every Jewish settler from our occupied Palestinian land."
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