4 - 10 October 2001
Issue No.554
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 4 - 10 October 2001 Issue No.554 |
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For Palestinians, in the occupied territories and Israel alike, the uprising is not over yet. Graham Usher writes from Ramallah and Nazareth
The Intifada -- to be continued
In Tel Aviv, Palestinian security chiefs met with their Israeli counterparts to put in place the cease-fire agreed between Yasser Arafat and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres on 26 September. In Ramallah Palestinians marched, more or less peacefully.In East Jerusalem they observed a general strike, unable to do much else given a massive police cordon around the city that barred access to all West Bank Palestinians and worship to any East Jerusalem Palestinian under the age of 40.
And in Gaza, Hebron, Bethlehem and at Silat Al-Dhahr village near Tulkarm they got killed -- 18 in 96 hours. This is how Palestinians passed the first anniversary of the Intifada by reliving and re-dying its first days. "You think the Intifada is over because of the cease-fire?" asked one Fatah leader in Ramallah. "It's barely started."
On the evidence of the anniversary he would seem to be right, as the cease-fire collapsed before it was built, with the Israeli army as the main saboteurs. As with its origin, it was Gaza where the flames really took hold, lit by the army in two separate events.
The first was on 27 September. Coming a few hours after the Arafat meeting with Peres, and in apparent reprisal for a bomb attack on an army base the day before, Israeli tanks and bulldozers invaded Rafah in a pre-dawn raid. Four Palestinians were killed, 30 injured, five critically, and 14 homes destroyed or damaged.
The next morning hundreds of Palestinian youths fanned out along the border with Egypt looking to take on tanks with machine-guns, rocks and pistols. "It was utterly explosive," said one eyewitness.
It exploded that night. Four Palestinians were killed near an army base on the border. The army said they were guerrillas from Rafah's cross-factional Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) who had perished from their own bombs. Palestinians said they were killed in a minefield deliberately left for them by the army.
And the anger turned inward. Fuelled by rumours that Arafat had dispatched 400 police to curb the fighting in Rafah, a Palestinian mob assailed and torched three PA security offices. It took the intervention of the PRC to steer the rage to an older enemy, as the funerals became demonstrations and the demonstrations turned into confrontations at such flash points as Gaza's Kfar Darom settlement and the Karni crossing into Israel.
Two Palestinian youths were killed at these sites and 55 were wounded, most of them from live army ammunition, all aged between 12-22.
A similar dynamic was happening in Hebron, as the army shelled the partitioned city and Palestinians responded with gunfire. Over three days of battles fought between Palestinian guerrillas and Israeli snipers and occasional tanks, four Palestinians were killed.
In the line of fire: Palestinian children skirt Israeli soldiers as they make their way home from school (photo: AP)
One was an Islamic Jihad activist, apparently killed by his own explosives. Another was a 48-year old man struck down by an Israeli bullet as he tried to cross the battlefield that was once Hebron's market. A third was a 10-year-old boy, caught in a firefight between Israeli soldiers on one roof and Palestinian fighters on another. The fourth was an officer in the PA's Preventive Security force, killed, say Palestinians, by an Israeli sniper while trying to move youths from his range.
Two more Palestinians were slain, in similar circumstances and by similar means, in and near Bethlehem.
But the cruellest slaughter occurred away from the frontlines. Early Sunday morning four Palestinian taxis were on their usual run ferrying Palestinians from Nablus to their jobs in Israel. Near the village of Silat Al-Dhahr the convoy stopped to remove a roadblock. Soldiers emerged from an olive grove. One of the taxi drivers, Ahmed Jaber Yusuf, describes what happened next.
"One soldier shouted at us. We got back in our cars and started to reverse. Then they [the soldiers] opened fire."
Two Palestinians were killed, 10 other passengers were injured, six seriously. The army said it would open an investigation into the incident.
Ariel Sharon, meanwhile, has been investigating Palestinian "breaches of the cease-fire." He is aware there are some members in his cabinet (and some in the US State Department) who suspect he ordered the incursion into Rafah less out of "self-defence" than to scupper the cease-fire. He, therefore, responded with "restraint."
Following a security cabinet meeting on Saturday, he gave the PA an extra 48 hours to bring "quiet" to the occupied territories but detain immediately eight "ticking bombs" from a list of 108 Palestinians whose arrest is demanded by Israel.
In the current mood among Palestinians, Arafat can no more make arrests than beat back the ocean with a stick. On Monday a car bomb exploded in West Jerusalem, the first Palestinian military operation inside the Green Line since the cease-fire. Two Israelis were lightly injured and three cars damaged. It was claimed by Islamic Jihad as "a response to the Israeli occupation."
And there is the rub. Now into its second year Arafat has sometimes ridden with Intifada, sometimes tried to cool it down, often exploited it for diplomatic ends. But he has never controlled it, and deliberately so.
What "controls" the uprising is the level of violence the occupation inflicts on Palestinians in Gaza, Hebron, Bethlehem and everywhere else in the occupied territories. When the occupation withdraws, so will the resistance. But not before, at least on the evidence of this anniversary, and no matter what "cease-fires" are declared.
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