20 - 26 December 2001
Issue No.565
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 20 - 26 December 2001 Issue No.565 |
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Destroying Arafat
The army is acting in the occupied territories because Yasser Arafat refuses to act, says Israel. But Israel's military actions go way beyond that. Graham Usher reports from Salfit in the West Bank
"The Arafat era has ended. There is no more Arafat. There is no such man," pronounced Ariel Sharon at a meeting of his cabinet on 12 December. He was speaking a few hours after Palestinian guerrillas had ambushed a settler convoy in the West Bank, leaving 10 Israelis dead and 23 wounded.
The next era began as the cabinet was sitting, and continued relentlessly over the next four days, with Israeli air strikes on Palestinian Authority headquarters and security positions across the West Bank and Gaza. It was given symbolic substance on 13 December when army bulldozers razed to rubble the PA's Voice of Palestine radio station and rolled tanks within 100 metres of Arafat's presidential offices in Ramallah.
And it went into overdrive on 14 and 15 December, when Israeli tanks and troops invaded four West Bank Palestinian villages, destroyed 35 homes in Khan Yunis refugee camp (rendering 345 Palestinians homeless) and reoccupied Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza, triggering an armed resistance that left four Palestinians dead and over 100 wounded.
The aim of the assault was "to do what the PA should have done a long time ago: to make arrests and prevent terrorist attacks," said Israel's Defense Minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, on Thursday.
Bitter holiday: the mother of 16-year-old Ahmed Mohsen, killed by Israeli troops, weeps during a visit to her son's grave on the first day of Eid Al-Fitr (photo: Reuters)
But for most Palestinians under the gale the aim is the destruction of the Palestinian Authority as the "model and symbol of our future Palestinian state," as Arafat put it in his EiD Al-Fitr cease-fire call to his people on 16 December.
Nowhere was that clearer than Salfit, a village of 10,000 people cut into the mountains west of Nablus, and one of four Sharon "saw to order" on 14 December.
Order came in pre-dawn raids led by army undercover squads dressed as Arabs. One invaded the home of Reziq Shaban Herzallah and shot him dead in front of his wife. Herzallah was a sergeant in the Palestinian police force, "one of the guys Sharon demands should arrest Hamas and Islamic Jihad," shrugs Salfit's mayor, Shaher Eshteih. The army said he was "wanted." It has yet to say what for.
Another police officer was killed outside his home, said eyewitnesses. The bodies of two other policemen were found dumped in an olive grove after the army left and dawn broke.
And two more -- Dia Nabil Mahmoud, 19, and Abdel- Ashour, 22, from Gaza -- were slain after alerting their neighbours that the Israelis were in town and it would be wise for all to take cover. Iman Herzala, 37, saw what happened next from her doorstep.
"Three men approached them on the road, all dressed in black. At first I thought they were Palestinian soldiers out on a training exercise. But my son said they spoke Arabic with a Hebrew accent. They told Dia and his friend to put down their gun -- they only had one between them -- and to put their hands behind their back. The Israelis then told them to lie on the ground, one on either side of the road. 'Lie down,' they said in Arabic. Then they started shooting with machine guns".
Dia's father, Nabil, said his son died from seven bullet wounds to his face and chest. Ashour also suffered a crushed skull. There is brown earth spread over the spot where he lay. "I think a jeep must have run over him. There was some kind of military vehicle up there," said Khadiji Al-Fataj, 61, who tended the bullet-riddled corpses once the soldiers had gone.
The "resistance" vanquished, 20 tanks entered Salfit, covered by helicopter machine gun fire. They combed through the village's narrow streets, arrested 20 "suspects," and blew up three homes, each belonging to a local Fatah leader.
Eshtieh knows them and is cut from the same cloth: young, a native of Salfit, a member Fatah's West Bank Higher Committee and an officer in Force-17, Arafat's so called "Presidential Guard."
He points out that all of those killed and most of those arrested are police officers or Fatah members and usually both. The police are the sinews of Arafat's rule in the occupied territories: Fatah the lifeblood that grants it legitimacy. Without the two Arafat cannot govern, cease-fire or no cease-fire.
And this is the true purpose of Israel's war, he insists. "Sharon is aware that the US and Europe accept a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza as fact. So he has to destroy the Palestinian Authority now -- area by area."
Eshtieh slumps in Salfit's new community centre, wrapped in a suede coat, his face haggard after a night tending the dead and wounded (he is a physician by profession).
"Look," he says, wearily. "I support the cease-fire. Hamas and Islamic Jihad do not have the right to act independently of the decision of the National Authority, though I'm unhappy about the arrests of their people. But a cease-fire cannot give Israel the license to destroy us. It certainly does not give me the right to tell my people not to resist."
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