17 - 23 January 2002
Issue No.569
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 17 - 23 January 2002 Issue No.569 |
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A different consensus
The cease-fire is over. The battle is joined. Graham Usher reports from Jerusalem
On 13 January Yasser Arafat addressed the 4,000 residents of Rashidiyeh refugee camp in Lebanon on the 37th anniversary of his Fatah movement. "We will remain steadfast and make sacrifices until the establishment of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital and until the refugees return to their homes," he said. He may as well have been addressing the 3.4 million Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza -- so far and so near does he revolve to and from them.
This is not just because he remains landlocked within his Ramallah headquarters. And because he will remain there "for years if necessary" or until he arrests the killers of Israeli cabinet minister Rahavam Zeevi, vows Ariel Sharon. It may be years: for Arafat cannot arrest Zeevi's assassins; at least he cannot do so now.
Nor is the isolation due to the increasingly convincing campaign Israel has waged to implicate him as the brain and the cash behind the arms shipment Israel seized in international waters off the Red Sea coast on 3 January. Under inordinate US pressure, his spokespersons announced that three senior Palestinian officials had been arrested in connection with the imbroglio, including chief financier of the Palestinian Authority's security forces, Fuad Shubaki.
This was not the wisest of claims to make. Shubaki may have been called in for questioning. But the other two were out of the country. The Israelis knew this, and so, of course, did the Americans.
Nor is the isolation due to the fact that "not one Arab leader" has contacted him in the past month, according to PA Cabinet Secretary Ahmad Abdel- Rahman. "What's this?" he asked a Hamas rally in Ramallah on 11 January on behalf of his president. "Isn't Yasser Arafat the leader of his people and does he not sit next to his brothers at the Arab summit?"
He does. But Abdel-Rahman is surely aware there is a world of difference between the solidarity displayed at Arab summits and the solidarity the Palestinians require to deal properly with Sharon.
Arafat's real isolation is born from the fact that the impressive "national consensus" he had marshalled behind his 16 December cease-fire declaration lies in ruins. Nor did the cease-fire collapse because of the ambush Hamas guerrillas mounted on an Israeli army position south of Gaza on 9 January that left four soldiers and themselves dead.
It failed because of the political and moral impossibility of keeping a truce and arresting those who breach it while Israel maintains its siege on the occupied territories, invades Palestinian towns and villages and kills, routinely, Palestinians -- 22 since 16 December, including 11 children.
Asked what had caused the cease-fire to unravel, PA security chief Jibril Al-Rajoub answered plainly. "Israeli aggression," he said. Al-Rajoub had been one of the main authors of the cease-fire gambit and the road back to American and European engagement and "pressure" on Israel he believed it offered. He remains, he says, committed to it.
He is one the few Palestinians who do. In the wake of the Hamas ambush Israel unleashed a series of reprisals. The most ferocious was the systematic destruction of 60 shelters in Rafah refugee camp on the Egyptian border and the rendering (in less than two hours) of another 614 Palestinians homeless.
But the most mortal in consequence was the Israeli-inspired assassination on 14 January of Raid Karmi, Fatah activist and leader of the Al-Aqsa militia in Tulkarm.
Long wanted for armed attacks on Israeli soldiers, settlers and civilians, Karmi had narrowly escaped death by helicopter gunship last September. He had been in PA "protective custody" ever since. Israel neither claimed nor denied the hit. It did not need to.
Eyewitnesses said Karmi was killed when a bomb planted in a cemetery wall exploded while he was on furlough to visit his wife and daughter. He had been in favour of the cease-fire, said West Bank Fatah leader Marwan Al-Barghouti. So, since 1 January, all the Palestinian factions had been in favour. No longer.
Within hours of the Rafah devastation, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the PLO's Popular and Democratic Fronts all announced their intention to resume military operations. Within hours of the assassination of their Tulkarm leader, the Al-Aqsa militia declared "the hoax of the so-called cease-fire is [now] null, null, null" and warned Israel and Israelis to ready themselves for "martyrdom operations in the heart of your entity."
The opening shot came that night with the killing of an Israeli and wounding of another in an ambush outside of Tulkarm. This was the second Israeli killed since 16 December. The Al-Aqsa militia made no claim of responsibility. It did not need to.
This is an impressive national consensus of sorts. But it does not stand behind the PA's cease-fire decision. It stands in united opposition to it.
In the struggle for the soul and leadership of the Palestinian struggle that has raged since 11 September it would be wrong to say Al-Rajoub lost and Hamas won. It would be more accurate to say that Sharon decided, and he was allowed to decide by the enormous abdication of responsibility shown to the Palestinian cause by America, Europe and the Arabs.
For it was evident that the only way Arafat's cease-fire could take root was if real pressure had been exerted on Israel to lift the sieges on Palestinian areas, end the assassinations of Palestinian militants, freeze the construction of Israeli settlements and return to some form of political negotiations based on UN resolutions 242 and 338.
Sharon did not evade the pressure by manufacturing the "ship of terror" and counting out how many "terrorists" the PA had or had not arrested. He did not need to. The pressure was not there.
This is why -- from his bunker in Ramallah -- Arafat has again started to address the refugees in Lebanon, dusted down that most ancient of Palestinian slogans sumud (steadfastness) and aired again the real national consensus, which is not a cease-fire, but self-determination and refugee return, and the resistance that both require.
This is also why Abdel-Rahman is addressing Hamas rallies in Ramallah and urging "all the national and Islamic forces" to "close ranks." For the battle now is neither for statehood nor the Mitchell process nor even the cease-fire. "It is for survival."
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