THE JERUSALEM REPORT MAGAZIN
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Calling the Shots
Khaled Abu Toameh and Isabel Kershner
"FOR JIHAD JE’ARA AND HIS comrades-in-arms in the "Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades," the temporary Israeli invasion of Bethlehem in early March came as no surprise. The Palestinian gunmen had been expecting the Israelis some 24 hours before the tanks and personnel carriers rolled into the city and its surroundings.
"The Palestinian Authority and some journalists told us about the Israeli army’s intention to enter Bethlehem at least a day ahead," boasts Je’ara, 28, a senior member of the Brigades. He was speaking to a reporter at the height of the Israeli incursion from his safe refuge in the city center. "We also saw the army amassing forces around the city a few hours before the incursion," he adds.
The Bethlehem branch of the Brigades, which belongs to the mainstream Fatah Tanzim militia, has been responsible for the shooting at the Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo from nearby Beit Jala, as well as a series of deadly ambushes against Jewish settlers in the area and terrorist attacks inside Israel.
In recent weeks the Fatah organization has regained its footing as the dominant Palestinian faction. Its restored lead comes at the expense of the fundamentalist Hamas, whose popularity had been steadily growing in past months. Fatah owes its new success entirely to the Tanzim, the grassroots militia which is armed by, and loyal to, Yasser Arafat. The Tanzim’s own status has only been boosted further by its survival of Israel’s military campaign, and by its continued ability to carry out armed attacks.
Je’ara, who is high on Israel’s wanted list, says the army had given the PA advance warning of its plans. So hours before the first Israeli soldiers moved into the city and its refugee camps of Deheishah, Aida and Al-Izza with the stated goal of rooting out the terrorist infrastructure there, Je’ara and his friends cleared out. He and some 150 gunmen belonging to various local Palestinian groups gathered in Manger Square, outside the Church of the Nativity, at the request, they say, of PA officials who said they had assurances that the Israeli army would not approach that revered and historic central area, the traditional site of the birth of Jesus.
For the next few days, Manger Square was transformed into a makeshift camp for the scores of gunmen armed with various types of rifles and pistols. Some were dressed in PA police uniforms. Friends and relatives joined the gunmen, bringing them food and drink. Loudspeakers posted on pickup vans blared out nationalist songs. The most popular one paid homage to the "heroic steadfastness of the fedayeen in Beirut" in 1982.
As the gunmen waited, at night forming small circles around fires, they eyed the tanks stationed on a hilltop overlooking Deheishah while Israeli soldiers conducted house to house searches in the refugee camp’s alleyways below.
Asked why the gunmen had fled their homes instead of staying behind to confront the invading army, as they had repeatedly vowed to do, the leader of the group, Abu Nassar, replies "This is not an even battle. We are prepared to fight against the Israeli enemy, but we only have rifles and pistols. We can’t use these weapons against tanks, armored vehicles, helicopters and F-16 jets. The Israeli soldiers are cowards. This is the nature of the Jews. If they want a real fight, then they should come here and fight face to face."
In Deheishah, as in the other refugee camps the army entered in early March, the soldiers rounded up all the males between 15 and 45 years of age. The boys and men were instructed over loudspeakers to head to a nearby stone-cutting factory where they were blindfolded and handcuffed before being questioned by security personnel. But the Israelis and the Palestinians already knew that these were the ones who had stayed at home because they had nothing to fear. Some 530 of the 600 Deheishah detainees were released within hours, and none of the other 70 were considered hard-core militants.
"The soldiers came into my house and said they wanted to search it for weapons," says Ghazi Abd al-Hadi, 50, a contractor who had recently moved back to the camp with his family from the United States. "I told the officer ‘Ahlan wa-sahlan, the only weapons I have at home are my seven children.’ Is Israel so stupid to think that the wanted men would remain in the camp and wait for them? Even the children knew that the Israeli forces were preparing to enter Deheishah."
Israel insists the operation was worthwhile, in that the troops uncovered weapons caches and factories for manufacturing explosives and rockets. It also claimed that it helped stop the shooting at Gilo, although shooting continued even with the troops inside Beit Jala.
It was a similar story in Ramallah. Again, the PA says it was notified in advance of the planned operation and that the Israeli forces had been instructed not to approach the Muqata’ah, Arafat’s headquarters in the city, where he and his top officials are based.
So some 300 gunmen, mostly belonging to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, found refuge inside the compound, from where they could watch the Israeli soldiers searching for them in the streets of Ramallah. Every few hours a group of gunmen would emerge from the Muqata’ah and head toward the city center to take turns in shooting at the soldiers.
SOME 200 PALESTINIAN LIVES were lost during the Israeli army’s recent campaign in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Among the dead were armed militiamen, members of the PA security forces, at least a dozen children and teenagers and three medical personnel. By far the army’s largest operation undertaken since the beginning of the current intifada, it came in response to a string of deadly Palestinian terrorist attacks that had left over 60 Israelis dead since the beginning of March.
Yet the Fatah militia has, if anything, come out strengthened. For now, Palestinian commentators agree, the Tanzim is calling all the shots.
While the thousands of Fatah militiamen, most of whom are in their 20s and 30s, have little respect for the Palestinian Authority, and many of them openly despise its officials, the gunmen do still answer to Arafat. And he, increasingly, is answering to them.
"These young people have respect for and are obedient to Arafat alone," says Mahdi Abdul Hadi, director of the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs, a prominent East Jerusalem think tank. "They say he never lost contact with them. They never knocked on his door and got no reply. Arafat is their symbol of Palestine and of the resistance. It’s a unique relationship."
Unlike the activists of the first intifada of the late 1980s, however, these militants expect not just to provide the materials, but "to share in building the Palestinian house," as Abdul Hadi puts it.
"I don’t think Arafat has any ‘partners’ in leadership," he states, "but these young faceless people are emerging as the partners in where to go next."
Ghassan Khatib, a Ramallah political scientist and director of the Jerusalem Media and Communications Center, says the Tanzim "takeover" should be seen only in terms of Fatah’s victory over Hamas, rather than a power struggle between the militants, Arafat or the Palestinian Authority. "The Tanzim and the PA are all Fatah in one form or another," he notes. "I cannot really see where the borders are."
Fatah and the Tanzim have garnered much public support in recent months because of their increased involvement in violent action and particularly, their adoption of suicide terror attacks inside Israeli cities that were previously the domain of the Islamic radicals alone. The shift came once Hamas, unprecedentedly, had started overtaking Fatah in local opinion polls a few months ago.
While Fatah says it is still "strategically committed" to fighting the Israeli occupation inside the territories, says Khatib, attacks against civilians inside Israel -- the "exception" --
come "in response to attacks by Israel in the heart of the Palestinian civilian population."
Khatib maintains that if the Palestinians were offered enough of a political carrot by Israel, and if "Israel would stop the violence from its side," then "Arafat and the Tanzim would be sensitive to that. If we have a genuine political stake, Fatah will respond -- unlike Hamas."
But Abdul Hadi talks rather in terms of a struggle that has taken on a dynamic of its own. The Palestinians are now in what he calls a phase of "legendary resistance," a fight imbued with a sense of historic proportion. "The feeling here is not war until independence, but sacrifice until independence," he says. "It’s very strong and very deep. It’s not ideological or religious or factional. It is an unorganized movement of the youth. I am amazed with the strength of the tendency toward sacrifice, out of commitment and conviction -- the conviction that independence will come through sacrifice, and won’t be handed down from the negotiating table."
Abdul Hadi clearly admires the young revolutionaries. But his words also reveal a degree of anxiety, helplessness and fear. Anxiety, he says, "because I personally am too short to meet people’s expectations. What can I do? I am not going to sacrifice myself."
And fear of the unknown. "People are up to here with the situation," he says, gesturing to his forehead, "to the point of committing suicide. We need some party to bring back sanity. There is a collapse of the status quo, and real, real hate."
For one thing, Abdul Hadi’s own personal vision of Palestinian civil society functioning normally "cannot be a reality now because of other serious priorities," he says. "People don’t have food, work or the minimum tools to stand on their feet as human beings."
THE TANZIM’S POPULARITY may be wide, but it doesn’t always run deep. Other Palestinians speak of the general public’s fear of the Tanzim. "They don’t dare speak out and have to show a nationalistic public face," says one Palestinian human rights activist. "But inside, they know that supporting the suicide bombers only brings them more suffering. There are armed militiamen in the streets. People don’t know what is going to happen, but they know it is something bad. Most want it to end."
Despite the popularity the Tanzim and its Brigades have chalked up as a result of their recent blows against Israel, many Palestinians also blame them and their actions for contributing to the state of lawlessness and anarchy prevailing in most of the Palestinian-controlled areas. They feel so confident in their own power that they can now afford to shoot suspected collaborators in public squares and mutilate their bodies as PA policemen look on from the side.
Indeed, one sector of Palestinian society that feels particularly threatened by the Brigades is the PA security forces themselves. Palestinian security officials describe the militiamen as "Arafat’s spoiled children" and note that most of them are now on Arafat’s payroll. They say that Arafat is deliberately strengthening the militiamen so that he can use them against future political foes.
Says one Palestinian security official: "They are the ones doing the dirty work now."
