BY AHMAD NIMER
RAMALLAH, Palestine — The October 17 assassination of tourism minister Rehevem Ze'evi, a hated leader of Israel's racist right, was greeted with huge public approval from the Palestinian street, but has since then provided a pretext for Israel to escalate its war in the occupied territories.
Ze'evi was assassinated by the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades, an armed group associated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). The day before his assassination, Ze'evi had tendered his resignation from the Israeli cabinet, in protest at what he saw as the softness of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's approach towards the Palestinians.
Ze'evi made his name as leader of the Moledet Party, advocating "transfer" — a euphemism for expulsion — of all Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In April, he made headlines by calling for the assassination of Palestinian Authority leaders including Yasser Arafat and has referred to Palestinians who work in Israel as "lice" who needed to be exterminated.
Claiming responsibility, the PFLP said the assassination was in response to the Israeli assassination of PFLP general secretary Abu Ali Mustafa on August 27.
Abu Ali was killed by rockets fired from US-made Apache helicopters as he sat working in his Ramallah office. His funeral was the largest attended public procession in Ramallah for decades.
The Palestinian public viewed the assassination of Ze'evi as retribution for not only Abu Ali's killing but also for the intensifying Israeli offensive against them; many even viewed it as a form of self-defence.
Since the al-Aqsa intifada (uprising) began in September 2000, more than 700 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire and approximately 1% of the total population has been wounded. More than 3000 Palestinians are currently political prisoners in Israeli jails.
Israel's unrelenting blockade of Palestinian cities and towns has caused the living standard to plunge to its lowest levels in decades.
Nearly 70 Palestinians have been assassinated as part of an open and systematic Israeli policy of targeting leaders and activists; many bystanders have also died in these attacks.
The most notorious example of this assassination policy occurred on July 31, when two political leaders of the Islamic movement Hamas in Nablus were killed by Israeli rockets fired at a crowded apartment bloc; nine others were also killed in the attack.
The militarisation of the intifada has escalated over the last weeks, particularly following the widespread incursions of Israeli forces into Palestinian Authority areas. The scale of these invasions is unprecedented in the eight years since the signing of the Oslo Accords.
More than 60 Palestinians have been killed in the last week during such assaults, with tanks occupying all major Palestinian cities and movement between cities almost impossible.
The worst Israeli atrocity over the last few days was a massacre perpetrated in the village of Beit Rima on October 24.
More than 1000 troops, 17 tanks and numerous helicopters circled the village of 800 people for 24 hours. All press and medical services were prevented from entering the village, including the International Red Cross, and a curfew was announced that confined all residents to their homes.
For the next 24 hours, Israeli soldiers went house to house, arresting tens of village residents with records of political activity. At least nine residents were killed during the raid and many wounded, with the Israeli military taking away the bodies.
PA arrest campaign
Whilst the Israeli army continues its attacks on the civilian population, the Palestinian Authority has embarked on a widespread campaign of arrests of its own, aimed at members of the PFLP in the Ramallah and Gaza areas.
Exact numbers of those arrested are difficult to come by, but estimates indicate over 100 detainees in the Ramallah area alone. Currently, two main security bodies are carrying out the arrests — the General Intelligence Services and the Palestinian Preventative Security.
The arrest campaign seems to be following a particular strategy, targeting initially rank-and-file members and sympathisers of the PFLP with the aim of holding back any popular mobilisations against the arrests. These people are being held by the General Intelligence Services where they are not being questioned or seriously mistreated.
The Preventative Security is holding higher-ranked leaders or longer-term activists of the PFLP and the conditions of detention are much more serious.
The prisoners are being held incommunicado from families or lawyers in a detention and interrogation centre that was built under the supervision of the CIA. Small cells measuring two metres by two metres extend five floors underground and there is a widespread belief that the detainees are being tortured.
Public opposition to the arrests has been muted, partly because of the blanket ban on coverage in the Palestinian media and partly due to the intensity of Israeli attacks around the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
At least one demonstration against the arrests has occurred, on October 21 in Ramallah, which was attended by around 300 people.
The demonstration was organised by the local committee of the intifada leadership and had received backing from all the factions present in the committee. However the demonstration was made up almost entirely of PFLP and Hamas supporters. Most noticeable in their absence were members of the ruling party of the Palestinian Authority, Fatah.
One of the important developments in the intifada has been the emergence of a street-level leadership that has challenged many of the positions of the Palestinian Authority.
Within Fatah, this has produced the phenomenon of the Palestinian leadership saying one thing, while the street leaders of Fatah have mobilised the rank-and-file around different demands. This was apparent during several attempts by Yasser Arafat to announce a ceasefire in the past months.
The non-participation of Ramallah Fatah activists in the demonstrations against the arrests is thus a serious about-face for the Fatah rank-and-file. It is perhaps an indication that the network of patronage within the party — essentially tying all Fatah leaders to a pyramid-like structure which is dependent on financial and political support from Yasser Arafat — is being reasserted in the Ramallah area.
In other areas of the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority seems to be in a virtual state of collapse. In its place, a parallel system of authority has arisen around political-military groups and, in some cases, large families whose members have led the armed resistance against the Israeli occupation.
Thus in the Bethlehem area, the Abbayat clan has challenged the rule of the Palestinian Authority on many occasions — leading Yasser Arafat to recently replace the Bethlehem governor and leaders of the security bodies in an attempt to stem their influence.
A prominent member of this family, Atef Abbayat, was assassinated by Israel on October 18, after the Palestinian Authority was unable to follow through on a pledge to Israel to arrest him.
A similar situation of parallel power also exists in the north of the West Bank, particularly Jenin and Nablus.
Following Ze'evi's assassination, the Palestinian Authority passed a ruling that declared all armed groups illegal and placed all decision-making in the hands of the PA and the PLO Executive Authority.
Such a decision is seen by many as an attempt to wrest control of the intifada from the street-level leadership. Whether the myriad of armed groups associated with Fatah will be brought back under the control of Arafat is still an open question.
Significantly, following the arrests in Ramallah, the relative acquiescence of Fatah Ramallah was counterposed to a statement issued by the Popular Army Battalions — an armed group active in the north of the West Bank and associated with Fatah — that opposed the arrests and lauded the military wing of the PFLP.
Strategic dilemma
While popular, events since the assassination have once again raised the question of the efficacy of such actions by small, armed groups against the Israeli state.
The pattern of this intifada was settled on very early: daily mass demonstrations on the edges of Palestinian towns confronted the Israeli military; the death toll grew as Israeli troops began a shoot-to-kill policy against demonstrators; various resistance factions began taking up arms in hit-and-run operations against Israeli troops and settlers; Israel in turn rapidly progressed to using helicopter gunships and tanks against the civilian population.
The military escalation raised a strategic dilemma for intifada activists: support for armed Palestinian actions was widespread, borne in a deep sense of frustration that people could not just sit by idly and wait for the next funeral.
But the ramifications of such an armed-struggle approach became apparent around the beginning of this year. Mass participation in street demonstrations began to drop, except for funeral marches and the traditional Friday demonstrations.
The majority of Palestinians attempted to get on with their lives, circumventing Israeli restrictions on movement as much as possible and trying to survive in the precarious economic situation.
Public support for continuing the intifada has remained high, but this intifada is largely understood as continuing armed actions, with the population-at-large sitting by as spectators.
The PA's negotiations strategy has compounded this dilemma. The negotiations are conducted by individuals behind closed doors. There are no attempts to formulate and discuss demands or solicit public support and no consideration is given to backing these demands with mass involvement.
In this sense, the negotiations strategy and the armed-struggle strategy are flip sides of the same coin — both view the Palestinian masses as spectators to a process beyond their control.
But it is those masses, reinvigorated to bean active part of the struggle, who are surely the key to ending the impasse.