TIME EUROPE
October 23, 2000, Vol. 156 No. 17
The Many Minds of Arafat
Page One | Two | Three | Four
As he watches the fires burn brighter, Arafat may be afraid to speak out. He stands to lose enormous prestige and authority if he tries
to quell the uprising and fails. For many of the men and boys
who took to the streets on Sept. 28, the "Liberation Battle"
has taken on a terrible momentum. Each stone-throwing demonstration
leads to a death that leads to a funeral that stokes passions
higher.
If that had been all, it might have subsided once anger exhausted
itself. But then the Israeli Arabs, fed up over years of discrimination,
joined in frightening neighbor-to-neighbor mayhem within the
confines of Israel itself. And Israel went from assertive
riot control with rubber bullets to aggressive military operations
using live ammunition, helicopter gunships, tanks and rockets.
The ratio of dead-more than 100 Palestinians to half a dozen
Israelis-underlined the imbalance of forces.
And to the basic intifadeh-style riots, the Tanzim added a new dimension
of its own, leading a full-fledged shooting war on Israelis
at night. The militias claim they are behind most of the gun
battles at Israeli checkpoints and shoot-ups on Jewish settlements.
Barghouti shows up at Palestinian funerals to make inflammatory
speeches, his deep suntan attesting to his constant presence
at clashes. The insistent calls on Sheikh's cell phone, announced
with the electronic ring of Jingle Bells, keeps him in instant
touch with the field. Both men are far closer to the action
than Arafat and have their own power bases to service. Barghouti
has gloated quite publicly about his hard-nosed intentions.
"The intifadeh has to continue," he said as Palestinians hurled
stones on the day Barak had ordered them to stop. "This will
destroy the peace process. This will open the gate to more
escalation."
The exact circumstances of each attack are the work of local leaders.
In Bethlehem, Tanzim boss Ali Ahmed proudly tells how he ordered
a group of five gunmen on a mission last week. "This evening
it's Gilo," he said. "Go and shoot." The idea was to spread
panic in the middle-class Jerusalem suburb with random nighttime
gunfire. He recalls watching the red tracer lines stream toward
the Jewish neighborhood as his men fired off 150 rounds. "It
felt so good to be hitting them," Ahmed says.
It takes no orders at all to inspire the impressionable Palestinian
children who make their way to the front lines. Boys like
Imad, a nine-year-old throwing stones at Israeli soldiers
as he trots home from school, are egged on by nonstop TV footage played against patriotic songs. Imad proudly claims he averages three hours a day in the clashes. "I'm not afraid," he says.
"What is death? I'd be on the television, and my friends would be carrying me."
The Palestinians are feeding on their own violence, on the frenzy of the crowds,
on the ferocity of the Israelis, on the daily funerals of
fresh martyrs. And Arafat is nearly as much the target of
their wrath as Barak. Their message to their leader is simple:
We don't want your peace process anymore. It hasn't brought
us what we hoped for. It takes guns, not peace talks, to win.
As a Palestinian youth tearing down Joseph's Tomb last week
told a reporter: "This peace? We don't want it. We will fight
until we have liberated all the land."
That leaves Arafat sitting in his spartan office in Gaza amid the turmoil,
partly ambivalent, partly impotent. The face he shows to those
around him suggests a man in his element. Assesses Qais Abdul
Karim, a faction leader who has seen Arafat three times since
the trouble began: "He's once again the fighter we knew before."
But the face he turns to foreign diplomats urging him to turn
off the violence seems that of a troubled man looking for
a way to climb down. Early last week, says a close aide to
Arafat, he warned his top security officials that the international
sympathy so savagely earned could easily switch off. "I don't
want anybody to make a mistake that would cost us all we've
achieved," he reportedly said. And then came the televised
murders of the two Israeli soldiers.
So, what is it that Arafat or the Palestinians have "achieved"? By
his lights, he has won some transient glory as the indomitable
defender of Muslim rights and has gathered newfound support
for himself among Palestinians and Middle East Arabs alike.
Right now ordinary Palestinians seem further than ever from
realizing their legitimate aspirations. Boys in the streets
talk wildly of "war" and "victory," but war is suicide when
one side has stones and the other Stingers, and the victory
they crave is total ownership of a land they can only share.
Between them, the Palestinians and the Israelis have killed the fragile trust each side had so grudgingly come to place in the other as a partner for peace. The two leaders now harbor such mutual animosity, they may find it hard to be in the same room. Yet they have agreed to sit down at a makeup summit to see if they can at least agree to cease hostilities. It will be long after that before we know if Arafat's gamble proves unconscionably foolhardy or a path back-not to peace but to the compromises necessary to achieve it.
With reporting by Lisa Beyer/New York, William Dowell/United Nations, J.F.O McAllister/London, Matt Rees and Jamil Hamad/Jerusalem and Douglas Waller/Washington
Page One | Two | Three | Four
This edition's table of contents
TIME Europe home
More stories from TIME Europe and related links
E-mail us at mail@timeatlantic.com
|
|
|
