A Murder at Morning

Monday, Oct. 29, 2001 By MATT REES/JERUSALEM

Article Tools

Reprints

One of the last letters Mustafa Zibri wrote from his office in the West Bank city of Ramallah was to fellow leaders of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. "Unless we contribute militarily to the intifadeh," the P.F.L.P. chief wrote, "we will be marginalized and nobody will mention our name." Soon after, Zibri died in a helicopter rocket attack by Israel, which blamed him for a string of car bombs in the yearlong Palestinian uprising called the Aqsa intifadeh. Once the Muslim mourning period for Zibri ended last week, the P.F.L.P.'s military wing took its revenge in an unprecedented attack that has horrified Israelis. Now the P.F.L.P. is on everyone's lips.

P.F.L.P. gunmen stalked a corridor of the Jerusalem Hyatt hotel early last Wednesday morning. There they killed Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavam Ze'evi with two bullets--one through the eye, the other in the neck. It was the first time in the country's history that Palestinians had assassinated an Israeli Cabinet minister. Ze'evi's enraged Cabinet colleagues accused Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat of encouraging attacks on Israelis and sent Israeli troops deep into Palestinian towns, bombarding the neighborhoods gunmen use as cover and killing six Palestinians, including an 11-year-old girl.

The Israelis gave Arafat an ultimatum: either hand over Ze'evi's killers to Israel (a politically indigestible option for Arafat) or be officially designated the head of "an entity supporting and sponsoring terror." Israel was threatening Arafat's Palestinian Authority with the Taliban treatment. In the murderous story of the intifadeh, the most dreadful chapter may be about to unfold.

The deaths of Ze'evi and Zibri illustrate how the intifadeh has taken those who were on the fringes of political credibility and made them symbols capable of rallying entire populations. Before the Aqsa intifadeh, Zibri's P.F.L.P., a faction of Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization, was a powerless joke in the West Bank, a has-been group that clung to its Marxist ideology and its naysaying on peace with Israel. Ze'evi was a marginal right-wing extremist who often advocated the "voluntary transfer" of Palestinians out of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In death, both have become, to their own sides, evidence of the other side's cruelty and irredeemability.

Ze'evi and Zibri had gained relevance even before their murders. When Ze'evi died, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, working to preserve his national unity government, was trying to persuade Ze'evi to withdraw his resignation, tendered two days before. Under Zibri's leadership, P.F.L.P. activists had begun to sit on intifadeh action committees in each Palestinian town alongside leaders of the radical Islamic groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which don't share the P.F.L.P.'s secular ideology but do share the desire to kill Israelis. Despite this activity, Zibri, as the P.F.L.P. leader, continued to sit on the executive committee of Arafat's P.L.O. and to draw P.L.O. money to fund his political budget.