Uneasy marriagesUneasy marriagesReprinted from Middle East International No.515, 15 December, 1996
"Going smoothly", is how Shimon Peres described Israel 's current redeployment in the West Bank after his first meeting as prime minister with Yasir Arafat in Gaza on 8 December. Superficially, this is so. Two days later-and slap on schedule- 150 Palestinian police arrived in Tulkaram, making the West Bank town of around 30,000 inhabitants the third (after Jericho and Jenin) to be formally transferred to Palestinian control. And during the night of 11 December Israeli troops evacuated their posts in Nablus ahead of schedule.
Peres reaffirmed Israel's pledge to release 1,000 prisoners ahead of the Palestinian elections on 20 January. He also said that Israel would issue 9,500 more work permits to bring the number of Palestinians working inside the Green Line to around 45,000. This, too, is welcome, especially if it marks a change from Yitzhak Rabin's previous vision of an absolute demographic separation between the two peoples. But it remains small rain for an economic desert. Even with the extra permits, there are still fewer than 20,000 Gazans employed in Israel; and there is an under-employment rate of between 50-60 per cent in Gaza's refugee camps.
But the bonhomie projected by the Peres-Arafat tete a fete cannot disguise the precarious nature of the arrangements that govern the redeployment, especially concerning the crucial areas of Israel's "internal security" and Palestinian "public order". Recent events in "liberated" Jenin and "occupied" Nablus augur less smoothness than rupture.
On 30 November, Israel sealed off autonomous Jenin for 24 hours, emphasizing just how separate (and containable) are the West Bank areas Israel has so far granted to the Palestine National Authority (PNA). The cause was an Israeli-engineered debacle, the motive of which remains murky but deeply ominous.
The day before, two Israeli border police (dressed "half in uniform, half in plain clothes", say eyewitnesses) raided a crowded cafe in Qabatiya, outside Jenin but within the PNA's autonomous area. Their quarry was Zahir Zaharna, a Fatah activist "wanted", say the Israelis, for killing collaborators. But this really is to stretch a point.
Zaharna had not only been wanted for homicide; he had been arrested and served time for it. In prison until 1994, he had been released on condition that he see out the rest of his sentence in Jericho. He should not have been in Qabatiya, but he was not in any way a threat to Israel's security, either national or personal. The attempted arrest-coming so soon after the Jenin redeployment-was thus a massive Israeli provocation. The Palestinians responded in kind.
With Zaharna holed up in the cafe, two members of Fatah's (supposedly disbanded) militia, the Black Panthers, retaliated by abducting two Israeli soldiers and holding them hostage in Jenin's refugee camp. What followed was a tense ten hour stand-off in which Israel and PNA politicians and security personnel (as well as Arafat himself) mediated to get the hostages released, the closure lifted and the redeployment unfrozen.
The matter was eventually resolved with the handing of the soldiers into Israeli custody and the sentencing by the PNA's new Jenin security court of the two Panthers to nine years' imprisonment for "violating security arrangements made by the PNA". Zaharana was quietly rehoused in Jericho. The IDF expressed its satisfaction with the outcome by issuing a statement saying that "the redeployment would continue as planned".
Both parties publicly blamed "lack of proper coordination" as the reason for the imbroglio. But privately Israeli military sources have admitted that the Zaharna arrest was a "big screw-up", hinting at internal struggle within Israel's security establishment between those who want the redeployment to proceed painlessly and those who want it slowed, and possibly halted altogether. If it is this, it is an extremely dangerous game, and not just for Palestinians. On 30 November, two IDF reservists were wounded in an ambush west of Jenin. Six days later, a soldier and IDF doctor were injured by gunfire near the Eilon Moreh settlement in the West Bank. And on 9 December two settlers from Efrat were fired upon on a road south of Jerusalem. "I have no explanation for this phenomena" of armed attacks, says West Bank Deputy Police Commander Natan Kramarsky. He should take a look at Jenin.
But if Arafat's main worry in Jenin is rogue elements within Israel's security forces, in Nablus it is rogue elements within his own Fatah movement.
On 30 November, major confrontations between Palestinian youths and the IDF broke out in the city, leaving over 20 injured. A week later, similar clashes erupted, this time taking the life of 20-year old Palestinian, Talal Abu Issa. These street wars have been accompanied by a virtual breakdown of law and order in the city, with the IDF passive and the PNA still absent in lieu of the former's imminent redeployment. There are -say Palestinian sources -now "around nine" Fatah aligned militias competing to fill the vacuum, dispensing a particularly wild brand of justice.
On 24 November, four Palestinians from Nablus' Balata refugee camp were "punished" (kneecapped) for "dealing in weapons and drugs" by a group calling itself the Black Panthers. Five days later, another Balatan, Sabi Ali Aisha, was "executed" for collaboration by the Fatah Hawks. This last group-and particularly its leader, Ahmad Tarbuk-is rapidly assuming the profile of "demons" in the Israeli press but of local heroes amongst the street culture of the Palestinian poor.
Tarbuk is an ex-prison leaader who, until March, was a member of Arafat's Pleventive Security Force (PSF) in Nablus. He fell out with the then PSF chief in the city, Issam Abu Bakr, who himself was deposed when Arafat "reorganized" Fatah in Nablus in July. Abu Bakr now heads his own militia, whose main activity appears to be the kidnapping and kneecapping of members of Tarbuk's group.
There is a theory-widespread in the Israeli media and among Nablus' middle classes-that Arafat is orchestrating the militias as a means of imposing his rule on the city. But it is unlikely that the PLO leader wants the kind of disorder they are currently wreaking. Nor can he be overly pleased about certain of their targets.
In August, the home of Arafat's appointed mayor for Nablus, Ghassan Shak'a, was fired on by a group of Fatah activists after one of them had been arrested and beaten by the city's municipal police. Last year, the offices of the Arab Insurance Company (owned by one of Nablus' biggest families, the Abd al- Hadis) were trashed by Fatah-aligned youths after a dispute, say sources, over a "compensation claim".
These are precisely the families Arafat needs to woo if he is to get their loyalty and, more precisely, their money for the autonomy. His reticence with the militias is that he also needs the support of the constituencies they represent - Fatah activists from the camps, villages and Nablus' poorer districts - if Fatah's non- ideological brand of nationalism is to hold together "all the Palestinian classes" in the autonomy as effectively as it held them in the occupation. "The last thing Arafat wants for the interim period is any kind of class struggle," says Nablus-based academic, Said Kan'an. To forestall this, Arafat will need a coalition in Nablus akin to that he has cultivated in Gaza-an uneasy marriage between the money of Palestine's big families and the guns of groups like the Hawks.