West Bank Towns Under Arafat's ControlWest Bank Towns Under Arafat's ControlReprinted from Middle East International,No.516, 5 January, 1996
Largely on cue, the turn of the year in the occupied territories witnessed Israel's military redeployment from Nablus (11 December), Qalqilya ( 16 December Bethlehem (21 December) and Ramallah (28 December). On the heels of the departing Israeli troops came around 3,500 Palestinian police and intelligence agents and, of course, their mentor and president, Yasir Arafat.
The PLO leader addressed mass rallies in each of the liberated areas". He gave out the same message everywhere he landed (usually by courtesy of an Egyptian army helicopter with an Israeli air escort), urging "national unity", calling on "all Palestinians" to participate in the elections on 20 January, promising the 5,()00 or so Palestinian prisoners still interned in Israeli jails that "the date of their freedom is soon", and likening the peace process to "a tunnel" at the end of which stand "the minarets, walls and churches of Jerusalem".
Palestinians' response to both the redeployment and the message was decidedly mixed. In Nablus, Palestinian youths stoned the departing soldiers and burned the Israeli flag. In Ramallah, they partied into the night, while families of exinternees milled (and mulled) over the vacated interrogation cells, torture "cupboards" and detention areas of the city's notorious military administration compound. And, in Qalqilya, a Land Defense Committee was formed to protest Israel's ongoing confiscation of nearly 400 acres of Palestinian land to build a fence that will separate the town from the old Green Line, as well as many of its residents from their livelihoods inside Israel.
But the highlight was Bethlehem where religious and nationalist sentiment became so mixed that Arafat could describe the town as the "birthplace of the Palestinian, Jesus Christ". The PLO leader was guest of honour at the city's traditional midnight Christmas mass, a right afforded historically to Bethlehem's temporal rulers. The current Greek Orthodox Patriarch, Diodorus 1, even compared Arafat to the 7th century Caliph Omar ibn al-Khatab, who had received the "keys of Jerusalem" after pledging to protect Christians therein.
Most Palestinians took the analogy with a large measure of salt. Arafat, however, took it very seriously indeed. On 24 December, an editor at the al-Quds newspaper, Maher al-Alami, was summoned to Jericho by Jibril Rajub, head of the PNA's West Bank Preventive Security Force. His crime was to put the Patriarch's "comparison" on page eight rather than on page one of the newspaper. After receiving a personal reprimand from Arafat in Ramallah, Alami was eventually released on 30 December. But on 2 January, a researcher for Israeli human rights group Betselem, Basim Id, was arrested by Palestinian security forces north of Jerusalem.
The same security emphasis was evident in Nablus. Virtually the first act of the PNA police there-and with Arafat's blessing was to round up 25 members of the "unofficial" Fatah Hawks militia headed by Ahmad Tabuk. Tabuk eventually surrendered himself after the PNA laid siege to his home in Nablus' old city for seven hours. He - along with five of his followers - were taken to Nablus Central Prison to await trial. "We are reviewing the complaints against them," said the PNA's police chief in the north of the West Bank, Ala Husni. "Should violations be proven, the law will take its course."
Arafat, it appears, will no more brook any independent base, whether military or media, in the West Bank then he has done in Gaza and Jericho.
On 25 December, the newly appointed head of the Palestinian Central Elections Commission (CEC), Mahmud Abbas, announced that 700 Palestinians had registered their candidacy for the Palestinian council elections, with 402 in the West Bank and 298 in Gaza. Of these, 75 per cent are running as independents, with only Arafat's Fatah fielding candidates in each of the 16 electoral boundaries. Two are standing for the presidency-Arafat, and the head of Ramallah-based charity In'ash al-Usra, Samiha Khalil, also a PNA member; 1,013,000 out of 1.2 million Palestinians eligible to vote had registered their names by 30 December, says the CEC.
On 29 December, Arafat requested- and got Israeli permission for - an enlargement of the council from 83 to 88 members, with five new seats being allocated for Gaza town, Khan Yunis, Hebron and Jerusalem. The PLO leader also unilaterally extended the registration deadline for voters to 5 January. This would have meant a campaigning period of only 13 days, as opposed to the 22 days specified in the Taba agreement signed in Washington last September.
These changes were issued neither by the CEC nor with any consultation with official electoral monitoring bodies such as the European Union's Electoral Unit (which has provided around 300 out of a total of 1,000 international observers for the elections). They were "presidential decrees", and earned the stern rebuke of the EU as wholly "arbitrary uses of power to redesign the electoral architecture".
In a press statement released on I January, the head of the EU Electoral Unit, Carl Lidbom, condemned the contraction of the campaigning period as detrimental to "independent candidates and the opposition parties". According to the PNA's own electoral law, "the total time allocated to each party or candidate" in the Palestinians ' news and current affairs media should 'match roughly the number of candidates".
Apparently stung by the criticism, Arafat quickly changed his mind. The day after Lidbom's statement, Mahmud Abbas announced that campaigning could in fact begin immediately, in effect extending the official campaigning period back up to 18 days. Lidbom welcomed the decision. "That takes care of the most important part of my criticism," he said. "I said they had to stop changing the regulations all the time ."
The idea that "equal media access" could be granted to 700 plus candidates in less than two weeks was fanciful. Nor has it happened. A survey carried out between 15-25 December by the French NGO, Reporteurs sans Frontieres, records rather a "very strong imbalance", with Palestinian TV giving over an hour's coverage to Arafat's candidacy and zero to Samiha Khalil's, and 71 minutes to Fatah's campaign compared with 17 seconds for the Palestine People's party. The 19 other PLO and newly registered parties have yet to receive any TV airtime.
The other changes similarly appear to have less to do with ensuring the elections' "democratic character" than with political expediency. Palestinian sources say that Arafat extended the deadline for registering candidates to 31 December mainly to woo Hamas to run in elections, despite the Islamists' formal decision to boycott after talks with the PNA in Cairo on 21 December.
The extension of voter registration also appears to have a political motive, confirming fears that actual Palestinian registration is nowhere as high as the PNA claim it to be. The Israeli "Oslo" monitoring group, Peace Watch, says the number of Palestinian voters is 830,400 rather than the million plus stated by the CEC.
The confusion over figures is especially acute in the crucial constituency of Jerusalem. Thus the CEC says 75,000 out of a potential Jerusalem Palestinian electorate of 110,000 had registered by 30 December. But the Israeli interior ministry -which, under Taba, has the right to inspect the PNA's electoral roll-says that of 91,148 names submitted by the PNA over the last month, around 30,000 were "double entries" and 12,500 were disqualified because the Palestinians registered possessed Israeli passports. This means that only 49,915 Palestinians in Jerusalem - less than half of its potential electorate-have bothered to register.
Both the PNA and Israel have their own reasons for wanting to massage the figures in Jerusalem, with "final status" talks on the city due to start almost immediately after the elections in May 1996. But Arafat's extension of the registration deadline as well as his repeated call to Palestinians to vote to "defend the Arab character of Jerusalem" suggest a Palestinian anxiety that the turn-out will be low rather than high. If so, the reason is mainly pragmatic.
Many Palestinians remain convinced (despite PNA assurances) that to register for the elections will endanger their residency rights in Jerusalem and, with them, their claim to Israeli benefits such as national insurance and unemployment benefit. But there is also a political dimension, summed up by a former Fatah activist who spoke to MEI on condition of anonymity. "For years the PLO did nothing to assert a Palestinian presence on the ground in East Jerusalem other than with rhetoric. Given the uncertain future of the city, many Palestinians have decided to vote with their feet."