Israel Jails Two Palestinian Nationalist Leaders

Israeli authorities jailed two prominent nationalist Palestinian leaders without trial Tuesday in an apparent attempt to force an end to anti-Israeli violence that has shaken Jerusalem for five weeks.

The Palestinians, Radwan abu Ayyash and Ziad abu Zayyad, are affiliated with the leading Fatah faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization. They are accused of inciting Palestinians to kill Israelis inside Israel as well as in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. The pair were ordered held for six months under an “administrative detention” order.

In Gaza, a third activist, physician Ahmed Yaziji, was also jailed for a year under a similar order.

There have been frequent knife attacks by Palestinians on police and civilians since the Oct. 8 police suppression of a riot in Jerusalem’s Old City, when 20 Palestinians were shot and killed by police.

In the latest in a series of street ambushes, a youth tried to knife a pair of police officers in the Old City on Tuesday. The officers were slightly injured, and the youth was captured. Shortly afterward, a group of youths set fire to a car on Saladin Street, the main shopping street for Arabs in East Jerusalem.

“Somehow, such acts must be stopped,” a military official said in explaining the detentions.

Both Abu Ayyash and Abu Zayyad had publicly campaigned for a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict based on the formation of an independent state for Palestinians now living under Israeli rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Each met frequently with Israeli peace groups and foreign visitors.

Israeli officials, sensitive to suggestions that the Palestinians were jailed for their political activities, insisted that the role of each in preparing inflammatory leaflets, distributing money for underground activities and maintaining contact with the Palestine Liberation Organization abroad prompted the arrests.

“The detentions were made exclusively for security reasons,” a military official said.

A Defense Ministry statement stressed that “the arrest is carried out . . . (because of) their both being senior members of the Fatah terrorist organization and their activities harming the security” of Israel and the occupied lands.

The jailing of prominent public leaders indirectly plays into a continuing diplomatic controversy. Israel is trying to reach a compromise with the United Nations over a U.N. effort to investigate the Oct. 8 riot and killings, while the PLO is pushing for the dispatch of a U.N. observer team to Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza.

Abu Zayyad, who is fluent in Hebrew, was a former editor of Al Fajr newspaper in Jerusalem, which is considered to be the mouthpiece of Fatah, headed by PLO chief Yasser Arafat. Until his arrest, Abu Zayyad edited Gesher, the only Arab newspaper published in Hebrew.

He was jailed for three months in 1976 for anti-Israeli activity and was banned from travel during 1986 and 1987.

Abu Ayyash operated a press service for journalists that issued identification cards to reporters to use on the West Bank and Gaza. He was banned from traveling abroad for seven years beginning in 1980 and in 1988 was jailed for six months without trial.

Neither was known as a street leader or organizer of confrontational protests. Last month, when a march down Saladin Street was planned in protest of the Old City killings, Abu Ayyash pulled out when word circulated that prominent leaders would be arrested if the march took place.