Peace Accord Begets Hawks Instead of Doves

Until he responded to the screams for help early Friday morning, Khalil Aram never thought of his 19-year-old son as a killer or a hero. On the eve of a promised peace, Aram never dreamed his son would choose war.

His son was simply Basam, his eldest, who labored alongside him in Zvi Fixler’s fields at the Jewish settlement near their squalid Palestinian refugee camp in the heart of the embattled Gaza Strip.

Then, early Friday, when his father had stepped away, Basam pulled out a knife. He was quickly joined by two other Palestinian youths, and together they savagely attacked their Jewish employer.

Khalil heard Fixler’s screams. The frail, 48-year-old Palestinian ran to help the Jew, but then collapsed in shock and pain: His own son had stabbed him in the knee.

Khalil could only watch as the three boys stole Fixler’s machine gun, left him for dead and fled to join an escalating Palestinian rebellion.

Fixler survived but is in critical condition. The attack was a stark illustration of the spiraling violence in the occupied lands that peace negotiations are meant to set free. The ongoing bloodshed has left many fearful and doubtful about the future in the territories, from which Israel has promised to begin withdrawing its forces by Monday.

Within hours of the attack on Fixler, three Palestinians were shot to death in a car as they drove home from work through a village west of Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. An anonymous caller told Israeli radio that the attack was to avenge the recent killings of two other Israeli settlers near Hebron. The shooting touched off Palestinian rioting in several West Bank villages.

On Friday, handwritten posters pasted by masked men on the walls of Gaza Strip mosques during weekly prayers attributed the attack on Fixler to a new, unified armed group that includes several Palestinian factions, one of which--PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat’s Fatah--is now trying to negotiate peace with Israel. The Fatah Hawks is the paramilitary group that Basam Aram told friends he was planning to join Friday at Fixler’s farm. Indeed, that assault was the youth’s initiation into the group.

The posters similarly declared that the attack at Fixler’s settlement near the sea was revenge for the recent killings by Israeli forces of two Palestinian armed leaders, one from the fundamentalist Islamic Resistance Movement’s military wing and the other a Fatah Hawk, Ahmed abu Rish, who had turned himself and his weapon in to Israeli authorities two weeks before he was gunned down.

Echoing the views of more than half a dozen armed Hawks interviewed Thursday night in Gaza, the posters vowed that the new Palestinian guerrilla force, which calls itself the Revenge Group of the National Union, will continue to kill Jewish settlers and Israeli soldiers throughout Gaza “until the last Israeli soldier withdraws from our lands.”

“The Israelis are still hunting me. They are still trying to kill me,” said Ismail abu Khomsan, a Hawk who said the night before the attack that neither he nor his fellow fighters will surrender their weapons until a Palestinian security force takes over from the Israelis in Gaza.

Khomsan acknowledged that the Hawks’ decision appears to run counter to their orders. Arafat and other Fatah leaders, he said, have told the Hawks to surrender their weapons in advance of the Israeli withdrawal--the first phase of the peace accord signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization in Washington three months ago.

The Hawks’ position illustrated the widespread dissatisfaction among Gazans with their own leadership as the PLO’s negotiations with the Israelis have failed to show real progress toward peace in the lands targeted for liberation.

Undercover Israeli army units continue to pursue the Fatah Hawks along with members of other armed Palestinian groups every day, Khomsan said, despite public promises that PLO leaders won from the Israeli army to treat the Hawks as free men.

“Our leaders told us already they have an agreement with Israeli authorities that they will stop hunting us,” Khomsan said. “But we will obey them only under certain conditions. If they continue running after us, we will continue these military operations against them.

“I will believe in this peace only after the withdrawal of the last Israeli soldier from the Gaza Strip.”

It is a popular position in a land where, just days before the scheduled pullout, Israeli patrols have intensified. Israeli soldiers continue to open fire on Palestinian demonstrators, who continue to pelt them with rocks.

Throughout Gaza, the only visible signs of change are for the worse. And the Aram family is living proof of the growing malaise.

Until Friday’s dawn attack on Fixler’s farm, Khalil Aram later recalled from his hospital bed, the father never suspected the sentiments of his son. “I never knew he could do this,” Khalil said, his voice raspy after surgery. “He was just a laborer, just like me.”

Not even Basam’s best friends believed him when he approached them in tears the night before he tried to stab Fixler to death.

“He came crying, and he told us: ‘Please forgive me, but wish me luck. Tomorrow I will join the Hawks,’ ” recalled a close friend of Basam’s who asked not to be named. He related the story outside the Khan Yunis hospital where Khalil still lay in pain.

“We didn’t believe him,” the friend continued. “But Basam insisted. He had tears in his eyes and he said: ‘Really, during these times, I want only to be a wanted man. I want only to be a Hawk.’ And still we didn’t believe him--until this morning.”

Basam’s younger brother sat silently, listening to the story, his face blank, his eyes wide. He had not been present when his brother confessed to his friends on the eve of the attack.

Does he admire his brother even after he stabbed their father? “Yes, of course,” the boy said without hesitation. “Now he is a hero of Palestine.”