Arafat Takes on Challenge in Wild Streets of Nablus : Mideast: PLO chief must deal with vigilantes as Israel cedes West Bank city. Wealthy backers expected to help.

No tougher challenge awaits Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in the West Bank than this ancient, violent city, once a bastion of armed resistance to Israel’s military occupation, now a jungle of street gangs and lawlessness.

On Monday night, the last Israeli troops were expected to pull out of Nablus and officially hand it over to the Palestinian police. Nablus, leader of the intifada against Israeli rule that erupted in the West Bank in 1987 and paved the way for Israel’s negotiations with Arafat, is both a prize and a curse for the Palestine Liberation Organization chairman.

Prize, because some of the West Bank’s wealthiest and most powerful families live here. They have traditionally provided much of the merchant class and political leadership of the Palestinian people. They are likely to be important builders of the future Palestinian state.

Curse, because the merchant class went into eclipse during the intifada, replaced by the likes of Ahmad Tabouk, intifada hero turned street vigilante, a man who specializes in killing and maiming Palestinians.

Tabouk, leader of the armed militia group Fatah Hawks, and men like him have been ruling Nablus for months. All of Nablus is waiting to see how Arafat will handle Tabouk, his followers and the eight other armed militias prowling Nablus.

“The first step for the authorities is to arrest all the people making problems,” said Amin Makboul, who belongs to Fatah, the largest PLO faction, and is a Fatah Higher Committee member for the northern West Bank. “It is what the people expect.”

Well, not all the people.

Tabouk has gained almost legendary stature among the poor of the casbah, his home turf. They regard him as a Robin Hood, a poor man brave enough to attack even members of wealthy and powerful Nablus families if he believes them guilty of collaborating with the Israelis, drug dealing or committing “moral” offenses.

Israel Radio reported one night last week that Tabouk had been killed in a gunfight with a powerful Nablus family. The next morning, hundreds of his supporters poured into the casbah streets, surrounding the uninjured Tabouk and following him on an impromptu march into downtown.

The crowd members ululated in joy as Tabouk and his men fired their weapons to celebrate his health.

But to the merchant class and the old families, Tabouk embodies the breakdown of Palestinian society. He is the sad and dangerous result, Palestinians who fear him say, of decades of military occupation and years of intifada.

Thousands of young men like Tabouk who were heroes during the intifada now pose a threat to the society that Arafat is trying to rebuild. They are unemployed, uneducated and frustrated to find themselves suddenly marginalized. Re-integrating them into Palestinian society may be Arafat’s most difficult task.

Tabouk and the Hawks have enthusiastically filled the power vacuum that grew after Israel and the PLO signed their framework peace accord in September 1993.

In Nablus, Israeli soldiers disappeared first from the casbah, then from most of the city’s streets. There was no police force, no authority to impose law and order.

The Hawks began to stalk alleged miscreants.

Insisting that they were acting in the name of Arafat, they settled squabbles with the other militias by engaging in running street battles. But they came to specialize in gunning men down in broad daylight.

They shoot lesser offenders--drug users or men accused of committing “moral” crimes--in the legs. They kill people who they believe have provided the Israeli army with information that has led to the deaths of wanted Palestinians.

“Because we have no Palestinian judicial system, there’s a lack of security,” Tabouk said in an interview. “There is no law, there is no order. So we are the balance that brings law and order and justice. We are the judge and we are the jury.”

Tabouk said he is willing to relinquish that role as soon as the governing Palestinian Authority arrives here with its 1,200-strong security force.

In fact, he is looking forward to joining that force, he said.

“When the sulta comes,” he said, referring to the Palestinian Authority, “there will be law here. It won’t be chaos, like today. We will be on the side of the sulta.”

Arafat’s dilemma is whether to incorporate men such as Tabouk into his security force--or to jail them.

In Janin, a West Bank city where the Palestinian Authority took control last month, it did both. It arrested and jailed for nine-year prison terms two Black Panthers, another armed group, for kidnapping two Israeli border police officers who were subsequently released unharmed.

The authority then accepted the “surrender” of about 90 Panthers, who turned in their weapons and were accepted as police cadets.

Ghazi Jabali, the chief of civil police in the Gaza Strip, points to Janin as a model.

He said he believes that the Palestinian Authority will integrate Tabouk and Nablus’ other armed men into its security forces.

“To a certain degree, he will be incorporated into the police,” Jabali said in a telephone interview. “He will not resist the sulta, and the sulta will help him become a dutiful citizen.”

Jabali refused to confirm whether Tabouk is already on the Palestinian Authority’s payroll.

But Tabouk, he said, “is not as bad as people say.”

Across the West Bank, there are thousands of men who, like Tabouk, threw themselves into the intifada when it erupted in December 1987 and have led violent lives ever since.

In 1987, Tabouk was a 24-year-old house painter from a poor family, living in the crumbling casbah. Amjad abu Rabiegh, his lieutenant, was 16.

In 1988, both joined the Black Panthers, a militant underground unit connected to Fatah.

The Panthers attacked Israeli soldiers and went after Palestinians suspected of collaborating with the Israelis. The Nablus Panthers were finally crushed by the Israelis--most of the group’s leaders were killed in shootouts with troops.

The rest, such as Tabouk and Rabiegh, were sentenced to long terms in military prisons.

“I’ve killed eight men,” Rabiegh said, sitting beside Tabouk. “I killed six during the intifada, and for that I was sentenced to six life sentences plus 80 years. I’ve killed two since I was released from prison in the prisoner exchange in 1994.”

Rabiegh and Tabouk speak impassively of the men they have killed and maimed. They put the number they have knee-capped at 29.

“When we see a bad person in the streets, we deal with him,” said Tabouk, a slight, soft-spoken man with a fifth-grade education. “I never regretted shooting anyone. I wasn’t acting as a bandit--I was acting in the service of the nation.”

Tabouk and Rabiegh said they attack only Palestinians now, because the Israeli-Palestinian accord forbids them to attack Israelis and they honor that accord.

Asked whether he fears the arrival of the Palestinian Authority, Tabouk said he welcomes it.

“Sure, we got used to a certain way of life,” he said. “I can never see myself giving up my gun. But I will abide by the orders of the sulta and be a policeman.”

Tabouk insisted that Arafat will never jail him.

“We know we have a role somehow,” he said, “to help build this nation.”

Tabouk said he worries more about Arafat forming alliances with the wealthy and forgetting about the work that the foot soldiers--most of them poor men from the cities and refugee camps--did during the intifada. But such is often the way of revolutions, he said, shrugging.

“There are a large number of people who have lost their rights and haven’t received any compensation for the sacrifices they have made,” he said. “They are still sitting around with nothing to do. It comes down to this: If you have somebody to back you, you get compensation. We have many fighters who got nothing.”

At the Center for Palestine Studies, a private Nablus think tank, businessman Said Kanan and academic Khalil Shikaki said Tabouk’s prediction is probably not far from wrong.

Both men said they look forward to Arafat’s extension of authority in a city they regard as a jungle of lawlessness.

“They are all cowards here in this city,” said Shikaki, a political scientist at An-Najah National University who conducts opinion polls among Palestinians. “What we have had here for months is infighting among Fatah commanders, and nobody has put a stop to it.”

But bringing thousands of such men into the security forces requires society paying a price, Shikaki said, noting: “The price for people like Tabouk being incorporated into the security apparatus is that it will become larger and larger, at the expense of the man on the street and at the expense of the democratic agenda. Democracy is getting pushed down to the bottom of our agenda.”

Summer Assad of The Times’ Jerusalem Bureau contributed to this report.

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