West Bank Refugees Get New Voices

This sprawling maze of concrete and corrugated tin, the largest refugee camp in the West Bank and vanguard of Palestinian armed resistance to Israeli military rule, boasts a new honor: Balata, despised home of the disenfranchised, has produced three members of the newly elected Palestinian self-governing council.

Not only is Balata home to a surprising number of winning candidates, but two were underfunded underdogs given little chance by political pundits; two were the youngest elected to the council; and one is among only five women elected to the 88-member body.

The victory of their native sons and daughter has made Balatans, normally a grim group, almost giddy.

At the homes of Kamel Afghani, Husam Khader and Dalal Salamah, the stream of well-wishers is endless, enthusiastic.

The trio is expected to represent not only Balata but all refugees on a council that promises to give President Yasser Arafat more trouble than the Palestine National Council--the Palestinian parliament in exile--ever has.

No one expects a revolution against Arafat’s leadership when he convenes the new council later this month. Master of Palestinian politics for three decades, Arafat will be backed on the council by 51 loyalists who captured seats after he named them to official slates of the Fatah faction that he founded. Eight other council members who ran as independents are considered Fatah loyalists.

But for the first time, Arafat will have to contend with opponents with a power base that is independent of his. They are eager to satisfy a constituency with a long list of demands, a constituency that gets to vote again in four years.

Besides the independents, “There are . . . within Fatah, about 20 who might constitute a Fatah rebels’ pool,” said political analyst Khalil Shikaki, who does public opinion polling of Palestinians for a think tank in the West Bank city of Nablus. The opposition “will have a very strong voice in the debate. They will make the debate interesting.”

The candidates from Balata vow to keep up their camp’s tradition of dissent. They express reservations about amending the Palestinian charter that calls for Israel’s destruction. They pledge to push Arafat to make tougher demands when he starts the next round of negotiations with Israel in May. And they say they will fight to ensure that Palestinian society is not patterned after the Arab world’s autocratic regimes.

Both Afghani and Khader played prominent roles in the intifada, the Palestinian uprising that burst from the refugee camps of the Gaza Strip and West Bank in 1987 and succeeded in making Israel rethink the cost of its occupation.

Afghani led Fatah factions for all Nablus-area refugee camps during the intifada. Arafat knocked his name and Khader’s off the Fatah slate for the Nablus district because the two were seen as troublemakers too openly critical of Arafat’s leadership.

Salamah, at 30 the youngest person elected to the council, is a different story. A veteran activist from Palestinian women’s committees, she was the lone woman on Fatah’s Nablus slate. But she carried her own handicaps into the campaign.

In a deeply traditional society, she was one of only a handful of women who dared to seek office. Wearing the head scarf favored by observant Muslim women, she ventured into rural villages on her own and campaigned hard, speaking to separate audiences of men and women.

In interviews last week, Khader and Salamah said their years of fighting Israelis and observing Israeli democracy have affected them deeply and molded them into people unlikely to be easily silenced by the autocratic Arafat.

They expressed confidence that they will find enough like-minded council members to make a difference in disputes with Arafat over policy.

“This is a generation that grew up in the school of reality,” Khader said. “It is the generation schooled in Israeli prisons, and it is unique in two ways: It was produced by struggle and affected by the democratic practice of the Israelis.”

That seems a strange comment coming from one who so doggedly challenged Israel’s military rule over the territories it captured in the 1967 Middle East War.

Khader was shot twice in clashes with Israeli troops and spent more than a year in prison before being deported in 1988 to southern Lebanon. He returned only in April 1994, after Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed their framework peace accord.

Now Khader speaks not of fighting Israelis but of fighting those he calls “the Stone Age people”--Palestinians who followed Arafat to the territories from Tunisian exile.

He frets that they will be willing to settle for limited self-government rather than push for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He worries that they will forget the plight of Palestinian refugees from 1948, when Israel was declared a state, and from 1967.

“We have been given the opportunity to observe the Israeli experience,” he said. “It is difficult for my generation to submit blindly to authority. We are the opposite of the PLO leadership that lived for so many years outside the homeland. They grew up with Arab regimes and dictatorships. They have no will to make decisions.”

The first test for such rhetoric, political analyst Shikaki said, will come when the council bargains with Arafat over its role.

The Israeli-PLO accord, which laid out the council’s responsibilities, left open whether it will initiate legislation or whether it will be limited to approving or vetoing measures initiated by its Executive Authority, which Arafat will head. The Executive Authority will include council members and outside Arafat appointees.

“The first battle will be over the rules governing the relationship of the council to the Executive Authority,” Shikaki said. “If Arafat wins that, he will win most of the battles to come.”

In her simple concrete-block home, Salamah promises that she will not be beholden to Arafat when she takes her seat in the council, saying: “It is the people whom I represent now. The people want democracy. We need democracy.”

She is more respectful than Khader of the leadership that came from outside the territories, saying she believes that there must be “continuity” between outsiders and insiders.

But Salamah acknowledges: “Maybe the different structures of the PLO did not fulfill this need for democracy that our people have. Our role together is to implement democracy in all aspects of life now. We do not want decisions to be imposed from the top.”