Palestinian Leaders Walk Tightrope as New Intifada Threatens to Erupt

At Bethlehem University’s student union office, youth leaders from Yasser Arafat’s mainstream Fatah organization spray-painted sheets to look like Israeli and American flags, then set off with hundreds of angry protesters to burn the banners at an Israeli checkpoint and hurl rocks at soldiers.

The Israelis fired back with tear gas and concussion grenades until, as the tension began to crest, Palestinian security chief Jibril Rajoub ordered his agents to pull the demonstrators back.

For nine days, scenes like this have been repeated in the West Bank towns of Bethlehem, Hebron and Ramallah. Young activists from Fatah--Palestinian Authority President Arafat’s political organization--have been at the forefront of violent clashes with Israeli soldiers, and officials of the Palestinian Authority have reined them in from the brink of bloodshed.

As the Palestinians gear up for large-scale Land Day demonstrations throughout the West Bank on Sunday, their leaders appear to be walking a tightrope.

They are under pressure from Palestinian youths and activists from the seven-year intifada, or uprising against Israeli rule, to fight back against Israel’s decision to build a new Jewish neighborhood in disputed East Jerusalem.

Palestinian Authority officials and old-line Fatah leaders, particularly those who returned with Arafat from exile in 1994, believe that they will lose credibility among their people if they do not allow the protests to proceed. They fear “losing control of the street” to extremist opposition groups such as Hamas.

But they also risk losing control of the demonstrations and facing all-out war with Israel.

Marwan Barghouti, the 37-year-old Fatah chief for the West Bank, said he and other leaders are having trouble convincing even their own ranks of the value of continuing the peace process with Israel.

He said Arafat could not stop the demonstrations now no matter how much he may want to.

“If he were to stop the demonstrations without stopping the bulldozers, I think no one would listen to Mr. Arafat,” Barghouti said.

Ziad abu Amr, an independent member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, agreed.

“I don’t think Fatah is radicalizing the street. I think the street is radicalizing Fatah,” Abu Amr said.

Most Israelis scorn this idea, arguing that with his huge Fatah organization, tens of thousands of police officers and intelligence agents throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Arafat can control anything.

They charge that Arafat is wielding these “staged” demonstrations like a club in Israel’s face, proving that he has not abandoned the option of violence.

When Fatah leaders assert that “settlements are terrorism”--and that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired the first shot in the latest round of political and street fighting with the construction in East Jerusalem--Israelis dismiss this as mere sloganeering.

The misunderstanding is mutual.

Barghouti said he believes that the pictures of Palestinians clashing with Israeli soldiers that flash across Israeli television screens each night strengthen the Israeli “peace camp,” or left-of-center opposition, because they show Israelis that Netanyahu is destroying the peace process.

In reality, the demonstrations help move Israeli public opinion to the right.

Israelis tend to close ranks when they are under attack. Since a Hamas suicide bomber blew up a Tel Aviv cafe a week ago, killing three women and wounding 47 other people, even the liberal newspapers have adopted the right-wing government’s point of view.

A Maariv newspaper poll published Friday showed that while 78% of Israelis still support the peace process, 89% hold Arafat directly or indirectly responsible for the bombing.

In this climate of mistrust and hardening public opinion, both sides are bracing for violence Sunday.

Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip have decided to join Palestinian residents of Israel in commemorating Land Day, which marks a day in 1976 when six Arab villagers in Israel were shot by border police during a protest over expropriated land.

Wrapping up a two-day effort to rescue the crumbling peace process, U.S. Middle East envoy Dennis B. Ross said that violence must cease before Israel and the Palestinians can resume negotiations.

“One thing is clear. It is essential to reestablish calm as a way to move forward the process. We cannot see a continuation of violence,” Ross said after separate talks with Palestinian and Israeli leaders.

Ross said he will report back to President Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, adding that he believes both sides are still interested resuming peace talks.

As Ross spoke, however, clashes continued in Hebron and Ramallah.

The Israeli army chief of staff, Gen. Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, has warned the Palestinians against escalating the violence Sunday and Palestinian police against firing on Israeli soldiers, as they did during riots last September over Israel’s opening of a tunnel door in Jerusalem’s Old City.

“An intifada with guns is not an intifada; it’s war,” Shahak said.

Some Palestinians apparently want “war.”

Barghouti said the top Fatah leaders still believe in the Israeli-Palestinian peace accords and think that bombings and gun battles hinder the Palestinian quest for an independent state.

Several Fatah members, however, described a tense meeting of 400 West Bank Fatah leaders and activists in Beit Sahur last Sunday in which the leadership’s view was widely challenged.

“For the first time in a conference, I heard the new voices calling for a return to armed struggle,” Barghouti said in an interview in Ramallah.

Kamal Hmeid, the head of Fatah for Bethlehem, said there were “mutual accusations of responsibility for allowing Israel to violate the peace process” and blasts from grass-roots activists “who accused the authority and negotiators for failing to explain the feelings of the Palestinian people to the Israelis.”

Barghouti made a speech asking the members to distinguish between the peace accords, which he said are good, and the policy of the current Israeli government to gut them.

Security chief Rajoub, who sat up front with Barghouti, opposed the use of violence, arguing that a clash could quickly escalate out of control.

“He knows the risks of losing control, but at the same time he couldn’t offer an option,” Hmeid said.

In the end, Fatah issued a 16-point declaration calling on Arafat to cease talks and security cooperation with Netanyahu, to call on Palestinians to confront settlements by all legal means and to demonstrate on Land Day.

Rami, a Fatah student leader who attended the meeting, said that grass-roots activists proposed that if the first measures fail, Fatah should resort to “armed struggle.”

There was wide support for this, he insisted, and the leaders up front remained quiet in the face of what seemed to Rami to be a decision.

“Even the most powerful leader can’t face off against his people,’ said Rami, who asked that his last name not be used.

Barghouti denied that any such decision was taken.

And yet the possibility of a military clash was on everyone’s mind.

In preparation for Sunday, Israel enforced a closure on the West Bank, fortifying settlements and readying the tanks they brought out during last September’s clashes, when at least 75 people died.

Israeli military chiefs said they would try to avoid confrontation but were prepared for anything.

Hussam Khader, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council who belongs to Fatah but is seen as independent, said he fears that clashes will break out and spark another cycle of violence.

He has warned Israel’s deputy military governor in the region that the religious shrine of Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus is likely to be a target of demonstrators, as it was last September.

“I told them this is a popular activity, stronger than Arafat,” Khader said.

Khader was one of three Palestinian leaders who helped evacuate more than 40 Israeli soldiers trapped by Palestinian demonstrators inside Joseph’s Tomb last September.

Khader spoke to the angry crowd and got them to back off so he and the others could enter to free the Israelis.

Asked if he would be willing to play a similar role this time, Khader said: “I don’t know. . . . It is very hard for me to say what my role will be if the peace process is still not going anywhere and I see my Palestinian brothers killed in front of me. Maybe I will pick up a Kalashnikov and use it in their defense.”