Palestinian Leader Facing Challengers

When hundreds of Palestinians rioted on the streets of this city last week, in protest over the Palestinian Authority’s arrest of a leading Islamic militant, Yasser Arafat asked Israel for permission to send in additional Palestinian troops.

But the conditions that Israel imposed--the men had to travel without their weapons--were so humiliating to Arafat that he declined, according to Palestinian officials.

Without reinforcements, Arafat’s security forces managed to put down violent demonstrations two days in a row, but Jenin was left a tense tinderbox and the Palestinian Authority president’s dilemma was sketched in bold.

It is a familiar but increasingly balancing act: While Arafat attempts to appease U.S. and international demands that he crack down on terrorism, he must also keep domestic opposition at bay.

Meanwhile Israel, by bombing Palestinian police stations and assassinating militants, further complicates Arafat’s task.

“We are on the sword’s edge,” said Jenin’s Gov. Zuhair Manasreh, one of several local leaders attempting to restore calm.

The Jenin riots illustrate the growing internal strife that threatens Arafat’s control and undermines his ability to enforce a cease-fire.

Arafat is being hit by domestic pressure from at least three fronts: the Islamists, who oppose all negotiation with Israel and rebel at any arrest of their members; younger, hardened street leaders who command the intifada and insist that the fight against Israeli occupation continue; and, more recently, an emerging faction of moderate Palestinians who want Arafat to change direction and find a way to end their nation’s bloody stalemate with Israel.

No one expects a Palestinian to attempt to oust Arafat, but the inveterate former guerrilla commander and now president of the 7-year-old Palestinian Authority is suddenly forced to weigh real threats to his very legitimacy, Palestinian analysts say.

Israel is working overtime to cast him as a dinosaurian terrorist unworthy of recognition, and openly looks to the post-Arafat era. Internally, Arafat is battling the decline of his popularity and especially the decimated popularity of his Fatah movement.

Islamic groups now share power with Fatah militants in many West Bank and Gazan streets. Taken together, the radical Hamas movement and Islamic Jihad, for the first time, have overtaken Fatah in terms of public support, according to pollster Khalil Shikaki, who has been monitoring the decline of Fatah and the Palestinian Authority since the start of the current intifada nearly 14 months ago.

The Jenin riots were especially alarming. Islamic militants and other supporters of the detained man, Mahmoud Tawalbi, stoned a dilapidated and overcrowded police station, torched cars and shot off automatic weapons. That was Wednesday; a similar, slightly less fiery demonstration erupted Thursday and again Friday.

It was the worst Palestinian-on-Palestinian violence since police killed three men in the Gaza Strip a month ago.

Tawalbi was the Islamic Jihad’s top military man here and a significant force in attacks against Israelis, Palestinian security sources said. He was on Israel’s 10 most-wanted list, implicated by Israeli authorities in numerous terror attacks that killed at least three Israelis. Jenin has been the home base for many of the suicide bombers who attacked Israel this year.

Manasreh conceded that the arrest was largely a public relations gesture but said it also served to demonstrate Palestinian willingness to fulfill promises to the U.S. and Europe. He insisted Tawalbi was arrested not at Israel’s request but because he refused to obey Arafat’s cease-fire orders.

Tawalbi had to be spirited out of Jenin to a jail in nearby Nablus, in part to deflect local outrage and in part because Jenin’s prison was destroyed by invading Israeli forces last month. Rumors that Arafat’s West Bank security chief, Col. Jibril Rajoub--often accused of doing Israel’s bidding--had struck a deal with the Israelis over the arrest further stoked the rioters.

One thing seems certain: Because Israel has Jenin under siege, it would have been next to impossible for Palestinian Authority security forces to move Tawalbi without Israeli acquiescence.

“Some say [Arafat] is wrong to do this,” Manasreh said in an interview. “A small group even says he is a traitor. It’s a serious problem. . . . We have to convince our people to respect the decisions of our leadership.”

Seated under a glorious lavender bougainvillea tree on the front lawn of the official governor’s compound, Manasreh said Israel was doing all the wrong things and making it increasingly difficult for Arafat to arrest people and stop shooting attacks on Israelis.

Each time Israel invades another Palestinian town or hunts and executes Palestinian activists or tightens its stranglehold on towns and villages, he said, support for those who attack Israel grows.

Across the street from where Manasreh sat were the ruins of Jenin’s police headquarters and 250-bed jail. The 60-year-old building was constructed during the British Mandate and served as a workplace for about 500 people. Israeli forces occupied parts of Jenin last month as punishment for the assassination of an Israeli Cabinet minister and blew up the headquarters. Jenin’s police forces have had to spread out to smaller satellite offices.

“If [the Israelis] want to be a real partner in ending the occupation, we can be their partner in ending the violence,” the 58-year-old governor said. “But if they think being a partner is us being their police arm and terrifying our own population, then they are wrong. That does not bring peace.”

Israeli officials maintain that Arafat could make arrests and stop violence if he chose to do so, and they defend their army’s strong-arm tactics as self-defense against possible Palestinian attack. The government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon welcomed the arrest of Tawalbi, but said it worried that he, like other suspects, will be freed quickly.

In downtown Jenin, along the storefronts of a chaotic marketplace selling Arabic sweets, coffee and cheap shoes, the mood remained tense last week. The demonstrators had marched along these streets, which lead to the main surviving police station, a dank warren of offices overcrowded now with agents displaced by the Israeli attack.

One shopkeeper, a vendor of plastic garbage bags and paper plates who identified himself as Abu Hamed, said it was a particularly dire time for Arafat to be making arrests, given that Israeli tanks continue to menace Jenin’s outskirts.

“People know it’s an Israeli job,” he said of the arrest of Tawalbi. “But if it relieves some of the pressure, then let him be arrested.”

Hamed, standing under a poster of Saddam Hussein and another of two Palestinian gunmen who recently shot up the downtown of an Israeli city, also said he was confident that any arrests would be temporary measures and did not signal a broader crackdown.

“The Palestinian Authority won’t go that far,” he said.

Arafat is eager to be in Washington’s good graces by associating himself with the so-called global war on terrorism. And some Palestinians anticipate that the Bush administration is about to embark on a serious Middle East peace policy, so Arafat needs to be in a favorable position. President Bush’s refusal to shake his hand at the United Nations last week, a humiliating gesture to Arafat, was based in part on Washington’s perception that Arafat has not done enough to rein in militants.

But given the pressures mounting on him, it will be a perilous feat to enforce a cease-fire and control the street without a political process as a counterbalance, international officials say. He has quieted Jenin for now, but without political gains to show toward the Palestinian fight for independence, he will not be able to restrain the forces of opposition.

Yet Sharon continues to refuse to resume negotiations with the Palestinians and is in no mood to grant any concession that his own hard-line constituency would see as a reward for violence.

“Arafat very much wants to climb down from the tree but never in a way that the other side will style as surrender or capitulation,” said a Western diplomat who follows Palestinian affairs closely. “He would like to end the violence, but only in exchange for a meaningful political reengagement. Otherwise, why do it? To be Sharon’s cop?”