Intifada Gives Palestinians Pause

You won’t hear it from the man with his head wrapped in a black-checked kaffiyeh who Friday torched a model of a Jewish settlement to celebrate the first anniversary of the Palestinian uprising.

Nor will you hear it from the fiery politicians stirring the crowds after Friday prayers, marching in yet another funeral and proclaiming that the intifada lives on.

But one year after Palestinians launched a new, angry fight against Israeli occupation, there is a debate within their society about whether it is time to change course and whether serious strategic mistakes have done more harm than good to the cause of nationhood.

Still confined largely to intellectual circles, the discussion calls on officials to reassess the way the intifada is being conducted--especially in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States, which have reshaped the attention paid and the sympathy given to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

It was a year ago Friday that then-opposition leader Ariel Sharon, the right-wing hawk who is now Israel’s prime minister, led a contingent of troops and police onto the compound that contains the Al Aqsa mosque, one of Islam’s holiest shrines. The plateau inside Jerusalem’s ancient walled city is also revered by Jews as the Temple Mount, holiest site in Judaism, and Sharon sought to assert Israeli authority over it.

Sharon’s visit sparked an outburst of shouting, followed by a clash between Israeli police and outraged Palestinians. The next day, a Friday, Palestinian youths, still enraged, emerged from prayers at Al Aqsa and hurled stones and iron bars at Israeli police, who fought back as some of the debris rained on Jewish worshipers below.

In the melee that ensued, four Palestinians were killed, becoming the first “martyrs” in a long, blood-soaked battle that destroyed a once-promising peace process, radicalized people on both sides of the ethnic and religious divide and devastated the Israeli and especially the Palestinian economies.

To date, about 800 people have been killed, more than three-quarters of them Palestinians. Thousands more have been injured. Despite a fledgling cease-fire, three more Palestinians, including a 10-year-old boy, were killed by Israeli fire in the West Bank on Friday, and another three were killed Friday night at the volatile Rafah border town in the Gaza Strip. A Palestinian in the West Bank city of Hebron was killed when a bomb he apparently was preparing exploded.

From Rock Throwing to Suicide Bombings

Early in the intifada, mass demonstrations by rock-throwing Palestinian youths, repressed with heavy force by Israeli troops, were replaced by Palestinian gunmen who targeted soldiers and Jewish settlers on West Bank and Gaza roads. Later, the conflict was characterized by a campaign of suicide bombings by Palestinian extremists and Israel’s use of helicopter gunships and F-16 warplanes to bombard Palestinian positions and kill militants. Israel also imposed crippling blockades on many Palestinian cities and villages.

In addition to the lives ruined and jobs lost, the Palestinian critics cite another undesired consequence: The popularity of Islamic fundamentalists has soared in the last year in the West Bank and Gaza.

Almost all Palestinians agree on the goal--independence--but the critics question whether these tactics, and the corrupt leadership under Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, can achieve it.

Saleh Abdul-Jawad, a political scientist at the West Bank’s Birzeit University and a member of a politically prominent family, has spoken out in lectures and, most recently and interestingly, at a forum sponsored by the ruling Palestinian Authority.

He maintains that allowing the intifada to become as violent as it did was a damning mistake.

“The explosion was inevitable,” he said in an interview at his home in the West Bank city of Ramallah, “but by using arms, the amount of violence was too much, and we fell into the Israeli trap [of escalation]. Instead of sending messages that we were still interested in peace, we sent the totally wrong messages.”

Flaws Seen in the Palestinian Campaign

Echoing Abdul-Jawad is Khalil Shikaki, a leading Palestinian pollster and political analyst. If a key goal of the intifada was to improve Arafat’s negotiating position, then that was achieved in the early weeks, he said. A more accommodating Israeli government was still in power and real progress in negotiations could have been made at that point. Instead, fighting escalated and Sharon’s hard-line Israeli government took over in March.

Another fundamental flaw: Palestinians agreed neither on strategy nor objectives. Nationalists wanted to end Israeli occupation and attack only Israeli soldiers and settlers within the West Bank and Gaza. The Islamists wanted the destruction of Israel and attacked Israeli civilians inside the Jewish state’s borders.

“The intifada was shooting itself in the foot and destroying all chances of, at any time, reaching accommodation with the Israelis,” Shikaki said. “The intifada had certain achievements, but also many very serious challenges that it failed to address. In the past, we had the luxury to allow these big failures, but not after Sept. 11.”

Shikaki and Abdul-Jawad spoke at the same forum last week. Their comments drew jeers from the audience, and several people walked out. Shikaki said Friday that he was disappointed that the debate has not taken on meaningful public dimensions, in part because many senior Palestinian officials do not want to end the fighting.

Few Palestinians are willing to admit publicly that they are fed up with the intifada. Instead, they feel that they must keep up the public spirit of determination.

But critics received a boost from the top security official in the West Bank, Col. Jibril Rajoub, who said the attacks on the U.S. marked a turning point that obliges Palestinian self-examination to avoid international isolation.

“It is not wrong to rethink tactical moves, as long as it revolves around the clear goal of ending the occupation,” Rajoub said in an interview with the Reuters news agency that was published Friday in the Palestinian Al Ayyam newspaper. Recent world developments “demand that the Palestinians not mix terrorism with legitimate means of struggle,” he said.

Voices of Moderation Exist on Both Sides

And Sari Nusseibeh, the respected president of Al Quds University in East Jerusalem, ended a self-imposed semi-exile from public politics by publishing in Israeli and Palestinian newspapers an entreaty to the two sides to compromise for peace.

“Can . . . the voice of reason, on both sides, be raised to deliver us from this tragic situation?” Nusseibeh wrote. “Or will we leave our shared destiny to opportunists--those bent on wanton destruction--and others?”

There are voices of moderation on the Israeli side too. Ron Pundak, an academic who was one of the architects of the 1993 Oslo peace accords, told the Jerusalem Post on Friday that he still believes Israelis and Palestinians will overcome their hate and find a diplomatic solution to decades of conflict.

But overall, both peoples have been radicalized in the last year. Israelis moved firmly to the right, declared Arafat an enemy and voted overwhelmingly for Sharon. Palestinians voice strong support for suicide bombings.

In the West Bank city of Nablus this week, students at An Najah University put on an art exhibit that glorified the August bombing of an Israeli pizza parlor, in which 16 people, including several children, were killed. Arafat, mindful of the new global sensitivity to terrorism, ordered the exhibit shut down.

It was the voices of defiance that were heard most loudly Friday, during the marking of the intifada’s anniversary.

Marwan Barghouti, the firebrand commander of West Bank militias, told a crowd in Ramallah’s central plaza that the second year of the uprising will see the end of Israeli occupation.

“The intifada has proved that it remains strong and will continue the struggle,” Barghouti said as demonstrators waved flags and chanted, “Intifada until liberty!”

But the celebrations in Ramallah were not well-attended and attracted surprisingly few gunmen--Arafat having ordered restraint, wanting to show Washington that he can control the violence and is worthy of joining the Bush administration’s alliance against terrorism.

Hakam Jadallah, dressed in a blue button-down shirt and crisp khakis, sat to one side watching the events. “You can tell people are a little depressed with the situation and disappointed,” said the 26-year-old employee of Jawal, the Palestinian cellular telephone company. “Everybody is looking for a solution, but everybody is worried we may have sacrificed for nothing.”