A Fiery Abbas Gets a Lift From Militants

Mahmoud Abbas, the leading candidate for the presidency of the Palestinian Authority in next Sunday’s election, appears to be winning over a key constituency: Palestinian militants and their supporters.

Abbas got a tumultuous welcome Saturday in the Rafah refugee camp, one of the most violence-plagued corners of the Gaza Strip throughout the more than four years of the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In an incongruous but increasingly familiar scenario, black-clad militants armed with assault rifles hoisted the candidate, clad in his usual sober business suit, onto their shoulders and paraded him before a cheering crowd. So many supporters jammed the rundown wedding hall where he spoke that Abbas had to climb out a window when it was time to leave.

The 69-year-old frontrunner, commonly known as Abu Mazen, had been accorded a similar reception two days earlier in the restive Jenin refugee camp, where a troupe of gunmen led by one of the West Bank’s most wanted men, Zakariya Zubeidi, demonstrated their enthusiasm for his candidacy by firing deafening bursts into the air.

Although the militants’ support is boosting Abbas’ popular standing and helping to set the stage for a decisive mandate that observers believe he must win if he is to effectively exercise power, the candidate is also walking a tightrope.

As one of the first Palestinian politicians to publicly urge a halt to the armed uprising against Israel, his credentials as a moderate are solid. But images of Abbas being embraced by gunmen, as well as the fiery stump speeches he has been delivering, are causing stirrings of unease on the Israeli side.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has given senior lieutenants strict orders to refrain from commenting on the Palestinian electoral campaign. Israel wishes to neither undermine Abbas by overtly expressing support for him nor engage in unseemly mudslinging against a not-yet-elected leader.

Abbas has not retreated from his position that the Palestinians should look to nonviolent means of achieving their goal of statehood. But in speech after speech, he has taken an unyielding political line: Israel must withdraw from all of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, territory seized in a 1967 war.

He sounded that call again Saturday in Rafah, a war-battered slum of about 80,000 people only yards from the Egyptian border that has been the scene of unrelenting fighting between Palestinian militants and Israeli troops. “We will not stop until we achieve victory through the establishment of a Palestinian state, the dream that began with your brother, the martyred Yasser Arafat,” Abbas told the crowd.

Together with praise for Arafat, who died Nov. 11 in a French military hospital, Abbas paid warm tribute to Rafah, whose name has become, for many Palestinians, synonymous with the struggle against Israel. The area is honeycombed with weapons-smuggling tunnels that run under the frontier, and the Israeli army regularly stages large-scale raids aimed at rooting them out.

“Rafah continues to suffer oppression and the humiliation of occupation, but it will not be defeated and will not be humiliated,” he said to thunderous applause. He denounced Israeli tactics such as home demolitions, assassinations of militant leaders and military incursions into densely populated refugee camps such as Rafah.

Abbas’ campaign swing through Gaza, which began Friday, has been far more auspicious than his first visit to the seaside strip in the wake of Arafat’s death. When he and his entourage entered a mourning tent set up for the late leader, wild gunfire broke out, killing a bodyguard, and Abbas had to be hustled away by aides.

The shooting was blamed on rival elements within the Palestine Liberation Organization, which was led for decades by Arafat and is now headed by Abbas. In the wake of Arafat’s death, there were fears of an all-out eruption of factional fighting within his Fatah movement, but those concerns have eased for the time being.

The gunmen lionizing Abbas are for the most part affiliated with the Martyr Yasser Arafat Brigade, formerly known as the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. The militia is loosely tied to Fatah and has carried out many violent attacks on Israelis. In Gaza, however, the group is less influential than Hamas, which has an enormous loyal following.

Hamas is boycotting next Sunday’s vote but has indicated that it will honor the results.

Despite unleashing crowd-pleasing anti-Israel rhetoric as he campaigns, Abbas has quietly distanced himself from Arafat’s views on some key issues. The late leader insistently demanded the “right of return” for the descendants of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled or were driven from their homes before and during Israel’s war of independence.

Israel flatly refuses to absorb significant numbers of refugees, saying it would be demographically swamped and lose its Jewish character.

Abbas, whose own family fled the town of Safat in what is now northern Israel in 1948, has refrained from demanding that the refugees be allowed to reclaim homes and land inside the Jewish state. Instead, he has said only that a fair solution to the refugee problem must be found.

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Special correspondent Rushdie abu Alouf contributed to this report from Gaza City.