Returning to the core

Israel is divided on the occupation, Palestinians are united in the resistance. Is this a turning point in the Intifada? Graham Usher writes from Balata refugee camp in Nablus
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict this week returned to its unvarnished core. On one side stood Israel, an occupying power but increasingly divided over whether the road ahead lies in deepening its colonial conquests in the West Bank and Gaza or in abandoning all or parts of them.
On the other fought an armed and increasingly united Palestinian resistance, slowly realising that its greatest strength is striking the occupation at its most visible and weakest sinews: the settlements and the checkpoints.
"Ariel Sharon has lost his way. The Palestinians have nothing left to lose," was the assessment of a Fatah leader in Nablus's Balata refugee camp.
The new dynamic was demonstrated in Gaza. On Monday, a guerrilla from Fatah's Al-Aqsa Brigades fired on a settler car near Gaza's Gush Qatif settlement, killing the driver. A troop of soldiers stormed the Palestinian, who threw grenades and killed two of them. He was shot dead by the others.
Twenty-four hours later, guerrillas from the same militia encircled an army checkpoint at Ein Ariq, a few kilometres west of Ramallah. In a barrage of fire they shot dead six soldiers before fleeing, undetected and unharmed, whence they came.
"It was one of our most successful operations because checkpoints are symbols of humiliation to the Palestinian people," said West Bank's young Fatah leader, Marwan Barghouti.
Israel's response to both attacks was typically ferocious. After the first, undercover squads, backed by tanks and helicopters, tried to penetrate Balata, in what Palestinians there describe as a new strategy aimed at dredging refugee camps of their armed defenders.
It did not succeed. For almost four hours the camp "as a camp" repulsed the invaders, but at a cost. Two Palestinians were killed, including 25-year-old Leila Katawi, shot by the army while standing on her roof.
The losses were greater in Gaza. F-16 warplanes dropped a 1,100lb bomb on a PA military intelligence building in Rafah while helicopters rocketed a Hamas information office in Jabalya refugee camp, killing three Palestinians, including three-year-old Inas Salah.
Other innocents were slaughtered near Rafah, after tanks fired on an armed infiltration into Gaza's tiny Morag settlement, killing one Palestinian.
According to testimony collected by Israel's B'tselem human rights organisation, three more Palestinians were killed 30 minutes after the raid. One corpse was found in a field 200m north of the settlement and two women, mother and daughter Maryam and Mona Bahabasa, were found dead in a bullet-ridden tin shack.
B'tselem also charged Palestinian ambulances were fired on as they attempted a rescue.
After the ambush on the checkpoint on Tuesday, the army resorted to even greater punishment, firing rockets at PA installations in Gaza, Ramallah (including one that landed metres away from Arafat's presidential offices) and Nablus, and killing 14 Palestinian policemen, five just outside Balata in what was seen by Palestinians as vengeance for the failed incursion the day before.
On Wednesday Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon convened an emergency meeting of his security cabinet, announcing a "new action plan in the war against terrorism." Asked what this might be, his spokesman, Ranaan Gissen, said Israel's onslaughts of the previous 48 hours "might be a small example of the kind of operations that would come to end the terror."
They would be small indeed. Sharon knows he has neither a majority in the coalition nor a consensus in Israel for his tried and failed military solutions.
Led by Likud leader-in-waiting Binyamin Netanyahu, the right is clamouring less to "pressure" the PA than to destroy it. It advocates, among other measures, the expulsion of Yasser Arafat, the "dismantling" of his "terrorist regime" and a full or temporary re-occupation of the PA areas so that the power of Israeli "deterrence" is restored in the minds of its colonial subjects.
On the left, the increasing cry is for a Lebanon-style solution to what is fast becoming a Lebanon-style war.
Last week the Council for Peace and Security, a renowned group of 1,000 former and reserve army officers, lent its voice to those in Israel's peace camp and Labor Party calling for Israel's unilateral withdrawal from all of Gaza and most of the West Bank. The Council says negotiations on a final status deal would then resume between two sovereign and mutually recognised states.
The Palestinian leadership's response to this growing unilateralist lobby in Israel has been mute. For now it is placing greater store on the UN Security Council, new "peace plans" germinating in the European Union, and Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Abdullah's suggestion that the Arabs offer full recognition of Israel in return for its full withdrawal to the 1967 lines.
But this is not the only Palestinian view. Hossam Khader is a Fatah leader and refugee activist in Balata. He has long championed the "nationalist current" within the Palestinian uprising (embodied by groups like the Al-Aqsa Brigades) against the tried and failed policies peddled by the Palestinians' "traditional" leadership. What does he think of those Israelis who advocate a unilateralist solution to the present confrontation?
"I think the Palestinians should grab it with both hands," he says. Nor are his reasons only to avoid a common future of "more deaths and more coffins" for the two peoples.
"It would be seen as a victory for the younger generation of Palestinian leaders," he says. "They would have achieved more in 16 months of the Intifada than the Oslo leadership achieved in seven years of negotiations."
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