Candle in the night

Yasser Arafat threw down a cease-fire and Ariel Sharon, reluctantly, was compelled to pick it up, writes Graham Usher from Jerusalem and, below, from Jenin
"I have issued strong and clear instructions for a full commitment to a cease-fire," announced Yasser Arafat on Monday. On Tuesday he reiterated the order applied to his security forces "on all fronts, even when under fire from Israeli forces" in Palestinian Authority areas. "I hope the Israeli government will reply to this message of peace and take the decision to cease fire too," he added.
He wished the Israeli people well on the occasion the Jewish New Year. Finally, he expressed his "readiness to be part of the international alliance for ending terrorism against unarmed innocent civilians."
It was classic Arafat. It was also deadly serious. And it elicited an Israeli response. On Tuesday night Ariel Sharon authorised his army to halt all offensive actions in the occupied territories while his army chief of staff, Shaul Mofaz, ordered a pull-back of Israeli troops from PA controlled Jenin and Jericho. Arafat's was an offer even Sharon could not refuse.
Unlike his cease-fire declaration in June -- extracted on pain of political ostracism by European, UN and US diplomats -- Arafat's call this time was real, born of recognition of the new political realities in the region thrown up by the attacks on America.
One reality was vulnerability. The Palestinian leader is convinced Israel has been exploiting the moral outrage caused by the strikes on New York and Washington -- and the international antipathy aroused by televised images of Palestinians "celebrating" the carnage -- to raise the military offensive against the Palestinian Authority.
In the week since the airliners ploughed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center the Israeli army has killed 28 Palestinians, wounded 200 and mounted 18 incursions into PA territories in the West Bank and Gaza, with the Jenin invasion lasting seven days.
On Saturday the army launched air, sea and land attacks throughout the Gaza Strip, a barrage that led to the killing of four Palestinians, including 14- year old Imad Zaroub. On Sunday, Israeli armour and helicopters -- allegedly in pursuit of a "wanted" Hamas cell -- penetrated deep into Ramallah. They were met with fierce Palestinian resistance, leaving an Israeli soldier and two Palestinians dead, including 70-year old Saadiya Bakri, killed from a heart attack when a missile struck her home.
Elsewhere Israel pounded Beit Jala, Hebron, Nablus, Jenin, Beit Sahour, Rafah and Ramallah, killing four more Palestinians, three of them civilians, one of them an ambulance driver.
Unlike the Jenin and Jericho incursions, the sheer speed and scale of these assaults lifted the blanket of silence that had covered the occupied territories in the wake of the attacks on America. Britain, France and Russia all condemned them. Even in Washington there were squeaks of protest.
This was the second reality. Surrounded by no less than 30 international envoys Arafat issued his cease-fire call to prevent the blanket again from descending and keep the plight of his people visible to the world's eye.
Arafat believes it is in his supreme interest for the PA to be included within the international coalition the US is assembling against "terrorism" rather than outside it and alongside such "rogues" as Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and, now, the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
Immediately after the attacks on America, Arafat convened an emergency meeting of the Palestinian leadership in Gaza. He warned he would be utterly ruthless against any Palestinian party -- even to the point of risking internal Palestinian violence -- that offered "pretexts" for what he believes is Sharon's campaign of destruction of the PA.
By "pretexts" he meant suicide operations inside Israel or any other actions against Israeli civilians. "Do not force me to arrest you," he reportedly told representatives from Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza on Monday.
The third reality driving Arafat to a cease-fire was political. The attacks on America have given him the barest glimmer of an opportunity to further his basic objective -- to drive a wedge between America and Israel and, through this, unravel Sharon's coalition government from within.
Last Friday, George Bush urged Sharon to authorise a meeting between Arafat and Israel's Foreign Minister Shimon Peres as a "first step" to clinching a cease-fire in the West Bank and Gaza.
Bush's sudden "re-engagement" in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had little to do with the mounting Palestinian casualties. It had everything to do with neutralising their impact on America's efforts to get Arab and Islamic covenant for a strike on Afghanistan. Sharon, initially, refused the trade and cancelled the meeting with Arafat.
"If you ask me whether Israel will make concessions so that one Arab country or another will take part in the [the US led] coalition, the answer is an emphatic no," he told Israel's Jerusalem Post newspaper on Monday.
Twenty- four hours later Sharon was less emphatic and made the "concession" of ending his army's offensive against the Palestinians.
Ostensibly this was in response to the Palestinian cease-fire. In fact, it was almost certainly under pressure from the Americans and criticism from Peres, who, over the weekend, made public his discontent over Sharon's decision to ban the meeting with Arafat. "I do not understand why Yasser Arafat has suddenly become Osama Bin Laden when the prime minister had [originally] given me a green light to meet with him," he snapped on Saturday.
For Arafat these fissures and Israel's subsequent decision to "suspend" the assault on the PA were cause and effect of his cease-fire gambit. At the very least they showed Sharon's desperate attempts to impress on the world that Arafat was "our Bin Laden" simply would not hold. Neither Europe nor Peres could buy the comparison and Bush was reportedly outraged by it.
For Palestinians in their besieged towns, camps and villages such gains may seem the smallest of lights. Hamas and Jihad have already dismissed the cease-fire, though probably more for domestic politics than out of any decision to breach it. Certain of Arafat's Fatah cadre will also be uneasy with a "message of peace" that could be construed as surrender.
This is unwise. In the night that is rapidly falling on the region the Palestinians will need all the candles they can hold.
In the shadow of the WTC
There were no "celebrations" in the West Bank town of Jenin after the strikes on America. Nor were there mass outpourings of grief. At best there was a kind of empathy. Jenin too has been burying its dead.
Palestinians are still reeling from a week's worth of Israeli assaults on the town: the most sustained incursion of any Palestinian Authority controlled area in the year old Intifada.
It began on 11 September, when Israeli tanks, armour and helicopters invaded the green hills girdling Jenin and gouged out craters on every road to it. The next day the tanks entered the town proper, blasting every PA barracks and checkpoint that stood in their way. Then they shelled Jenin camp, home to 13,600 Palestinian refugees. Finally -- on 14 September -- they ripped out new trenches before "withdrawing" to the hills.
There the tanks still rest under a canopy of cypress trees and between red-tiled Palestinian houses, lobbing the occasional shell at anything that moves. The army gave notice should anyone approach the tanks he or she risks breaching the "kill zone": a 50-metre buffer where Israeli soldiers have orders to shoot on sight. None of the 14 displaced Palestinian families have so far returned.
Detritus is everywhere. The PA Governor House is a felled slag of pulverised concrete and disgorged filing cabinets, covered in a film of dust. A school has a rash of bullet marks across one of its walls. A car is sliced in two, "run over by a tank," say Palestinians. They point to thick tracks that plough up black earth on fields and impress mud on roads.
Israelis call these incursions "surgical strikes" intended to wrinkle out "terrorists" and those who dispatch and give them haven. But there was nothing clinical about the deaths of six Palestinians and injury to 70 others in Jenin camp this week.
One of the slain was 24-year old Mohamed Abu Haija, a "wanted" Hamas activist. A missile fired from a helicopter struck him on 12 September, a hit so precise "collaborators" must have supplied his location, Palestinians in Jenin camp say. No doubt the location of the collaborators is being determined in the same place right now.
Two more Hamas men -- Iyad Al- Masri, 18, and Ibrahim Al-Fayed, 23 -- were shot dead while trying to rescue a third during a ferocious gun battle around a girls' school. Fakhri Sleet, 32, and his sister in law, Raja Feihat, died when a tank shell plunged into their home. Palestinians shrug their shoulders why they were hit.
"There were a lot of people around their neighbourhood when the fighting started," says one. "But they were not firing. They were running".
The sixth Palestinian dead was 33 year old Khatab Jabareen. Wired up with explosives, he apparently threw himself before a 60-tonne M60 Israeli tank. The US- made leviathan crushed him with the same ease as it ploughed through the thin barricades of rock, tyres and rubbish containers Palestinians had thrown up around the town.
But what was the purpose? Clutching cups of sweet coffee Palestinians in the camp have different views. All agree Israel is using the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks as "cover" for upping the military ante against the uprising.
"Sharon wants us to give up the Intifada," says one. "But that's not going to happen. We're not afraid of a reoccupation of Jenin. We're occupied already".
Another detects a military design. "There's not a PA security office left in Jenin," he says. "They've all been destroyed. Sharon wants to drain us of ammunition. That's why the army is digging trenches everywhere. Once we're totally disarmed the army will move into the camp." Another says it reminds him of the war in Lebanon.
It certainly looks and smells like the siege of Beirut. On street corners women purify buckets of water in the midday sun. Windows are being sandbagged in every shelter. In the camp's single clinic, frantic phone calls are being made to check that staples of flour, oil and milk will soon be delivered. After a week of total siege stocks are running low. Everywhere there is a sense of vacancy, of hunkering down, waiting. There are few people on the streets. Jenin is a town of 40,000.
Above all, Beirut is invoked by the dozens of young militiamen, from all Palestinian factions and none, who now effectively run Jenin. ("The PA doesn't really function here anymore. So someone has to take control," says one camp resident).
During the day, they doze in garages, exhausted by the night's fighting. At dusk they trawl the town in cars without plates to check if the Israelis have moved locations. At night they take up combat positions on the edge of the camp, some just 50 metres from the nearest tank.
Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders, some fighters are no more than 17. But they are old enough to know there is nothing to be had from the occupation and nothing to lose except their lives.
Out of such destruction -- human and material -- suicide bombers hardly need to be "dispatched". They are bred. But it is Israel that has sown the seed and will reap the harvest. And if George Bush does to Afghanistan what Israel has done to Jenin, so will America.
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