As the dominoes fall

In less than 48 hours, Israel assassinated a major leader in the PLO and reoccupied Beit Jala. For most Palestinians this means the Intifada is now war. Graham Usher reports from Beit Jala and Ramallah
A spray of bullets splashes across the road. People duck for cover. Some huddle in shop- fronts, others run for sanctuary in the King Hussein hospital. A rumour goes round that the Israeli army has entered the refugee camp. A white jeep races up the hill, a masked man on its back behind a mounted machine gun. People rise from the doorways and cheer.
It could be Beirut circa September 1982. It is Beit Jala, Tuesday 28 August and the latest turn in a curve of events in the Palestinian- Israeli conflict that has "opened the doors to a comprehensive war," according to an official statement by the Palestinian Authority on the same day.
It is of course Ariel Sharon's war, with each campaign following the other according to an inexorable logic aimed at destroying the Palestinian regime within the occupied territories and determining the new political, geographical and military realities for whatever comes after. The only snag in the plan was the jolt that sent the dominoes tumbling.
On 25 August two Palestinians crawled up the earth ramparts and cut through two lines of barbed wire of the Marganit army base that defends the Gush Qatif settlement bloc in the southern Gaza Strip. On reaching their prey, they opened up with Kalashnikovs and hand grenades, leaving three Israeli soldiers dead and seven wounded, one seriously.
One fighter, Amin Abu Khatib, 26, from Rafah, was killed in the crossfire. The other, Hisham Abu Jamus, 24, also from Rafah, managed to escape to the fence, where he was found and killed by Israeli soldiers several hours later.
One Israeli military source quoted in Israel's Haaretz newspaper on 26 August conceded the ambush represented "a new dimension in Palestinian operations," requiring "daring, co- ordination and intelligence gathering." A former Israeli cabinet minister likened the attack to Hizbullah ambushes in south Lebanon in the late 1990s, which in Israeli military argot is a compliment as much as an accusation.
The ambush was remarkable in other ways too. Claimed by the secular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Abu Khatib and Abu Jamus were actually Fatah men who prepared for their deaths with all the religious ceremony associated with Islamic mujahedin.
The apparent confusion reflects a growing unity of purpose among the Palestinian factions, embodied by such cross-factional militias as the Popular Resistance Committees in Gaza and bound by the common determination to get beyond ideological differences to a united armed resistance against the occupation.
The resistance resonated in the West Bank also. Later that night three Jewish settlers were killed by Palestinian fire near the Givat Zeev settlement on the recently declared "safe" Jerusalem to Tel Aviv highway and, on Sunday, an Israeli civilian was shot dead on Israel's border with the West Bank.
Israel met these blows with a barrage of violence. For the first time in three months, it dispatched F16s and helicopters to flatten police stations in Gaza and the West Bank town of Salfit and again rolled tanks into Rafah to flush out guerrillas. In all, a Palestinian police officer was killed and 21 were injured in the air raids.
But Sharon's real riposte was through his preferred arm of political assassination, in fact, the biggest political killing Israel has carried out since Israeli commandos mowed down PLO leader Abu Jihad in Tunis in May 1988.
At 11.15 Monday morning, Abu Ali Mustafa, secretary-general of the PLO's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), was working at his desk in his office on the top floor of a residential block in the suburbs of El-Bireh. Two rockets flew through his office windows, fired from Israeli helicopters hovering over Birzeit village some three to four kilometres away.
It took a full ten minutes for his guards to prise open the door to his room. "The heat and smoke were so intense," said one, apologetically. When they did get through, Mustafa was recognisable only by his clothes. "His head had been torn from his neck."
The significance of Israel's 69th assassination of the Intifada was immediate to all. Although it has seen its fortunes slump in recent years, the PFLP remains the most important faction in the PLO after Arafat's Fatah movement. The association between the two leaders was made clear by the hit and was thoroughly intended by the government that ordered it. "The distance between the assassination of Mustafa and the assassination of Arafat is very small," said Israel's Minister of "Arab Affairs" Saleh Tarif.
PLO Executive Committee member Yasser Abed Rabbo was blunter. "It is an unparalleled Israeli crime against the Palestinians," he said. "Abu Ali Mustafa is one of the five major leaders who founded the PLO 30 years ago. His assassination is a crime and Israel will pay a heavy price."
The magnitude of the crime was sensed immediately, as Palestinians spontaneously took to the streets in Gaza, Jenin, Arraba near Jenin (Mustafa's hometown), Lebanon and Syria. It was seen, overwhelmingly, at his funeral the next day in Ramallah, as PA policemen merged with Palestinian militiamen and thousands of Palestinians marched under a flotilla of Palestinian flags and to the hale of machine gun fire.
It was also felt in resistance. Ten hours after Mustafa was hit a settler was shot dead near Nablus, the first of PFLP's threatened revenge attacks. And gun battles erupted in or near virtually every main Palestinian locality, including along the incendiary front-line separating Beit Jala and the vast Jewish settlement built on its land, Gilo.
This was the domino Sharon most wanted to fall, following his threat last week to "take" Beit Jala should firing from there recur on Gilo. According to Palestinian sources in the village, Israel had moved up tanks, armoured personnel carriers, bulldozers and soldiers to bases on the crest of the village on early Monday morning, before Mustafa was assassinated.
And on Monday evening the firing resumed, "either from Palestinians angered by Abu Ali's death or by collaborators under instructions from Israel," in the opinion of one resident of Beit Jala. One Gilo settler was moderately wounded and 11 buildings were hit by machine gun fire. And Sharon moved on to his latest stage in annulling the realities created by the Oslo process and the existence of the PA.
At around 1am Tuesday, tanks and helicopters moved into Beit Jala "in a rain of shelling and bullets" said one local, conquering its central area and commandeering five buildings, including an orphanage housing 45 Palestinian children. By morning, the army had "secured" the village's northwest quarter facing Gilo, curfewed its 12,000 residents and stuck a large foothold in Beit Jala's Aida refugee camp.
Nor is there any sign the army will leave. "Beit Jala has become a snipers nest," said Israeli government spokesman Avi Pazner on Tuesday. "Our forces have entered to clean it up." Palestinian guerrillas answered by firing on the "forces" and, throughout Tuesday, at Gilo.
This will almost certainly continue. "Does Sharon really think the Intifada will stop because he reoccupied Beit Jala," asked one Fatah fighter. "Our Intifada is not about ending the 'reoccupation,' it's about ending the occupation."
Another Palestinian agrees. He is Peter Qumri, director and chief surgeon at Beit Jala's King Hussein hospital. He goes through the invasion's casualties: one Palestinian police officer killed, another severely wounded and 15 Palestinian civilians wounded. "Beit Jala's worst night of the Intifada," he concludes. But he agrees with the young Fatah fighter not only because he too believes resistance will eventually bring independence but also because he remembers history and the lessons it taught.
"Of course the resistance will continue," he says. "We will not let the past repeat itself. In 1967, the Jordanian army disarmed us prior to the Israeli occupation. We will not be disarmed again."
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