While Palestine burns

The Palestinians' five-month wait for another "special session" of the UN Security Council has brought nothing except greater Israeli repression. Graham Usher writes from Jerusalem
When the PLO representative to the United Nations, Nasser Al-Kidwa, rose to address the UN Security Council on Monday, three Palestinians had been killed in the preceding 24 hours. By the time the "special session on the deteriorating situation in the occupied territories" drew to a close on Tuesday, another seven had "gone," to borrow Ariel Sharon's euphemism for the killing of Palestinians. Truly, while New York fiddles, the West Bank and Gaza burn.
The hike in the Palestinian body count comes amid what the Israeli army admits is a lull in Palestinian resistance in the occupied territories. It is the result of what the Israeli leader calls his "successful" policy of "commando operations against terror" (that is, political assassinations and Israeli invasions of Palestinian territories).
The slaughter began Friday night, when an army brigade entered Khan Younes and killed Abdel-Rahman Abu Bakr, an activist in the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC), the grassroots cross-factional militia that has led the fighting in the southern Gaza Strip. Ten other Palestinians were wounded in the raid, three seriously.
Two more Palestinians were slain the next day, though these were less "targeted" hits than the toll of Israel's increasingly savage use of firepower. According to Palestinian sources, 13-year-old Mohamed Abu Arar was shot while playing with friends as army bulldozers retreated from an invasion of a Rafah refugee camp. Thirty- two-year-old Muwayin Abu Lawi was shot in the neck while trying to skirt an army blockade near Nablus. He had apparently been on an errand to buy school notebooks for his three children.
But the real carnage was yet to come. On Sunday night, Samir Abu Ziad, his seven-year-old daughter and five- year-old son were literally blown to pieces in an explosion at his house on the edge of Rafah. The army initially said the blast was from a misfired Palestinian mortar. It then said it had "incontrovertible" proof that Abu Ziad died while assembling explosives in his backyard.
Palestinians insist Israeli missiles did the killing, though they were chary with evidence to back this up. But whoever and whatever was behind the deaths, it marked another notch on Israel's hit list of "targeted" Palestinians. Abu Ziad was a leading figure in the PRC.
The Israelis were a little less "incontrovertible" in their accounts of the killing of four Palestinians at Beit Iba village near Nablus yesterday. According to sources in Nablus, one member of a Fatah militia was injured in a shoot-out with the Israeli army. Villagers from Beit Iba then tried to rescue him. An Israeli undercover squad shot dead three of them while the wounded Fatah man, 23- year-old Ahmed Fares, was carted away by soldiers, presumed dead.
Amid such assaults, the UN Security Council had about as much significance for Palestinians as a squall in a sandstorm. It also went depressingly to script. Israel lambasted the Palestinians' motion to the meeting as "one-sided," the US said it was "unbalanced and unworkable," and Russia and several European countries sat meekly on their hands. The session closed with Arab speaker after Arab speaker denouncing Israel in language that was long on imagery but short on substance.
Palestinians expected the same from the meeting of Arab foreign ministers in Cairo yesterday, the fifth such "emergency" gathering since the Intifada erupted last fall, each of which has been held with progressively diminishing returns.
Faced with the collapse of his "internationalisation" gambit, Yasser Arafat was left clutching at every straw that floated his way. Following a meeting with German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer in Ramallah on Tuesday, the Palestinian leader announced he would "welcome meeting Shimon Peres in [Fischer's] office in Berlin." One Palestinian negotiator winked this was a diplomatic "prize" awarded to Europe, as opposed to the studied non- intervention of the US administration.
In fact, Arafat's acceptance marked a retreat from the Palestinians' previous demand that there be no meeting with any Israeli interlocutor until Orient House (PLO headquarters in East Jerusalem) is reopened. It was closed in an Israeli police raid on 10 August. Nor did either Fischer's visit or the putative meeting with Peres herald any softening of Israel's stance toward the "cease-fire" brokered by CIA boss George Tenet in June.
Whether or not the Peres parley actually happens, a spokesman for the Israeli prime minister made it clear that "Sharon has not and will not relinquish [his demand for] seven days of complete calm" in the occupied territories before the Tenet truce can come into force. There is a quiet consensus among Palestinian, European and Arab diplomats that this condition is now impossible for Arafat to fulfil.
For Palestinians, the only glint on the grey horizon was the declaration that PLO Executive Committee member Mahmoud Abbas's recent trip to Damascus was "most successful" and that a Palestinian delegation will travel to Syria to prepare a meeting between Arafat and President Bashar Al-Assad.
Hossam Khader is a Fatah leader in Nablus who in recent weeks has been virulently critical of Arafat's hands- off approach to the Intifada and his refusal to make any internal reforms that will help Palestinian society sustain it. But he welcomes this road to Damascus, and not only because many of the Palestinian factions still house their leaderships there.
"We need a strategic relationship with Syria," he says. "It is an independent country with responsibility for 400,000 Palestinian refugees. We also face a common enemy."
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