Imploding Palestinian Authority

Israel's assassinations policy is lethal not only for the lives it takes, but for the ramifications it is having on Palestinian society. Graham Usher reports from Gaza
It is becoming a film endlessly rewound. A convoy of cars pulls out from the Fatah offices onto an avenue lined with trees in a suburb of El- Bireh. Out of the blue -- and fired from the Psagot settlement that commands the West Bank Palestinian town like a fortress -- two missiles plough into the road. The first misses the lead car by inches, allowing Fatah activist and Force 17 officer, Muhanid Diirya to escape with first- degree burns but also his life. The second turns the car into a smouldering, buckled wreck.
"I was supposed to be in that car," said West Bank Fatah leader, Marwan Al-Barghouti, on Sunday, 24-hours after the hit.
Coming four days after the killings of Hamas political leaders Jamal Mansour and Jamal Salim in Nablus, Bargouti believes their actual and his intended scalps mark a new page in Israel's manual to crush the Palestinian uprising. "Israel has decided to assassinate the political leadership of the Intifada as part of its comprehensive war against the Palestinian people and Palestinian Authority," he says.
The war is being waged not only through assaults from the sky but also through corrosion from within Palestinian society. Israel's qualitative hike in an assassinations policy that has claimed 15 Palestinian lives in less than a week has left the PA in disarray, pleading with the world to dispatch "international observers" to arrest the drift to chaos.
Veteran Palestinian leaders like Ahmed Qurei now muse whether the time may soon come for the PLO to again become an "underground resistance." Hamas leaders believe the time may have already arrived, as they lost yet another activist, Omar Al-Madiri, from death by helicopter gun-ship in Tulkarm on Sunday.
"Hamas may have to go underground too," says Ghazi Hamad, editor of the Islamist Al- Risala weekly in Gaza. He leans back to stroke the curtain snapping in the mid-day breeze. "Every time I hear helicopters I think a missile will come through that window. After all, Jamal Mansour was killed in his media centre. This is my newspaper office. What's the difference?"
The difference is that in casting its line to hook political as well as military leaders Israel is deliberately setting off dynamics among Palestinians that augur implosion as much as explosion. One is now an almost insatiable thirst for revenge.
"With the assassinations of Mansour and Salim, Hamas believes Sharon has declared an open war against them. There are no longer red- lines or green-lines, cease-fires or 'Palestinian national interests'," says Hamad. "There is resistance against Israel everywhere. Many Fatah cadre believe this too, even if their leaders don't say so," he adds.
But it remains an unstructured resistance. On Thursday, a 17-year old Palestinian tried to plant explosives on a bus near the Israeli town of Beit Shean. The next day a 20-year Palestinian woman tried to smuggle a bomb into Tel Aviv's central bus station. And, on Sunday, 35-year old Ali Joulani sprayed machine-gun bullets outside Israel's Defence Ministry in the same city, leaving nine soldiers and two civilians wounded. Joulani was shot and later died in hospital.
It is unclear whether any of the three belonged to a Palestinian faction, though the Fatah affiliated Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades claimed Joulani as their own. They have been free-lance actions, driven by despair as much as by "deterrence." Given the conditions in which most Palestinians are living, this may be understandable. But it is also counter-productive, says Palestinian analyst Abdullah Hourani.
"The argument of Hamas is that it is easier to hit Tel Aviv than the settlements. But the cost in punishment outweighs the benefit. We should rather concentrate our resistance against the soldiers and settlers in the occupied territories. In this way we can keep international support."
Another cost accrued by Israel's assassinations -- and the precise intelligence they require to strike its quarry -- is the panic over Palestinian collaborators, real or alleged.
Following the killing of two Hamas activists in Bethlehem on 17 July PA police arrested 50 Palestinians, largely "for their own protection," admitted one PA source. The protection was probably needed. A rumour was rampant in the city that it was Palestinian Christians who had betrayed the Hamas men. A similar sweep happened in Jenin and for similar reasons of "protective custody."
The danger with the hunt for collaborators is that it pits Palestinians against Palestinians and breeds antagonism where there should be solidarity. The night after Mansour and Salim were killed, clashes broke out between PA police and Fatah activists demanding that "collaborators" interned in Hebron prison immediately be put to death. Other Palestinians did not even demand, killing three Palestinian "collaborators" by their own hands in three days in Bethlehem, Beit Sahour and Ramallah.
The consequences of such resorts to summary justice were exposed in Gaza. On 27 July, members of the Hasin family near Khan Yunis killed Anwar Jouref, an officer in the PA's Preventive Security force (PSF). The murder had apparently been revenge for Jouref's killing of a member of the Hasin clan in 1991, allegedly for collaborating with Israel.
In the feud that followed nine Palestinians were killed and 22 injured. Eyewitnesses talk of 14-year old boys, from one clan or the other, roaming the streets armed with machine guns, checking their elders' identity papers.
There are at least 20,000 PA in Gaza. They were nowhere to be seen. They were rather parties to the dispute, with PSF members lining up with the Jouref family and Gaza Police Chief, Ghazi Jabali, providing "custodial" sanctuary to the Hasin clan.
Nor could Israel resist stirring the brew. That night Israeli helicopters bombed a factory in Khan Yunis. The army said it was manufacturing mortars. Local Palestinians are convinced it was cover to enable at least one member of the Hasin to slip across the Green Line.
"We have no law, no accountability, no nothing!" says Mona Al-Fara, a Palestinian doctor from Khan Yunis. She blames Gaza's latest descent into tribalism on a PA policy that has encouraged family affiliation over respect for the law and on a factional gun culture that prioritises "armed resistance" over struggles for political and domestic reform. "We can survive Sharon's war against us," she says. "We will not survive a war among ourselves."
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