Walking on a precipice

A week after the Tel Aviv bombing Yasser Arafat is damned if he does not reign in his militants and damned if he does, writes Graham Usher from Ramallah
"If the Israelis invade, they'd probably take this road. This is the road they used in 1967," says Issam, 34 years after the event.
He is standing on the outskirts of Ramallah. In the distance is the main highway to Tel Aviv, an Israeli army base and the vast Jewish settlement of Givat Zeev. Beside him there are Palestinian factories, low-rise apartments and the glittering new Ramallah headquarters of the Palestinian Authority's Preventive Security Force.
In Issam's opinion this would have been a prime target for the "very, very severe strike" Israel was poised to make after a Hamas suicide bombing in Tel Aviv last Friday night left 20 Israeli civilians dead and 120 wounded.
Paranoia? Not at all. According to Israeli sources among the strikes Israel had ordered was a re-invasion of PA controlled areas like Ramallah, destruction of PA security buildings and the arrest of leaders of "extremist organisations," including Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement. Nor has this threat been withdrawn. "Our finger is still on the trigger," said Israel's Defence Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer on Monday.
The sole reason it has not been pulled was Arafat's decision, taken late Saturday night and under enormous American and European pressure, to enforce a cease-fire on his people.
The truce has more or less been observed, save for a serious skirmish between the Israeli army and Palestinian guerrillas in Rafah on Monday and one or two Palestinian shooting attacks elsewhere in the occupied territories. It is unconditional, with Palestinian police mobilising to prevent clashes in the teeth of a ferocious Israeli blockade on the West Bank and Gaza. It is also unilateral.
"There is no cease-fire on the Israeli side. There is an undeclared war on the Palestinian people and a trap that will be used to justify further aggression against us," said Palestinian analyst and Ramallah-based doctor, Mustafa Barghouti.
Aside from the blockade, the trap is being sprung through a number of "localised" actions whose sole purpose appears to be to draw a Palestinian military response and bring the rockets crashing down on cities like Ramallah.
For example, the Rafah gunfight was caused by the army's ongoing attempts to chisel a trench along the Gaza-Egyptian border. On Tuesday, soldiers opened fire on Palestinian students and teachers trying to clear a blockade on the Ramallah-to-Birzeit road. Six Palestinians were injured.
There were more ominous provocations. On Monday, a roadside bomb exploded near Jenin as a car passed driven by Ahmed Basharat, an Islamic Jihad activist. On Tuesday, a senior Fatah official, Ashraf Badawill, was seriously injured when a bomb ripped apart his car near Tulkarm. The army denied any involvement in the blasts. Palestinians say the hits had "assassination" written all over them.
There has been precious little international condemnation of these events or Israel's utterly illegal blockades. On the contrary, Ariel Sharon is being feted for his "restraint" and the heat, exclusively, is being put on Arafat. It is likely to remain so.
CIA Director George Tenant was arriving in the region yesterday to "consolidate" the cease-fire, broker Israeli-Palestinian security cooperation meetings and assess how well Arafat is complying with Israel's demand that he arrest 300 Palestinians, including Fatah members and officers in his security forces, "wanted" for killing Israelis.
So far the PA has arrested two Palestinians in Qalqilya, allegedly for their involvement in the Tel Aviv bombing.
Faced with this diplomatic and military pincer movement, the brief factional unity Arafat had rallied behind his cease-fire call became unstuck. On Monday, a joint statement by Hamas's and Fatah's armed wings had apparently conditioned a moratorium on attacks in Israel to an end to Israeli actions against Palestinians in the occupied territories. The call was bogus, announced Hamas on Tuesday.
"Hamas does not stand behind that statement," said Hamas political leader in Gaza, Ismail Abu Shanab. "The Intifada will go on and so will our resistance as long as Hamas sees the effect on Israelis of the hits in the heart of Israel." Islamic Jihad and the secularist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine also issued statements rejecting Arafat's cease-fire decree.
As so often in the past, Arafat is again "walking on a precipice," in the words of one of his aides. On the one side he must impose discipline on his fractious, mutinous people. On the other, he is being squeezed by Israel and the US to take actions that not only make this discipline harder but could also, if taken too far, imperil his rule.
And on the third side, where Palestinians hoped there would be Arab solidarity and threats of counter-sanctions against Israel, there is nothing but the most tangible absence.
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