The enemy within

By Graham Usher
On Sunday night Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak told his cabinet that since Israel's resumption of security cooperation with the Palestinian Authority on 10 January there had been a 70 per cent decrease in "violent activities" in the West Bank and a 40 per cent drop in Gaza. This was one reason he had agreed to dispatch an Israeli delegation to Taba for "marathon" negotiations with the Palestinians, despite an assessment that the chances of reaching any kind of agreement before the 6 February Israeli elections were "small."
Few Palestinians would disagree with Barak's statistics. Four months old, the Al-Aqsa Intifada follows a downward curve from popular protest to sporadic armed struggle, especially in the besieged Gaza Strip. Where the curve rises is in the "revolutionary justice" meted out to those deemed treasonous within Palestinian society.
On 13 January, and for first time since the Oslo accords were signed in 1993, the Palestinian Authority (PA) executed two Palestinians and sentenced two others to death for collaborating with Israel's military and intelligence services. The judgement was popular among Palestinians. If guilty as charged, the four men's cumulative "assistance" to Israel had caused the death of seven Palestinians, three of them activists in Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, one Hamas leader and three innocent civilians. It also proved exemplary.
Two days later, a 38-year-old Palestinian was found dead outside his home in Burqin village near Salfit, "executed" for collaborating with Israel during the intifada of 1987-1993. The next day masked gunmen killed another Palestinian in Ajjeh near Jenin, though it is unclear whether this punishment was for treason or adultery. The day after a bullet-ridden corpse was found on the outskirts of Ramallah. This was not a Palestinian, "traitor" or otherwise. It was a 15-year-old Israeli, killed, it seems, for no other reason than being an Israeli.
Such rushes to summary judgement rattled certain of Fatah's wiser leaders. "Yes, we are in a state of war and we must extricate them [collaborators] from our midst," said Fatah leader in Jerusalem, Faisal Al-Husseini. "But the PA must remain the sole party responsible for executing collaborators."
The problem is few Palestinians, including many in Fatah, believe justice in the PA areas is truly blind, given that security and economic cooperation with Israel has always been part of the fabric of the PA's rule and the webs of various Palestinian "interests" woven within it. On 17 January, the head of the PA's Broadcasting Corporation, Hisham Mekki, was smoking a water pipe in a beach front hotel in Gaza. Two masked men approached and shot him ten times in the heart and head.
Mekki was an unpopular man in the occupied territories. He was viewed as one of Oslo's "economic class" who had acquired power and privilege through his position in the PA hierarchy rather than by virtue of national commitment or ability. In 1998, the PA's own comptroller suspected him of corruption and embezzlement. Gazans spoke of his arrogance and womanising. But the comptroller's report recommended that he be removed from office and, if the allegations of corruption proved true, that criminal charges be brought against him. It did not recommend he be shot dead in broad daylight.
That "sentence of the people" was carried out by the Brigades of the Martyrs of the Al-Aqsa, one of the several vigilante organisations that have emerged during the uprising and drawn mostly from disaffected ranks within Fatah and the PA's intelligence forces. In a statement released to news agencies on 18 January, the group said they "had been forced to assassinate Mekki," who "practised sex and stole money," because of the failure of the PA to "punish corrupt people."
The killing of Mekki is perhaps the clearest instance so far of the power struggle the uprising has wrought within Fatah, a tussle for influence that pits the "national bloc" of grassroots cadres against the "economic bloc" of businessmen and politicians who have grown fat off Oslo's perks. There are many Palestinians also who see this as "revolutionary," cleansing the leadership of quislings and opportunists. But Saleh Abdel-Jawad is not among them. "The militarisation of the Intifada is not a revolutionary development," he says. "It's a reactionary development."
Abdel-Jawad is a historian at Birzeit University. He is also one of the most trenchant critics of Palestinian tactics and practice in the present uprising. As early 10 October he submitted an article to the Palestinian Al-Ayyam newspaper (it was never published) warning that a strategy of armed confrontation with Israel could prove disastrous both for the national struggle and to the fight for domestic reform within Palestinian society. The turn to vigilantism and manhunt of collaborators he sees as a confirmation of his fears.
"The militarisation of the Intifada is useless in fighting Israel, counter-productive because of the enormous Israeli retaliation it elicits and anti-democratic because it excludes whole sectors of Palestinian society from participating in the uprising, like women for instance," he says. "But its greatest danger is that it empowers the military forces in Palestinian society over the civil and political forces."
It also represents a failure to learn from past experience. The 1987 uprising was successful, at least initially, because its mass, civilian character "stripped the Israelis of their military power over us," he says. By contrast, an undisciplined, armed confrontation, "when neither the leadership nor the opposition is prepared for it," led the Palestinian resistance only to the debacle of Jordan in the 1970s and Lebanon in the 1980s.
Similarly internecine conflict and violence, particularly against alleged "collaborators," is what caused the unravelling of both the 1936 Palestinian revolt and the excesses of later years of the first intifada. In neither case was the outcome liberation and victory, but rather collapse, disorder and defeat. Abdel-Jawad sees the same symptoms today.
He is not the only one. Hussam Khader is a Fatah leader from Balata camp near Nablus. In recent weeks he has been active in organising Palestinian demonstrations against Bill Clinton's proposals for resettling the refugees "outside Palestine" and against Canadian and Australian offers to host them.
But he, too, believes that "unless this intifada achieves internal reform of Palestinian society it cannot be deemed a success. The [Al-Aqsa] Intifada showed the Palestinians have not surrendered -- that they are still prepared to fight for their rights. But we should also be fighting for democracy, the rule of law, proper and accountable institutions and human dignity. Without these, I'm afraid this intifada could end up the same way as the last one, not with victory but with Oslo."
Related stories:
Running out of steam
Sweet tooth for slaughter 18 - 24 January 2001
Re-defiling reality 18 - 24 January 2001
To the bitter end 18 - 24 January 2001
Unmaking Sharon 11 - 17 January 2001
See Intifada in focus
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