WORLD AFFAIRS

Fighting for survival

In Israeli-occupied territories, suicide bombing by Palestinians has become an act of survival against oppression.

VIKRAM SURA
in Gaza

THE Palestinian resistance against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is now led by two types of leaders: those who advocate suicide bombing against Israeli civilians and those who have joined the chorus unwilling to disturb the consensus.

Suicide bombing as a method of political violence in Palestine did not materialise at the push of a button. It took seven years before it was put to frequent use; and is rooted in the failure to get the Israeli military to redeploy its forces stationed in Palestinian territories, a key feature of the Interim Agreement of September 1995 for Palestinian self-governance, say Palestinian leaders in Gaza.

The leaders say that the failure of the Palestinian Authority (P.A.) to secure the redeployment and to guarantee Israel's security demands led to political factions opposed to negotiations and disposed towards suicide bombings gaining popularity.

GAMMA
A Palestinian suicide-bomber who was shot dead by Israeli soldiers at the Fruit checkpoint in West Bank in March this year, before he could detonate himself.

In the 23 months between the outbreak of the Aqsa uprising in October 2000 and the Israeli reoccupation of the West Bank by August 2002, 368 Israeli civilians - 172 of them in the last five months alone - fell victim to Palestinian violence inside Israel and the Occupied Territories, according to B'Tselem, the Jerusalem-based Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories. The Palestinian body count, on the other hand, is 1,066 civilians in the Occupied Territories, 396 of them in the last six months.

This nudged the resistance led by secular Muslim leaders of Al-Fateh, the political party of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, into the eager hands of factions opposed to negotiations.

Efforts to implement the interim agreement on the redeployment of Israeli forces failed, says Brigadier-General Osama Al-Ali of the P.A. Al-Ali was the Chairman of the Regional Security Committee with Israel Defence Forces (IDF) in Gaza, set up under the agreement. He says he had time and again unfolded his six-by-two-feet Oslo map of the Gaza Strip and pointed out to his Israeli counterpart how military lookout posts had popped up like wild mushrooms on Palestinian land that was guaranteed under the agreement.

GAMMA
The typical vest-borne weapons of a suicide-bomber.

"The Oslo agreement is not an agreement of peace; it is an agreement to end Israeli occupation. It is a very clear agreement - it has dates, it has a programme and schedule for implementation, within a span of three years of the interim period," he says. But the redeployment never happened. Meanwhile, the two sides fought with unequal results, says Al-Ali.

"I don't ask to kill Israelis, I don't ask to attack Israelis, I don't ask to harm Israelis," he says. "I ask to protect me from a huge army against which I don't have anything to protect myself. They refused," says Al-Ali, referring to the proposal put before the United Nations Security Council in December 2001 to position international monitors in Palestinian areas. The United States vetoed the proposal saying that it did not single out the terrorist organisations responsible for the violence in Israel.

"So what can they do, the Palestinian people?" Al-Ali asks. "Kill. So the way out is to go and kill himself there. If the Palestinian people had the Apache (helicopter gunship), they would have sent it; if the Palestinian people had tanks, they would have shot with tanks. When it is normal and legal for Israek to kill me with an Apache, why is not normal to kill an Israeli by myself? If an Israeli kills me wearing military uniform, it is not terror. But if I kill him in civilian clothes, it is terror. I don't wish to hit civilian targets - I don't believe it, I don't like it, I don't want it," he says.

EVEN as the P.A. and the Israeli government negotiated on the treadmill of time, pointing fingers at each other, a 65-year-old, frail, quadriplegic, in flowing white beard returned home to Gaza in 1997, upon his release after eight years in an Israeli prison. He was Sheik Ahmed Ismail Yasin, the "spiritual" leader of the Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya, the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas.

"The stalemate facing the peace process at large, and people's impression that the P.A. did not seem effective, and the illusion of peace that did not prove fruitful gave Hamas some amount of popularity," says Mahmoud Ajrami, director-general of the Africa directorate in the Palestinian Ministry of Planning and International Development in Gaza City and a member of the Palestinian National Council.

Hamas rode the tide of popular approval of the first Palestinian uprising at the Jabalya refugee camp in Gaza in 1987. It published pamphlets in support of the struggle, says a Palestinian Information Officer from the refugee camp who was active in the first uprising.

Hamas cadre spun a wide network of social services in the Gaza Strip, which included medical clinics providing free services, soup kitchens, orphanages, and student leagues. While Arafat's administration was negotiating with Israel in the late 1990s, the military wing of Hamas, Izz el-Din al-Kassam Brigades, struck: A car-bomb attack on a bus in Israel killed eight people on April 6, 1994. It was the first bombing that Hamas claimed responsibility for after the Declaration of Principles between Yasser Arafat and the Israeli government a year earlier. From assaulting Jewish settlers and reserve soldiers inside the occupied territories, Hamas graduated to new means of political violence. Other militias later imitated it. Of the 90 suicide attacks that took place inside Israel since 1994, Hamas sponsored 23, according to Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs statistics.

"The Palestinian suffering was unbearable," says Ismail Abu Shanab, a Hamas founding member, who stood in for the ailing Sheik Yasin for an interview. "Palestinians were throwing stones first, then Israel began assassinations, and then destroyed homes and establishments with F-16s and Apaches."

The AH-64 Apache helicopter gunship became a symbol of terror among the people of Gaza, explain Palestinian officials. When Jewish settlements in the occupied territories were strafed with mortar fire or the fragile calm within Israel was ripped apart by bombing, or when a suspected Palestinian militant came overground, the Apache gunship was sent in to retaliate or assassinate.

However, it was after the election of Ariel Sharon as Israel's Prime Minister in February 2001 that the F-16 fighter-bomber raided Palestinian police compounds and posts in the West Bank and Gaza - in May the same year. This was the first time since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war when the fighter jet, poetically christened the Fighting Falcon, bombed Palestinian targets. Twelve policemen reportedly died in the raids, which came as a response to a Hamas-sponsored suicide bombing in Israel that killed five and reportedly injured 100. Hamas ratcheted up the degree of violence, and Israel responded - unequivocally - with the F-16.

In May 2002, an opinion poll conducted among 1,317 Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza by the Ramallah-based Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research revealed that Hamas had a popularity rating of 15.5 per cent and Al-Fateh, 31.7 per cent.

Mahmoud Ajrami hints that Israel encouraged Hamas against the P.A.

"It's a lie," says Abu Shanab of Hamas. "We refused to join with the P.A., so they say Israel supports us. He adds: "Oslo split Palestine into two: opponents and proponents. Hamas continues the resistance, while the P.A. believes in Oslo. After 10 years of negotiations there is no more progress. The P.A. has failed to achieve what Palestinians intended it to achieve."

While Hamas, with its tradition of sharp reprisals, challenged Arafat's authority, Al-Fateh imitated Hamas. The Aqsa Martyrs Brigades was born in the year 2000 from the Tanzim, the youth league of Al-Fateh. The Brigades has claimed responsibility for 13 of the 90 bombings in Israel since 1994. The opinion survey of May 2002 made some telling comments, which included: "Fateh improved its popularity ratings from 28 per cent in December to 32 per cent in this poll while those of the Islamist groups remained unchanged at 25 per cent... One possible reason for the rise in the popularity of Al-Fateh may have been the public satisfaction with the attacks carried out by Al-Fateh's armed wing, Al Aqsa Brigades, inside Israel and against Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank since December."

"Tanzim and the Aqsa Martyrs Brigades had an unofficial marriage," says an officer in the Palestinian Planning Ministry who requested anonymity. "The marriage is denied at the top but is known to everyone, especially the Israelis. Arafat also knows these Fateh and Al Aqsa Martyrs people."

The Aqsa Martyrs Brigades employed guerilla tactics which were initially aimed at soldiers manning checkpoints where Palestini-ans were humiliated, says the officer. One of their "successes" was an early morning sniper hit in March 2002 against seven Israeli soldiers and three civilians at a West Bank checkpoint. All hits proved fatal.

Among the Fateh leaders in Gaza, Rashid Abu Shbak is playfully dubbed the "father of mortars", as he had patronised mortar manufacturing in the Resistance. At present, he is the chief of the Preventive Security Service in Gaza. A "much-loved man" on the Palestinian "street", Abu Shbak is considered the "hidden brain" of the Fateh. Abu Shbak has spent 17 years in Israeli prisons, yet he says he still believes in peace. He says the delay in troop withdrawal and the military escalation by Israel made Palestinian society militant.

"The second intifada began as an unarmed uprising. But during the initial stages, the military escalation and the killing of Palestinian people by the Israeli occupation forces contributed further to the military nature of the Palestinian action. Specifically, in the seven years before the Aqsa intifada, the region had stability as never before," he points out. "On the contrary, what did we have from the Israelis? Delaying of troops withdrawal. Then Sharon came. He destroyed everything: the P.A., its institutions, and the infrastructure of Palestinian society."

Abu Shbak dismisses Hamas. He says: "The Islamists have supporters but they are not popular. Their popularity increased because of Israeli behaviour - it was 15 per cent but now it is only 7 or 8 per cent."

He often reminds himself, he says, that he is working for a security apparatus and he does not like it. As the chief of the Preventive Security Service, Abu Shbak keeps Israeli citizens, including Jewish settlers, safe from Palestinian terror attacks. His 3,000-member force works as an internal intelligence agency in Gaza, locking in prison suspected Palestinian militants. But as a Fateh leader, Abu Shbak continues to resist the occupation.

"We have the legitimate right to defend ourselves according to international law," he says. "The world now doesn't understand what's happening on the Palestinian side, especially the actions of the so-called suicide bombers against Israeli civilians. Strange that people don't see anything but the Israeli civilian. They don't see the tens of Palestinian children killed daily... they don't see a Palestinian woman give birth to a baby at a checkpoint."

The Aqsa Martyrs Brigades of Al-Fateh and the Kassam Brigades of Hamas have an old partner in the field in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PLFP). The PLFP is a secular, Marxist, political faction that joined Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in 1967. Like Hamas, the PLFP is opposed to negotiations. The PLFP has to its credit five bombings since 1994. With a popularity rating of just 3 per cent, it nevertheless shot into prominence in October 2001 when its cadre assassinated Rechavam Ze'evi, Israel's right-wing Likud Party Minister, in a Jerusalem hotel. The assassination was in retaliation for an Apache air strike that killed PLFP chief Abu Ali Mustafa in Ramallah in August 2001.

"The Israeli citizen must realise that whenever his nation makes an aggression against Palestinians, he must pay a price for it," says Rabah MHanna, a PLFP polit bureau member and one of the organisation's founders. "I don't have Apaches or F-16s. But I have the suicide bomber. As a human being, I cannot bear to see an Israeli boy or girl or woman walk to a coffee shop and get killed. So suicide-bombing is terrorism. But why are we doing this? And for what? We are doing it to protect Palestinians. We do this - call this terrorism - to protect ourselves," he says.

MHanna says he wants to maintain a "balance of terror" between Palestinian and Israeli civilians. He adds that the terror-scale pans should include their leaderships also. Hemmed in by Israel's occupation forces, each Palestinian political faction is leading its own little freelance fight, with its glassy-eyed youth leaguers as bomb material.

Mahmoud Ajrami says: "When a rabbit in a forest is attacked, it tries to find a hole to hide. The Palestinian has no hole to protect him. This (terrorism) is, in fact, for survival."