A shooting in Gaza

Monday, November 15, 2004

True, the armed men who burst into the mourning tent in Gaza belonged to one of the 12+ Palestinian Authority security services that Arafat established during his 10-year rule of the Palestinian territories. But his management of those forces was always to set them one against the other.

According to Palestinian reports over the past two weeks, the PLO executive, which holds supreme authority for the Palestinian nation, gave Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei’ full authority over all the security services, something that Arafat had denied Qurei’ – and before him, Abbas. But while the estimated 30,000-40,000 Palestinians in their variety of PA uniforms far outnumber the cells and groupings of gunmen, it is obvious that the current Palestinian government simply does not have the power to order the PA security services to assert their supremacy over the gunmen and disarm the Fateh-affiliated Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades (now known as the Arafat Martyrs Brigades) or the Hamas’ Azzadin Martyrs Brigades – or any of the dozens of street corner gangs operating under the names of those two groups.

Not that Abbas needs anyone to tell him that the armed groups are first of all a threat to the Palestinian Authority’s authority – and not merely because their attacks on Israeli targets could lead to Israeli retaliations. There is already worry about how the presence of the armed groups on the ground in Palestinian areas will have an adverse affect on the planned elections. The Israelis will probably allow the East Jerusalemites vote, the Americans will put up as much as $75 million to help pay for the elections, and Europeans have promised to guarantee that the elections are fair and conducted without undue influence by Israel. But nobody knows what kind of influence armed groups deep inside the refugee camps of Gaza or the cities of the West Bank will have on the neighborhoods in which they rule the streets.

So, Abbas is said to be working on a reconciliation meeting between Dahlan and Moussa Arafat, a cousin of the late rais, who was put in charge of Gaza security forces a few months ago but has been largely neutralized by Dahlan’s informal control over the Preventive Security forces in the Strip. It’s all part of Abbas’ plan to rule by consensus and agreement, rather than force, and to reach a pan-Palestinian agreement for a hudna, a ceasefire, and then draw the armed groups into the official PA armed services, thus getting the undisciplined gangs off the streets. The Israeli authorities are skeptical about that plan, of course, since it does not make clear to the street that the PA is the sole governmental authority allowed to carry arms. On the other hand, Israel’s own experience in the earliest days of the state was for the underground groups to be drawn into the IDF, rather than sending the IDF out to ‘dismantle the terrorist infrastructure,’ as the Israelis continue to demand of the Palestinians.

or many Israelis, the incident in Gaza last night, combined with the pandemonium of Arafat’s burial in Ramallah, was proof that there’s still nothing to trust about the Palestinians. Yet there is some real confusion in Israel about how to deal with the Palestinian Authority now that Arafat is gone. Yesterday, military sources were saying that the cooperation with the PA security services for the funeral arrangements in Ramallah and the following three days, was the best cooperation in a long time. On the other hand, this morning, the army reinstated its policy prohibiting Palestinian police from carrying arms, and already last night, the army was back inside Jenin, making arrests of suspected terrorists. In the U.S., Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom breached a longstanding insistence that the disengagement from Gaza and the northern West Bank area is going to be unilateral, by saying that if the new Palestinian leadership demonstrates a determination to halt terror attacks, Israel will be open to negotiating with the Palestinians about the disengagement. Much depends on the U.S.; next week, Secretary of State Colin Powell will make his first visit to the region since the Aqaba summit of 2003. Of course, nobody knows just how much longer Powell will be secretary of state – and if he does remain, just how much power he will have in the second term of the Bush administration. It’s like a minuet being danced in the dark, to music improvised by undisciplined musicians.

Meanwhile, a flurry of speculation in the Israeli press about imprisoned Marwan Barghouti considering running for PA president may have had some influence on Barghouti actually consider challenging Abbas. There is no doubt that Barghouti, at least since he was arrested in April 2002 and put on trial for orchestrating deadly attacks in the Jerusalem area that killed five people, has become very popular in the West Bank in particular. And there is much speculation that if he were to run as a kind of Palestinian Nelson Mandela, it would create enormous pressure on Israel to free him.

Cooler heads are suggesting that if Barghouti, known to be deeply involved in hudna ‘cease-fire, were to throw his support behind Abbas, and Abbas does, as expected, defeat any challenger from one of the other Palestinian political parties (including Hamas, if it decides to post a candidate), Abbas would have U.S. backing for a deal with Israel that would include a prisoner release. In any case, reports this week about a three-way deal, freeing Baghouti, Jonathan Pollard, and Azzam Azzam, seems to be much more speculative than realistic – at least for now.

And Army Radio created a flurry of excitement this morning with a scoop about an unidentified submarine being spotted off the coast of Israel earlier this week. The submarine, said military sources, was from a Western country and was collecting intelligence. The Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee was very upset that the press learned about the foreign submarine before the MKs.