• Escalation in the North by Yossef Bodansky
• Arafat's Policies Disastrous by Dr Edward Said
• Dr. Sa'di Al-Krunz - Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) by Aaron Lerner
• Shameless in Gaza by David Hirst
• M.K. Ran Cohen's Letter to Yassar Arafat

Iran, Syria, the HizbAllah and Palestinian terrorist organizations actively prepare for escalation in the strikes against Israel. The terrorist strikes from Lebanon may be used by Syrian President Hafiz al-Assad to attrite Israel and even instigate a widening of the crisis leading to a wider Syrian-Israeli confrontation. The recent reinforcing and training of the HizbAllah and other terrorist organizations by Iran constitute the key to this potential escalation. The Israeli Government is fully aware of these developments.

In a May 9, 1997, interview with Haaretz, IDF Intelligence Corps chief Moshe Ya'alon pointed to the growing role of terrorism in Assad's policy. While negotiating for peace, Assad is simultaneously exercising other options by which it hopes to exert pressure on Israel, both in the Lebanese theater and by means of terror.

Damascus hosts the headquarters of all the Palestinian terrorist organizations. Violence and terrorism while negotiations are in progress is the tool Assad has chosen. Concurrently, Damascus is keeping all other options open.

The Syrians have a war strategy based on the element of surprise.

Echoing the strategic percept of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Syrians opt for seizing territory with the intention of using it to then initiate a political process that will compel Israel for major concessions.

Gen. Ya'alon assesses that Syria would not require foreign aid to launch a limited war, and that it in the event of a war it would activate the HizbAllah in Lebanon. A likely scenario leading to war will have Assad bring[ing] about a deterioration of the situation that would enable him to be perceived as reacting to an Israeli maneuver, for example in Lebanon. And even the continuation of the current level of violence in South Lebanon is of strategic importance. The on-going confrontation with the HizbAllah is an unwinnable war as long as Iran is there concedes Uri Lubrani, the coordinator of Israel's activities in Lebanon.

The emergence of such Syrian-Iranian strategic capabilities in Lebanon is the result of an intensive joint effort. In the first four months of 1997 alone, the Iranians flew to Damascus 37 plane loads -- all Boeing 747 Jumbo Jets -- of weapons and ammunition for the HizbAllah. Among the weapons supplied are advanced shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles, Raad anti-tank guided missiles (an Iranian development of the Soviet lethal AT-3 SAGGER with longer range and more powerful warhead), Fajr-3 240 mm Katyusha-rockets (with a 40km/25mile range), sophisticated electronic systems for bombs and mines, as well as a host of other weapon systems and large quantities of ammunition.

At the same time, Syria and Iran are expanding a program of intense military training for HizbAllah, Amal, and Palestinian terrorists (mainly the PFLP-GC) in bases in both Syria and Labanon. Moreover, Syrian and Iranian officers and NCOs now deploy along with the newly trained terrorists into south Lebanon, thus ensuring better and more efficient use of the new weapons.

The deployment of these quality assets has already been reflected in a series of engagements with the IDF and the SLA in which the Hizballah and Palestinian forces demonstrated better skills and tactics, as well as mastership of advanced weapons. The HizbAllah's large-scale attack on the Sujud strong-point on May 12 (Israel's Independence Day), and the fierce clash with an IDF patrol on the night of May 15-16 that resulted in three Israeli fatalities and five wounded, are the latest examples of the newly acquired improved capabilities, audacity and courage of the terrorist forces in southern Lebanon.

No less important is the impact that this deployment of reinforcements has already had on the HizbAllah units in southern Lebanon. After a winter of setbacks and mounting casualties in the relentless fight against the IDF and the SLA, cracks emerged in some of the local HizbAllah units. The crisis was so severe that recruitment markedly declined and there were even numerous cases of desertion -- an unheard of phenomena among the ideologically committed fighters of the HizbAllah. The arrival of the Syrians, Iranians, and fresh elite fighters boosted morale and rejuvenated the entire HizbAllah-Palestinian system in southern Lebanon.

And this is only the beginning. There is mounting evidence that Syria, Iran, and their sponsored terrorists -- particularly the elite forces of the HizbAllah and the PFLP-GC -- are actively preparing for the launch of spectacular operations against the IDF and the SLA. Among these are plans to kidnap Israeli soldiers, surprise barrages of long-range rockets against Haifa, exploding massive car-bombs with suicide drivers in order to inflict heavy casualties on the IDF, and anti-aircraft ambushes aimed to challenge the invincible lethality of the Israeli Air Force.

Meanwhile, Damascus also activated the new arrangements with the Palestinian terrorists in the territories. Israel now has information that the March 1997 bombing in Cafe Apropos in Tel Aviv was conducted not only in the aftermath of a green light from Yassir Arafat, but also in coordination with the HAMAS command center in Damascus -- itself controlled by Syrian and Iranian intelligence.

The gang [that carried out the bombing] has links of some sort with the external HAMAS organization, which is headquartered in Damascus. The connection is with Damascus, Ya'alon stressed. By now, Israeli intelligence has ample information about widespread preparations throughout the PA-held zones for the resumption of terrorist strikes, including spectacular and suicide operations, against Israel. The Islamist organizations are convinced that the time is ripe for the resumption of terrorist campaigns. There is an atmosphere in the field of terror attacks, Yaalon told the Knesset Foreign Affair and Defense Committee on May 13.

Presently, the Islamist forces in south Lebanon, and particularly the HizbAllah, have no doubt about the meaning of the impending escalation of terrorism throughout the region. For example, on May 9, 1997, the HizbAllah's organ -- al-'Ahd -- published an analysis of the recent developments in south Lebanon.

The HizbAllah stresses the use of escalation in south Lebanon as means to break the political deadlock between Israel and Syria, albeit blaming Israel for the belligerence. "Though the escalation ... the Zionist enemy is seeking to achieve security and political objectives by keeping the south under a controlled degree of tension." The Israeli government can no longer withstand the political price of impasse in the peace process because of the building international pressure. "The search for an outlet from the political deadlock is a permanent policy for Israeli governments and the Lebanese arena has remained one of the places fit for such an outlet, which takes the form of military escalation, as was the practice in similar circumstances."

Significantly, the HizbAllah analysis anticipates the possibility of the fighting in south Lebanon escalating to a regional war. Al-'Ahd notes that "several sources are expressing fears that there is a Zionist plan [to escalate the fighting against the HizbAllah in south Lebanon] in preparation for pouncing on it through a large-scale aggression against the south, especially as the political climate in the region is overcast and regional moves are pointing to new military alliances under US political and military cover that are beating the drums of war [against Syria] and preparing for it. Lebanon cannot in this case be immune from all this because it will be a direct target in any war in the region or Zionist aggression in the south that might possibly be carried out as a substitute for a large-scale war. In both cases, Lebanon remains the target of the Zionist escalation."

And the HizbAllah vows to do all in its power to derail Israel's plans. The growing flow of better weapons and skilled fighters from Iran and Syria will be of use in this endeavor.

Return to Contents

When I visited Hebron last July, I paid a call on an old friend, Mayor Mustafa Natshe, to find out what he saw as the future of his town. He told me that he had pleaded with Yosser Arafat and his men during the 1995 negotiations that led up to Oslo "not to sign an agreement that would give a Palestinian seal of approval to the 450 illegal settlers - most of them fanatics squatting with such offensive, even murderous, insistence in the centre of an Arab town.

`It isn't just the principle of the thing that is so galling,' he said, `but the fact that giving them this foothold in our midst by partitioning the town makes it possible for them to use Hebron as a precedent for staying in all their other settlements, extending their reach further all over the West Bank.'

Natshe's pleas went unheard, as Arafat and his team pressed ahead with their Israeli peace `partners' who consolidated their gains with, I suspect, a sense of disbelief. How else could even the most hardened Israeli explain that the Palestinians had accepted a formula for 'coexistence' in Hebron which gave 450 people (with the Israeli army guarding them) the choicest 20 per cent of the town's commercial centre, whereas the 160,000 resident Palestinians were expected to be happy that they got 80 per cent, so bogged down with conditions as to make it a peripheral part of the Israeli enclave.

What sort of `strategic' calculation by the Palestinian leadership produced acquiescence in the Israeli settler population being allowed to carry arms, abetted by Israeli patrols given virtually the run of the surrounding hills, while the Palestinian police were limited to a few poorly armed men, theoretically subject to Israeli restraints?

Nevertheless, there seemed to be genuine euphoria among Hebronites, for whom the presence of Israeli settlers and soldiers has been so unpleasant an ordeal; just seeing some of them leave in the hope of not having them come back on quite the same basis as before supplied a good day's worth of celebration.

But much of the jubilation will be as short-lived as it was when Ramallah and Nablus went through the same happy catharsis 18 monhs ago. Hebron was not liberated: 80 per cent of it was given the right to administer municipal affairs - sanitation, health, postal delivery, education, local security and traffic - under the Palestinian Authority's jurisdiction, with israel still in charge of security, access, water and overall sovereignty.

The ambiguities are evident in reports from Hebron in the press. On the first day,there were reports citing Netanyahu and Sharansky as to how Hebron is still Israeli, backed up by statistics showing continued Israeli control over the city. The next day, editorials and stories predicted a Palestinian state emerging soon from the messy Palestinian `archipelago' that has left the West Bank and Gaza divided into lots of little parts without territorial continuity or sovereignty.

On American TV, the de riguer scene of Arafat and Netanyahu shaking hands with American mediator Dennis Ross between them showed a grim-faced Arafat anxious to speed away into the night. As the New York Times coyly put it in its jubilant report of how well things went, the actual amounts of land to be ceded to the Palestinians were left entirely to "Israel's discretion".

Now this is precisely how things were left in the Oslo 2 documents, since just before the Washington signing the Israelis calmly removed the specific areas of re-deployment already agreed with the Palestinians and left the timetable. Apparently, Arafat demurred at this, but under American pressure was made to sign. His latest heroics during the Hebron negotiations were meant to make up for what had happened earlier; but he failed again. No wonder he didn't want to answer any questions.

It has been no secret that America, which has sub-contracted out its Middle Eastern policy to Dennis Ross and his coterie of experts, placed Arafat under pressure. Israel's political concerns and its exaggerated obsessions with security and terror were adopted by the American middlemen, who were acting as anything but honest brokers. There was also an important confluence of strategic aims that united Netanyahu and Ross: that there should never be anything resembling real Palestinian self-determination.

And three-and-a-half years after Oslo began, `autonomy' for Palestinians is all that has been achieved, in tiny enclaves on the West Bank whose roads and access are controlled by israel. An important town like Ramallah now has settlements on three sides. Sovereignty in the true sense of the word remains in Israel's hands, and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

Why do so many Israelis seem upset by this agreement, which keeps them firmly in charge throughout the still-Occupied Territories ?

The reason is an ideological fanaticism so deep and all-encompassing that most western and even Arab readers do not have an adequate sense of its imperatives. Despite the millions of Palestinians in Palestine, they have always been considered aliens, to be tolerated at most or to be driven out or treated either as non-existent or as juridical inferiors.

Palestine is considered to be the land of the Jewish people entrusted to Israel; no non-Jews are doctrinally allowed to use or have this land. That is why Netanyahu, more honest than Peres, has always refused to accept the formula `land for peace', and why sovereignty accorded to non-Jews has not, and will not be, an admissible oncept in negotiations.

I believe these positions are also shared, by the `acceptable' Israelis whose views are aired in western media as representative of the peace camp, and who brilliantly conceal their real views of Palestinians beneath conscience-rending, anguished prose. They never bring up sovereignty for Palestinians. Many of them (including the egregious Henry Kissenger) speak of a Palestinian state, which they say they would accept, but none of them has specified sovereignty and real self-determination for Palestinians.

Trying to put myself in the shoes of the PLO men who continue to produce such disadvantageous agreements that do nothing to change the course of Israeli policy, I keep asking what our leader must be thinking. They certainly do not do very much talking, and share very little with their people beyond the usual triumphalist nonsense.

All I come up with is a series of unflattering rationales for going on as before, with equally bad results and equally tragic consequences for the whole people. One is that as long as the peace process guarantees the centrality of the PLO and its leader, then anything goes. Another is that being so out-gunned and out-smarted by Israel, you feel you have no choice but to go on, trying to brazen it out vis-a-vis your own people with hopeful but ultimately misleading speeches and promises; meanwhile, you surround yourself with supporters who tell you what you want to hear, and are anxious to help you set up feel-good things like a bag-pipe bend, a few luxurious cars and houses, and postage stamps with your face on them. The best thing is to go on as many state visits (none of them necessary) as possible, one day Stockholm, another Paris, another Cairo.

A third rationale is to make more concessions, accepting all the humiliating Israeli concessions in the wishful fantasy that some day you'll either stop having to make concessions or the Israelis will give you a few things back.

Fourthly, you can say that this is politics, a dirty business, and so we proceed with the Israelis like partners in crime; never mind that they get all the advantages, a lot of commercial deals have come our way.

There may be one or two more possibilities, but none explains the Palestinian streets' acceptance of this appalling situation, which seems to worsen daily. Many of Arafat's adviser are intelligent men and women, quite a few with long histories in progressive politics. Why are they so silent? And why do the most gifted so willingly accept a few material advantages (a car, an office, a VIP designation) in return for continuing to work with a man whose tactics they loathe and whose mistakes over the past few years they known - and say openly - has brought as Palestinians and as Arabs to one of the lowest points in our history?

Why silence, and why co-operation ? Do they feel no obligation towards the truth and to the misery of a people whose continuing dispossession could have been alleviated a thousand times better than the PLO has done ?

In the meantime, most people in America and in Europe genuinely believe that peace has improved things for the `area', and that for the first time in 30 years the Palestinians are getting their freedom.

This is the cruelty of the Palestinian dilemma. We want to show that we desire peace, yet because of that `peace', the daily lives of all but a tiny handful of wealthy businessmen, security chiefs and PA employees have become a good deal worse.

For at least six months, the mainstream media in the US and Europe have been filled with stories about the diplomatic front, the negotiations, the impasses and the final breakthroughs, and completely void of anything that shows real Palestinian lives on the ground.

There has been no coverage of the thousands of students in Gaza who cannot go back to their schools and universities on the West Bank (forbidden by Israel); nothing about the large number of Palestinians prisoners still festering (and in some cases being tortured to death) in Israeli prisons; nothing about the horrors that a large family in Gaza with unemployed father must go through to survive; nothing about the systematic, almost daily reprisals against Palestinians who try to prevent their own dispossession by Israeli settlers and army; nothing about what it means for a Palestinian to try to get in and out of Gaza (or about all West Bankers who have been forbidden entry into Jerusalem for a year); nothing about the checkpoints that make the little West Bank enclaves seem like stifling ghettos; nothing about life under Craft's dreadful regime, with books, newspapers and magazines censored or banned, the security services threatening average people, and corruption killing the possibility of regular daily business.

And nothing, above all, about the total absence of law or the rule of law in the Palestinian autonomy areas.

Given all this, plus the sense of frustration and hopelessness felt by every Palestinian at the cruel farce our leaders are forced to enact,it becomes an absolute duty to describe the actualities of quotidian life under the peace process - unadorned and in the greatest detail possible.

The world must be told by us what our people under occupation are still going through. This is not a matter of money, but of discipline and will. If every one of us first took it upon him or herself to be informed, and then attempted somehow to break through the official snd media silence - with a letter to the editor, a call to a radio or TV station, the setting-up of groups to do this kind of work systematically and collectively - - then we will be beginning our attempt at liberation, a laughably modest attempt it is true, but surely a great deal better than passivity and silence.

The present situation cannot last. There are too many inequities and injustices right at the heart of Palestinian life. Who is preparing for the next, post-Hebron phase?

When I visited Hebron last July, I paid a call on an old friend, Mayor Mustafa Natshe, to find out what he saw as the future of his town. He told me that he had pleaded with Yosser Arafat and his men during the 1995 negotiations that led up to Oslo "not to sign an agreement that would give a Palestinian seal of approval to the 450 illegal settlers - most of them fanatics squatting with such offensive, even murderous, insistence in the centre of an Arab town.

`It isn't just the principle of the thing that is so galling,' he said, `but the fact that giving them this foothold in our midst by partitioning the town makes it possible for them to use Hebron as a precedent for staying in all their other settlements, extending their reach further all over the West Bank.'

Natshe's pleas went unheard, as Arafat and his team pressed ahead with their Israeli peace `partners' who consolidated their gains with, I suspect, a sense of disbelief. How else could even the most hardened Israeli explain that the Palestinians had accepted a formula for 'coexistence' in Hebron which gave 450 people (with the Israeli army guarding them) the choicest 20 per cent of the town's commercial centre, whereas the 160,000 resident Palestinians were expected to be happy that they got 80 per cent, so bogged down with conditions as to make it a peripheral part of the Israeli enclave.

What sort of `strategic' calculation by the Palestinian leadership produced acquiescence in the Israeli settler population being allowed to carry arms, abetted by Israeli patrols given virtually the run of the surrounding hills, while the Palestinian police were limited to a few poorly armed men, theoretically subject to Israeli restraints?

Nevertheless, there seemed to be genuine euphoria among Hebronites, for whom the presence of Israeli settlers and soldiers has been so unpleasant an ordeal; just seeing some of them leave in the hope of not having them come back on quite the same basis as before supplied a good day's worth of celebration.

But much of the jubilation will be as short-lived as it was when Ramallah and Nablus went through the same happy catharsis 18 monhs ago. Hebron was not liberated: 80 per cent of it was given the right to administer municipal affairs - sanitation, health, postal delivery, education, local security and traffic - under the Palestinian Authority's jurisdiction, with israel still in charge of security, access, water and overall sovereignty.

The ambiguities are evident in reports from Hebron in the press. On the first day,there were reports citing Netanyahu and Sharansky as to how Hebron is still Israeli, backed up by statistics showing continued Israeli control over the city. The next day, editorials and stories predicted a Palestinian state emerging soon from the messy Palestinian `archipelago' that has left the West Bank and Gaza divided into lots of little parts without territorial continuity or sovereignty.

On American TV, the de riguer scene of Arafat and Netanyahu shaking hands with American mediator Dennis Ross between them showed a grim-faced Arafat anxious to speed away into the night. As the New York Times coyly put it in its jubilant report of how well things went, the actual amounts of land to be ceded to the Palestinians were left entirely to "Israel's discretion".

Now this is precisely how things were left in the Oslo 2 documents, since just before the Washington signing the Israelis calmly removed the specific areas of re-deployment already agreed with the Palestinians and left the timetable. Apparently, Arafat demurred at this, but under American pressure was made to sign. His latest heroics during the Hebron negotiations were meant to make up for what had happened earlier; but he failed again. No wonder he didn't want to answer any questions.

It has been no secret that America, which has sub-contracted out its Middle Eastern policy to Dennis Ross and his coterie of experts, placed Arafat under pressure. Israel's political concerns and its exaggerated obsessions with security and terror were adopted by the American middlemen, who were acting as anything but honest brokers. There was also an important confluence of strategic aims that united Netanyahu and Ross: that there should never be anything resembling real Palestinian self-determination.

And three-and-a-half years after Oslo began, `autonomy' for Palestinians is all that has been achieved, in tiny enclaves on the West Bank whose roads and access are controlled by israel. An important town like Ramallah now has settlements on three sides. Sovereignty in the true sense of the word remains in Israel's hands, and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

Why do so many Israelis seem upset by this agreement, which keeps them firmly in charge throughout the still-Occupied Territories ?

The reason is an ideological fanaticism so deep and all-encompassing that most western and even Arab readers do not have an adequate sense of its imperatives. Despite the millions of Palestinians in Palestine, they have always been considered aliens, to be tolerated at most or to be driven out or treated either as non-existent or as juridical inferiors.

Palestine is considered to be the land of the Jewish people entrusted to Israel; no non-Jews are doctrinally allowed to use or have this land. That is why Netanyahu, more honest than Peres, has always refused to accept the formula `land for peace', and why sovereignty accorded to non-Jews has not, and will not be, an admissible oncept in negotiations.

I believe these positions are also shared, by the `acceptable' Israelis whose views are aired in western media as representative of the peace camp, and who brilliantly conceal their real views of Palestinians beneath conscience-rending, anguished prose. They never bring up sovereignty for Palestinians. Many of them (including the egregious Henry Kissenger) speak of a Palestinian state, which they say they would accept, but none of them has specified sovereignty and real self-determination for Palestinians.

Trying to put myself in the shoes of the PLO men who continue to produce such disadvantageous agreements that do nothing to change the course of Israeli policy, I keep asking what our leader must be thinking. They certainly do not do very much talking, and share very little with their people beyond the usual triumphalist nonsense.

All I come up with is a series of unflattering rationales for going on as before, with equally bad results and equally tragic consequences for the whole people. One is that as long as the peace process guarantees the centrality of the PLO and its leader, then anything goes. Another is that being so out-gunned and out-smarted by Israel, you feel you have no choice but to go on, trying to brazen it out vis-a-vis your own people with hopeful but ultimately misleading speeches and promises; meanwhile, you surround yourself with supporters who tell you what you want to hear, and are anxious to help you set up feel-good things like a bag-pipe bend, a few luxurious cars and houses, and postage stamps with your face on them. The best thing is to go on as many state visits (none of them necessary) as possible, one day Stockholm, another Paris, another Cairo.

A third rationale is to make more concessions, accepting all the humiliating Israeli concessions in the wishful fantasy that some day you'll either stop having to make concessions or the Israelis will give you a few things back.

Fourthly, you can say that this is politics, a dirty business, and so we proceed with the Israelis like partners in crime; never mind that they get all the advantages, a lot of commercial deals have come our way.

There may be one or two more possibilities, but none explains the Palestinian streets' acceptance of this appalling situation, which seems to worsen daily. Many of Arafat's adviser are intelligent men and women, quite a few with long histories in progressive politics. Why are they so silent? And why do the most gifted so willingly accept a few material advantages (a car, an office, a VIP designation) in return for continuing to work with a man whose tactics they loathe and whose mistakes over the past few years they known - and say openly - has brought as Palestinians and as Arabs to one of the lowest points in our history?

Why silence, and why co-operation ? Do they feel no obligation towards the truth and to the misery of a people whose continuing dispossession could have been alleviated a thousand times better than the PLO has done ?

In the meantime, most people in America and in Europe genuinely believe that peace has improved things for the `area', and that for the first time in 30 years the Palestinians are getting their freedom.

This is the cruelty of the Palestinian dilemma. We want to show that we desire peace, yet because of that `peace', the daily lives of all but a tiny handful of wealthy businessmen, security chiefs and PA employees have become a good deal worse.

For at least six months, the mainstream media in the US and Europe have been filled with stories about the diplomatic front, the negotiations, the impasses and the final breakthroughs, and completely void of anything that shows real Palestinian lives on the ground.

There has been no coverage of the thousands of students in Gaza who cannot go back to their schools and universities on the West Bank (forbidden by Israel); nothing about the large number of Palestinians prisoners still festering (and in some cases being tortured to death) in Israeli prisons; nothing about the horrors that a large family in Gaza with unemployed father must go through to survive; nothing about the systematic, almost daily reprisals against Palestinians who try to prevent their own dispossession by Israeli settlers and army; nothing about what it means for a Palestinian to try to get in and out of Gaza (or about all West Bankers who have been forbidden entry into Jerusalem for a year); nothing about the checkpoints that make the little West Bank enclaves seem like stifling ghettos; nothing about life under Craft's dreadful regime, with books, newspapers and magazines censored or banned, the security services threatening average people, and corruption killing the possibility of regular daily business.

And nothing, above all, about the total absence of law or the rule of law in the Palestinian autonomy areas.

Given all this, plus the sense of frustration and hopelessness felt by every Palestinian at the cruel farce our leaders are forced to enact,it becomes an absolute duty to describe the actualities of quotidian life under the peace process - unadorned and in the greatest detail possible.

The world must be told by us what our people under occupation are still going through. This is not a matter of money, but of discipline and will. If every one of us first took it upon him or herself to be informed, and then attempted somehow to break through the official snd media silence - with a letter to the editor, a call to a radio or TV station, the setting-up of groups to do this kind of work systematically and collectively - - then we will be beginning our attempt at liberation, a laughably modest attempt it is true, but surely a great deal better than passivity and silence.

The present situation cannot last. There are too many inequities and injustices right at the heart of Palestinian life. Who is preparing for the next, post-Hebron phase?

Return to Contents

Dr. Sa'di Al-Krunz of Al Azar University is a Fatah representative from the Deir Al-Balah District in the Gaza Strip in the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC).

IMRA interviewed Dr. Al-Krunz in English on May 19. The interview, in its entirety, appears below.

IMRA: Does the current impasse in Israel-Palestinian Authority (PA) relations hurt Palestinian national unity?

Al_Krunz: No. I don't think it is hurting Palestinian national unity. When we have troubles we are united.

IMRA: What about Chairman Arafat's position?

Al_Krunz: It isn't not hurting Arafat's position. It is helping the opposition of the people to the peace process. The percentage of people supporting the peace process is decreasing in a very bad way.

IMRA: Is time on Netanyahu's side or Arafat's side?

Al_Krunz: The time is on Netanyahu's side because they are building settlements and this helps their position.

IMRA: Does that push the Palestinians to compromise?

Al_Krunz: I don't think so. We want - that is both the people and the Palestinian Legislative Council - to stop the process. Today, with the peace process, we are protecting the settlers. The Palestinian Police is acting like Lahad's army in South Lebanon.

IMRA: If there is no peace process then what do you see in its place?

Al_Krunz: I don't think that what the Israelis see now of peace and prosperity will continue. There will be more military operations agaisnt the Israelis because under these circumstances the Palestinian Police will have to be with the people. Arafat can't be tough with the Palestinians and he can't make concessions. There can't be any security cooperation with Israel.

IMRA: Will the stalemate lead to war?

Al_Krunz: You see that the Palestinian problem is the core problem in the Middle East. The relations between Israel and the entire Arab world will be bad. Even Israeli relations with the Gulf countries will also be affected. If there was peace then you would have warm relations between Israel and all the Arabs states along the lines that Israel used to have with Jordan.

IMRA: What will happen ultimately?

Al_Krunz: After the Madrid Conference things between Israel and the Arabs countries started to improve - to the benefit of everyone in the Middle East. After what has happened I think we will return to what was before Madrid.

IMRA: What happens with the PA?

Al_Krunz: Believe me, if Israel came back to the territories that they occupied before - including Gaza - it would be better for the Palestinians. I talk with the people and many feel this way.

IMRA: A return to the occupation is preferable to the current situation?

Al_Krunz: We have nothing to lose if it continues this way. What are we gaining from the current situation? A return to Israeli occupation would be better so that we can fight with no constraints. Right now under the situation we are helping them confiscate Palestinian land. Since the peace process started the rate of settlement activity is maybe ten times what it was in the past. Today the settlers are feeling safe in Gaza, Nablus, etc. so there are new settlers arriving because they feel safe. We are in a bad situation. Before, any settler who wanted to come to Gaza would think twice.

IMRA: And then?

Al_Krunz: What I believe is that what the Israelis will gain from constructing new settlements is nothing compared to what they will gain by making peace with the Arabs. And if Israel makes peace here it can make peace with everyone in the Middle East because things will change. Because instead of hating each other we would understand that there is Israel, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, etc. and we have to work and live together etc.. If the peace process would go in same direction as during the time of Rabin/Peres it would be good for all - more money for everyone, a better life, etc..

IMRA: What do you think of the Beilin-Mazen plan?

Al_Krunz: We know nothing about Beilin-Mazen. Maybe there was some talk. Some kind of agreement. But nothing official that could be said to be more than the thoughts and opinions of Beilin and Abu Mazen.

The Likud isn't sincere about the peace process but we are sincere as we have no choice.

IMRA: One of the major issues is the return of refugees to within the Green Line. What do you think is the solution?

Al-Krunz: For me I believe that only solution is to apply the United Nations resolution - every person who wants to return can return. But if we reach the situation that have peace and love between neighbors then why should that be a problem? I used to live in Indiana with all kinds - Jewish, Indians, you name it, and there was no problem.

The apartheid in South Africa ended. The Jewish state which was built with the idea of keeping out the Arabs will lead to the same results that happened in South Africa. It is inevitable that the world won't accept this . I have visited Germany and other European countries and I see that the sympathy is for the Palestinian people. Maybe not yet in the United States but eventually it will be.

IMRA: The Israeli Labor Party keeps talking about separation. It sounds like you feel separation is impossible.

Al-Krunz: You see everyone knows that you can't draw a line. You can draw a line but it won't be a real line. They will have no choice but to allow the refugees back into all of Palestine. We have refugees everywhere. If there are Jews who want to return to their homes within the autonomy that would be OK. In the end we would have two states - one with a Palestinian majority and the other with a Jewish majority.

Dr. Aaron Lerner,
Director IMRA (Independent Media Review & Analysis)
P.O.BOX 982 Kfar Sava
Tel: (+972-9) 760-4719
Fax: (+972-9) 741-1645
imra@netvision.net.il

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Gaza is the most conservative of Palestinian communities; its Islamist militants once set fire to a sea-front hotel, a restaurant and other such dens of iniquity.

So imagine the pious horror at the opening of Gaza's first and only nightclub. On a Thursday evening of the Muslim weekend, I found the Zahra al-Mada'in, the Flower of the Cities, packed almost to capacity, not just with lonely young men come to admire Gaza's first belly dancers and songstresses - locally recruited gypsies - but with entire families, women, children and even a babe-in-arms.

In other smart or risque places, you can add illicit liquor to your Coca-Cola, but here, in another Gazan first, you can order your scotch or your Israeli Maccabee beer on the very premises. However the oddest thing is not so much the place, but the clientele: they are mainly "Tunisians", not Gazans at all.

Tunis was Yasser Arafat's last headquarters in exile, and "the Tunisians" is a nickname which Gazans gave to those, officially known as "returnees", who came with him when, following the Oslo accord he established himself here instead. There are about 10,000 of them, bureaucrats who run his Palestinian Authority, former guerrillas who dominate his enormous security apparatus.

The Tunisians" have "come home" to the soil of Palestine itself. But the terrible irony is that they are not merely strangers in their own land, they are for the most part disliked, despised, even hated. It is they who introduced such abominations as Zahra al-Mada'in.

But it is not just Hamas and Islamic Jihad, or bigots in general, who feel the shock. Liberals who welcome any challenge to the dour local mores feel it too. For almost everyone, "the Tunisians" are as alien, as unfit to rule, as those - Turks, British, Egyptians, Israelis - who came before them.

And because they are actually Palestinians, and came as "liberators", the shock is even worse. Arafat's Palestine Revolution never made itself very popular, among governments, elites or even ordinary people of the territories it passed through.

But at least in Jordan, in the sixties, its men truly fought and died. So, though with less purpose or conviction, did they in Lebanon in the seventies and eighties. Obviously, during the eighties and nineties, they could not fight from Tunis, and other far-flung Arab countries in which they fetched up, but at least, as members of the world's richest liberation movement, they continued to pump money into local economies.

Here, in the homeland itself, far from fighting the former Zionist foe, they lead the collaboration with it. They may attract money in the form of international aid to this poorest of Palestinian communities, but they take at least as much away from it. They are oppressive, and immeasurably corrupt.

"We live in amazing, shameful times," said one of Gaza's merchant princes, and a former Fatah fighter himself, "but you should know that every revolution has its fighters, thinkers and profiteers. Our fighters have been killed, our thinkers assassinated, and all we have left are the profiteers. These don't think even primarily of the cause, they don't think about it at all. They know that they are just transients here, as they were in Tunis, and, as with any regime whose end is near, they think only of profiting from it while they can."

This is a damning indictment, but if any system can be measured by the conduct of its bureaucrats it is a fair one. In fact, the justice of it hits even a casual visitor in the eye. Just go to the district of Rimal. Rimal means "sand", and on this former wasteland there is now arising, at incredible speed, the most up-market neighborhood of "liberated" Gaza.

You might not think it at first sight; a sand-smothered, refuse-strewn mess of empty lots amid shacks that are disappearing and half-finished concrete monsters that are taking their place, it differs little in spirit from the rest of this desolate, infinitely decrepit and unsightly city.

But it is mainly here that "the Tunisians" have taken root, with their amazing array of "ministries", "authorities" and special "agencies", police stations and sentry posts, choice rooftop apartments, villas and places of entertainment.

Here is Arafat's own sea-front bureau, al-Muntada, The Club, with all the "presidential" trappings he so adores, and here in the very next building, is the Zahra al-Mada'in cabaret.

Here you will sooner or later run into Suha, his young wife, out for lunch at Le Mirage, an exclusive sea-front restaurant, with her infant daughter and a posse of Force-17 bodyguards. You will run into her, at least, when she is not in Paris, where she does her shopping and can find a decent hairdresser, unlike the first, disastrous Gazan one, who reportedly turned her blonde locks almost orange.

And you are bound to come across Susie, her ample British nanny who affects leopard-skin tights and often has too much to drink, a condition in which she is apt to dispense indiscretions about the presidential household, threatening, some fear, another Middle Eastern nanny scandal of Netanyahu proportions.

Among the fancy new villas, fanciest is that of Abu Mazen, key negotiator of the ill-fated Oslo accord. It is not clear who paid for this $2 million-plus affair, all balconies and balustrades in gothic profusion, but the graffiti which some irreverent scoundrel scrawled on its wall proclaimed that "this is your reward for selling Palestine".

Lifestyles match. Nabil Shaath, the highly articulate minister of planning much seen on Western TV screens, recently took a wife young enough to be his daughter. He required four receptions to celebrate this event, in Cairo, Gaza, and two in Jerusalem. Because his Israeli friends could not go to the one in East Jerusalem's Orient House, that "illegal" outpost of the Palestinian Authority, he had another in the Ambassador Hotel.

For salutary contrast with Rimal, just stroll up the coast where, just beyond Le Mirage, you will come upon the awful squalor and open sewers of the Shati' refugee camp, conditions resembling those n which most Gazans live.

There, in a windowless concrete block they call "the cafe", I asked some day laborers, idled by yet another Israeli border closure, whether they thought that Gaza's per capita income, far from rising, had actually fallen by as much as 39 per cent since the Oslo accord. For that is what a recent UN survey says. "More like 75 per cent," one replied. "some no longer think it a shame to send their children out to beg." That also seems to be borne out by the UN report, which records an "alarming" increase in "child labor".

More shocking, really, than the contrast itself is what lies behind it. When he first came here, Arafat said he would turn Gaza into a "new Singapore". Palestinian businessmen, who made their fortunes building the Arab oil states, would help him build his.

But, three years on, it is clear that none will seriously touch it. Not just the Israelis deter them, with their repeated frontier closures that bedevil businessmen as well as workers. In truth, Arafat does not want them either.

For they would undermine his control, achieved through a combination of police surveillance and money power. So instead of any kind of independent, creative, wealth-producing capitalism, he and his coterie of unofficial economic "advisers" have thrown up a ramshackle, nepotistic edifice of monopoly, racketeering and naked extortion that enriches them as it further impoverishes society at large.

Two years ago, the al-Bahr company barely existed. Al-Bahr means "sea". But Gazans now dub it "the ocean", because, they say, "it is swallowing Gaza whole". Legally speaking, not being officially registered, it should not be operating at all. Yet it is so brazen about its powerful connections that, to the impotent indignation of the Palestinian "parliament", it even uses the Authority's letter heads.

It belongs to Arafat, or, more precisely, to his wife Suha and the other "shareholders" who handle his private finances. Al-Bahr - who else? - runs the Zahra al-Mada'in nightclub.

The premises were supposed to go by open tender to the most qualified bidder. But Arafat just signed a decree placing it in his protege's hands. It is never by fair, and often by quite foul, means that Arafat Incorporated moves into real estate, entertainment, computers, advertising, medicine, insurance. Only the most powerful Gazan businessmen can resist its encroachments. It goes chiefly after small and medium fry. These are pressed into "partnership" with al-Bahr.

Al-Bahr is the new, strictly domestic instrument of Arafat's takeover of the Gazan economy. It complements already existing monopolies, for the import of such basic commodities as cement, petrol or flour, which he operates in complicity with the Israelis. For example, out of the $74 for which a ton of cement is sold in Gaza, $17 goes to the Authority, and $17 into his own account in a Tel Aviv bank.

It is no secret what Arafat uses this money for. "I shall give you all you want if you obey and protect me - and give me all I want."

That has always been his message to his nomenklatura, and it has been amazingly successful. For what resistance can be expected from an apparatus whose minister of civil affairs, Jamil Tarifi, a big contractor, goes on building Israeli settlements even as the Palestinian people threaten a new intifada over Har Homa?

Or whose high officials use their VIP cars to sail through Israeli checkpoints on their way to the fleshpots of Tel Aviv even as Israeli border closures rob day laborers of their menial wage?

Rarely can a revolution have degenerated like Arafat's and yet survived. It only survives because, in robbing his people to bribe his bureaucrats, he has proved so great a commitment to the peace process that the parties on which he now completely depends - Israelis, Americans, the international community at large - are willing to ignore, even encourage, his manifest corruptions.

The Israelis may be embarrassed by the latest, scandalous revelations of their leading newspaper, Ha'aretz, about the Arafat slush fund that the great peace-maker, Yitzhak Rabin, authorized.

But so long as Arafat goes on bending to their conception of the peace, they will go on letting him draw on it.

European governments would be far more embarrassed if it were established that Arafat really does earn far more from al-Bahr and his illicit monopolies than from all their aid combined. But unless the scandal becomes too great, they will go on paying too. But they delude themselves if they think that they can go on propping him up for ever. And in this regard, it seems, Arafat and his "Tunisians" are more clear-headed than they are. They know that there is a point beyond which even he cannot go without risking his people's wrath.

Small wonder then that, according to Ha'aretz, a part of Arafat's secret fund is earmarked for "emergency situations", such as a coup or a civil war, in which he, his family and immediate entourage could be forced to flee into exile once more, and re-establish the leadership from there. They know, better than anyone, that the peace process, and all they get out of it, is built, like the Zahra al-Mada'in, on nothing more solid than the fine white powdery sands of Rimal.

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The following is IMRA's translation of the Hebrew letter sent by Meretz (Peace Now) M.K. Ran Cohen to Chairman Yasser Arafat. M.K. Cohen provided IMRA a copy of the original Hebrew letter.

The Knesset
MK Ran Cohen
Jerusalem

13 Iyar 5757
20 May, 1997

Chairman of the Palestinian Authority Mr. Yasser Arafat
Gaza

Dear Sir,

As someone who has worked for and yearned for a humane solution of peace and security for the State of Israel and the Palestinian people for 30 years, I feel a moral and state obligation to turn to you with the expectation that you will forbid and publicly denounce acts of murder and execution within the area of the Palestinian Authority in general and regarding the sale of land in particular.

The reaction of your assistant, Marwan Kanafani, this morning, causes the greatest of concern. Kanafani does not differentiate between the prohibition on the sale of land as is practiced by the "Jewish National Fund", and the justification and approval of murder, which was never given in Israel. It is the full right of the Authority, of course, to set its position regarding the sale of land, but between this to permitting murder lies a moral void.

Mr. Chairman, you can denigrate those who shout "death to the Arabs" at the same time that the Palestinians are denounced for the murder of land dealers. But you cannot ignore two vital considerations:

1. The State of Israel did not carry out a death sentence, even in the case of first degree murderers who slaughtered innocent citizens (mostly Jews, a minority Arabs).

2. The Palestinian people, on its way to a Palestinian state, must free itself from terrorist and cruel elements and images, both for its own good and for the good of good neighborliness and peace with Israel.

There is not yet evidence to the responsibility of the Palestinian Authority for the murder and the investigation continues, but the stain exists. And for that I ask you to rise and publicly announce your position forbidding murder!

Regards,

MK Ran Cohen

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