The New Palestinian Revolt

Chris Hedges

From Foreign Affairs, January/February 2001

Summary:  Last autumn's fresh outbreak of violence between Palestinians and Israelis has shaken an assumption that has reigned since the 1993 Oslo peace accords: that negotiations and interim agreements can lay the roadwork for a lasting peace. Now Oslo's delegitimization has swayed public opinion in Israel and the occupied territories away from compromise and toward more radical solutions.

Chris Hedges is a reporter for The New York Times. He was Middle East Bureau Chief for The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, based in Jerusalem and Cairo, from 1988 to 1995.

The Palestinian position has now hardened, leaving little chance for a return to the Oslo process. Palestinian leaders talk only of U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, which calls on Israel to withdraw from the territory it occupied following the Six-Day War and for all the states in the region to recognize and respect each other's borders.

"This intifada has changed the basis of negotiations," Marwan Barghouthi, a leader of Arafat's Fatah faction in the West Bank, said recently in a speech at Bir Zeit University. "We will not return to the negotiations and become hostages to the Israelis and the Americans without having any action on the ground. The aim of this intifada is clear: the return of refugees, ending occupation, gaining independence and sovereignty, and establishing Palestinian sovereignty over Jerusalem."

the new warriors

Yasid Abu Abed, a veteran fighter in Fatah, stepped over the wreckage caused by Israeli missile attacks in his headquarters in Gaza City -- chunks of concrete, broken beams, twisted iron reinforcing rods, and mangled furniture. Clustered around him were bodyguards who clutched an eclectic collection of weapons, including American-made m-16 assault rifles and outdated black snub-nosed Russian machine guns. Some in the entourage had covered their faces with Palestinian flags or hoods, some wore uniforms, and some had strapped webbed belts with green cartridge cases over their jeans.

These ragtag fighters, members of a Palestinian militia known as the tanzim ("organization" in Arabic), will largely determine whether the battles with Israel continue. The police of the Palestinian Authority, whether out of sympathy or impotence, often watch passively as tanzim members fire toward Israeli positions in spots such as the Nezarim junction in Gaza or at Ramallah in the West Bank, often provoking a withering and deadly Israeli response.

Rayad Zaid, 21, is typical of those who have spent most of their lives fighting Israelis. As a child he often missed school to stone Israeli soldiers on patrol. He has been shot in the leg three times and carries a scar on his forehead from a rubber bullet. His father spent 13 years in Israeli jails. He said his mother, an asthmatic, died after inhaling tear gas when he was 11. "I will make any sacrifice for my people and my country," he said in the Jabaliya refugee camp, "and I will strap explosives on my body and blow myself up to attack the Israelis if it is required."

Palestinians have acquired large numbers of automatic weapons over the past couple of years. During the first intifada it was rare to find guns in the hands of protesters. It was even rarer to see them used against Israelis. But the streets of Gaza are now awash with a wide variety of guns, some of which look like they belong in a museum. Israel has permitted the ruling Palestinian Authority to obtain some light weapons, but many more have been smuggled in from Jordan, Egypt, and even Israel, militia leaders say.

Tanzim commanders say they will mount a protracted guerrilla war against Israel, a war of attrition modeled on Hezbollah's efforts in southern Lebanon. They point out that many of the inhabitants of the Israeli settlements around Ramallah, Gilo, and three settlements in Gaza -- Nezarim, Kefar Darom, and Morag -- have fled, despite the deployment of Israeli tanks and armored personnel carriers intended to protect them.

"We know that the Israelis have powerful weapons," said Abu Abed, who spent five years in Israeli jails, "but we are willing to take losses they would never accept. Hezbollah, with little more than light weapons, drove Israel out of Lebanon. We, with nothing more than rocks, forced them to return part of our land. With our guns we are ready to liberate all of Palestine and our capital, holy Jerusalem."

an unwinnable war?