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Features
Palestine: missing Arafat
From Graham Usher in Jenin
December 1st, 2004 -- It is 15 November. The Israeli army has ended a two-week long incursion into Jenin. Nine Palestinians have been killed, including four civilians, 25 have been wounded and 25 arrested. One arms cache has been found. It is the third morning of Id al-Fitr, the fifth after Yaser Arafat’s death. Jenin is a ruin of shell-cratered roads and lampposts flattened by tanks. As the Israelis drive out, we drive in, looking for the same man.
Zakariya Zubaydi is the leader of the Aqsa Martyrs Brigades (AMB) in the northern West Bank, a militia whose ties to Arafat’s ruling Fatah movement grow ever looser. The latest raid was Israel’s fourth attempt at killing him.
The first time, the Israelis thought he was cornered in Jenin Refugee Camp; the second, on the second floor of a house; the third, in a stolen army jeep. Each time he evaded them, though five of his men were killed in the jeep, including a 14-year-old boy. This time too he slipped the noose, but with the loss of his AMB deputy, Alaa.
We meet him in a “safe house”. He is wearing a blue anorak, a fur collar turned up against the cold. A Kalashnikov is propped up on the sofa beside him. Outside the window children play “Aqsa Martyrs Brigades versus the army”. They are firing plastic Kalashnikovs. One of them is Zubaydi. “Bang!”
The fourth generation
He is 27 years old but looks younger, helped by pop star looks, with black hair and large brown eyes. The youthfulness is reinforced by what can only be described as a kind of innocence. At one point an older woman kisses him on both cheeks. He is troubled by the intimacy but at a loss to prevent it.
He is an age older than his years. His face is seared from a bomb blast; whether it was his own or Israel’s is not clear. He smokes incessantly. When a firecracker goes off outside the window his shoulders hunch.
His life — what remains of it — has entered folklore, tracking in its violence the latest descent of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Thousands like him have walked the same path. They are the so-called fourth generation of Fatah leaders, Palestinians born and bred under Israeli occupation but betrayed by Oslo and the promise of freedom it carried. His journey went like this.
As a child, Zubaydi was part of a joint Palestinian-Israeli theatre troupe, when peace seemed possible, even in Jenin. At 14 he was jailed for six months for throwing stones at an Israeli patrol. In all he has spent seven years in Israeli prisons.
In the bloody eye of the Intifada he has seen his mother and a brother killed by the Israelis, his home destroyed, two other brothers imprisoned and dozens of his peers detained, maimed or executed. In revenge, he has dispatched dozens to kill Israelis, including civilians, including mothers and brothers, inside Israel. He is married, with one son, who, he says, will continue the fight.
He knows he is hanging from a burning bridge and that the Israelis want him dead, but it is not his death that concerns him when we meet. It is that of his leader and the consequences this has for his movement and cause.
Not Abu Mazen
“Yaser Arafat’s death is a big blow to the AMB,” he says. “With Arafat I was sure our political aims were safe while we were fighting the occupation. For the last four years I have lived as a fighter, like Yaser Arafat. I felt he understood me because he had been in my place at a certain point in his life. Now? Now, I am not so sure”.
You think Abu Mazen [Mahmud Abbas, the new PLO chairman] doesn’t understand you?
“I don’t trust Abu Mazen with our national constants — I mean Jerusalem and the right of return for the Palestinian refugees. None of the factions do. All of the factions saw Arafat as the trustee of our cause. That’s why he was poisoned. That’s why Israel killed him.”
So, you are opposed to Abu Mazen becoming the next Palestinian Authority president?
He looks at his three colleagues in the room.
“If a majority in Fatah supports Abu Mazen’s candidacy, I will commit myself to that decision — as long as it is decided by elections throughout Fatah and not just the Central Committee [the highest decision-making body in Fatah],” he says. “But if Abu Mazen starts to mess with our unalterable positions — with Jerusalem, the right of return, a Palestinian state, the release of prisoners — we will not recognize his leadership.”
You would act against him?
“I belong to Fatah. I cannot use my weapons in an internal struggle.”
So the AMB would split from Fatah?
“The AMB will not split from Fatah. We would have to accept these differences.”
Who would you vote for?
“Marwan Barghuthi [Fatah’s imprisoned West Bank leader]. But I am speaking for myself, not the AMB,” he says, with another glance around the room.
Zubaydi’s shifting answers reflect the confusion into which Arafat’s death has thrown Fatah, particularly its militia fighters. Where once there was an anchor, even if marooned in its Ramallah headquarters, today there are rapids, streaming to different shores. Zubaydi has no clue whether he (and hundreds like him) are about to saved or dashed by them.
The purity of arms
What is clear is that Abu Mazen and others in the new leadership want to end the “chaos of arms” in the Palestinian areas, such as the skirmish that left two Palestinian policemen dead while Abu Mazen was attending Arafat’s mourning tent in Gaza (MEI 738). Zubaydi condemned the killings in a phone call to Al Jazeera, dissociating the AMB from the “mistake”. But he knows he and his men are included in Abu Mazen’s sights.
In June Zubaydi abducted the PA’s governor of Jenin, Haydar Irshad, and (in his words) “beat the shit out of him” for refusing to pay salaries to the AMB. He also burned down the local office of the elected Palestinian Legislative Council.
Zubaydi says his struggle is not against the PA. “We want the PA to fulfil its role on the ground. But in the absence of law I have to fill the vacuum for Fatah,” he says. It is not clear whether Palestinians in Jenin want this kind of guardianship. According to polls, what they want are new presidential, parliamentary and municipal elections and the rule of law. Zubaydi does not.
“I want the Central Council to recognize the AMB as Fatah’s military wing. But they reject us. I want Fatah to be reconstructed. But they say the occupation doesn’t permit this. So how come they can organize presidential elections under the occupation? Democracy is not feasible under occupation. Suppose Hamas were to win the Legislative Council elections? The Israelis would lay siege to the building.”
“Look,” he says. “We are at war. We need a commander-in-chief. But we are separating our powers. Abu Mazen is head of the PLO but not the PA. Abu Ala [Ahmad Quray, the PA prime minister] is in charge of the security forces. The leader of Fatah [Faruq Qaddumi] is outside the West Bank and Gaza. All of this opens the window to an internal struggle among the Palestinians. It will breed chaos. It gives Israel the upper hand.”
Fear your friends
We drink bitter coffee to mourn Arafat’s death and eat dates to celebrate his martyrdom. The talk turns to money, the cause of Zubaydi’s fight with Irshad and other Fatah officials.
“We never relied just on Fatah. We had other sources. But the situation is difficult. Everything will be influenced by Yaser Arafat’s death. If we could move, if we were free, I wouldn’t have had to burn the Legislative Council building. One trip to Arafat in Ramallah and the problem would have been solved.
“Many people are having second thoughts now, now he’s buried,” he says. “We will miss him more. The Americans will recognize in the future the vacuum he has left behind. Even the Israelis will regret his passing. With Yaser Arafat they had a leader with whom they could have struck a deal. Arafat had strings and influence with every faction.”
When he looks to the future is it with hope or fear?
“I don’t fear for my life. I fear for our final, crucial decisions. I fear for the AMB because our situation is more dangerous now,” he says, cradling his gun. “In the military we have a saying: ‘Fear not your foes — fear your friends.’”
All content ©1971-2004 Middle East International.
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