A PORTLY official from the office of the Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, planted a kiss on Musa Abu Mariya’s right eye, enveloped him in a bear hug and sped off in his sport utility vehicle trailing a cloud of dust. Mr Abu Mariya organises protests in Beit Omar, a town on the West Bank, against Israel’s appropriation of land for settlements and security walls that can cut through Palestinian farms and hurt the villagers’ livelihood. As official visits go, it was better than most. But the kiss left Mr Abu Mariya squirming. These days he no longer knows whether the pre-dawn knock on his door heralds Israeli or Palestinian security men. In recent weeks, both have hauled him off to their prisons.
The Palestinian official’s visit illustrates the dilemma faced by the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Mr Fayyad. Publicly, the PA celebrates Mr Abu Mariya’s peaceful protests beneath Israel’s concrete watch-towers. His sit-downs in Beit Omar, on the main road that Jewish settlers use between Jerusalem and Hebron, the biggest Palestinian city in the southern part of the West Bank, chime with the PA’s own boycott of anything to do with the settlements. The PA recently gave the 25,000-odd Palestinians who work in them until the end of the year to give up their jobs or face up to five years in jail. And both the protesters and the PA share the common aim of ending the occupation in the 80% of the West Bank, known as Areas B and C, that are controlled directly by the Israeli army.
Yet the increasingly vocal protests by Mr Abu Mariya and others like him are disturbing the quiet that the PA has preserved since Israel crushed the Palestinians’ second intifada (uprising) some four years ago and that has given Mr Fayyad the space to start building a state from the bottom up. While the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, looks to American-mediated negotiations, which have just resumed indirectly, to bring about a future Palestinian state, Mr Fayyad has used the calm to try to resuscitate the economy and train security forces. Should protests, now concentrated in the rural parts of the West Bank and numbering around 40 a week, turn violent, Israel may once again feel obliged to rumble in and upset the PA’s plans. “Things are happening outside the cities beyond our control,” says a PA security official. “You can ride the tiger, but you have no idea where it is heading.”
Through kisses and harsher means, the Palestinian Authority is seeking to tame the protesters. Mr Fayyad, a former World Bank man admired by many Western leaders, has fronted rallies and at public bonfires symbolically burned products made by Israeli settlers. With foreign diplomats in tow, he recently went to Bilin, a village famous for its protests, and opened a conference for “Palestinian popular resistance”. He has even appointed a minister for the Annexation Wall and Settlements with a $63m budget to oversee his own protest committees. This week the minister, Maher Ghnemi, hosted Mr Abu Mariya and other protest leaders in Ramallah.
But to Israeli military men who run Areas B and C, Mr Fayyad’s actions risk stoking another intifada. To Mr Abu Mariya, they look like a veiled bid by Mr Fayyad to gain control of an independent grassroots movement and to turn the drive for a Palestinian state into a cause without rebels.
In cities such as Nablus, the biggest in the northern bit of the West Bank and the hub of the second intifada, that mission seems largely accomplished. The city’s billboards, once covered in portraits of “martyred” fighters, including suicide-bombers, now sport advertisements for fancy shops. As the influence of Islamist radicals wanes, more girls have shed their veils. Earlier this year, Nablus police made their first arrest for drunken-driving since the intifada.
But in the hills outside the cities, where Israel still rules, Palestinian anger against the impotence of their own authorities is still fierce. “No one from the PA comes to help us,” complains Azmi Shweikhi, who has the misfortune to live just below a Jewish settlement run by Baruch Marzel, a far-right zealot who, he says, empties his rubbish on his Palestinian neighbour below and is blamed for sawing down the olive trees on his terrace. To add to Mr Shweikhi’s misery, Israel’s authorities recently gave him an eviction order.
Mr Abu Mariya admits to tapping into such discontent but rejects accusations that he is travelling down a slippery slope towards violence. Campaigners, he says, have learnt from the experience of the second intifada that they are outgunned. Non-violent protest is more effective, though some of his followers make an exception for throwing stones in return for soldiers’ gunfire. Though not yet a mass movement, Mr Abu Mariya has mobilised unarmed female, international and Israeli sympathisers, including his wife, a Jewish-American. Each week, across the West Bank, they brave soldiers’ tear-gas, rubber-coated bullets and beatings-up. Last year 145 people, including 62 Israeli and Palestinian security people, were injured in demonstrations, 40% more than in 2008.
Political opponents of Mr Fayyad, a technocrat who has sought to avoid being tagged with any particular label, have also jumped on the protesters’ bandwagon. Those in the secular Fatah party, which has been largely excluded from Mr Fayyad’s government in the West Bank (and from that of the Islamist movement, Hamas, in the Gaza Strip), have taken to flag-waving at demonstrations to remind people that they are still there. Hamas, which denounces both negotiations and Mr Fayyad’s state-building project and has, as a result, been virtually banned from political activity in the West Bank, is also looking for ways of expressing itself. Beit Omar’s former mayor, a Hamas man who was sacked by Mr Fayyad, walks at the front of the town’s marches, arm-in-arm with left-wing Israelis. “Popular resistance is the right way to resist the occupation,” says Mahmoud Ramahi, a senior Hamas member of the Palestinian parliament.
Bolstered by people power, such protests have had an effect. In Bilin, Budrus and other spots along Israel’s barrier that takes bites out of Palestinian territory in the West Bank, they may have helped persuade Israel’s courts to push the West Bank barrier closer to the boundary that existed before the war of 1967. “Weakness is our strength,” says Mr Abu Mariya.
However, that may not work much longer. In addition to Israeli gunfire and tear-gas, PA security men in plain clothes have begun to infiltrate the ranks of the protesters to spot people who might want a third intifada. Some suspect that, as well as suppressing Hamas, Mr Fayyad’s forces also want to prove their effectiveness and thus gain Israel’s trust. In a few places Israel’s army has already expanded the territory where PA security forces can operate outside the cities to which the Oslo Accords of 1993 had confined them, particularly around Hebron. Israel has also hinted that as reward for the current proximity talks more territorial extensions could be in the offing. But the protesters complain that Mr Fayyad’s men are doing the occupier’s dirty work. Worryingly for Mr Abu Mariya, Israel’s military authorities are even considering a PA request to build a police station in Beit Omar.
Israel benefits as well as the PA. After all, the fiercest challenges to its rule have been in the villages of the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, all places that have been under Israel’s military control. Israel would be only too happy to let Mr Fayyad’s men rid them of havens for Hamas and car thieves. But not all Israel’s soldiers feel so comfortable about helping the PA extend its control. They often make sure the Palestinians, whoever they are, know who is in charge, sometimes by patrolling around the PA’s seat of government in Ramallah. After the fat PA official had delivered his message to the gaunt Mr Abu Mariya, gently requesting good behaviour, he too found his exit blocked by Israeli soldiers, who had put boulders at the entrance to Beit Omar. With or without their good behaviour, the Palestinians still have a long way to go before they build a state. But Mr Fayyad has made a fair start.
Front Page Features