Zacharia Zubeidi: The marked man
DONALD MacINTYRE
Independent, 28 May 2004
Zacharia Zubeidi, head of the al-Aqsa Martyrs brigade in Jenin, has survived four assassination attempts by Israeli forces. He tells DONALD MacINTYRE he is fighting for his sons' future
Jenin -- A tendency to fidget is the nearest Zacharia Zubeidi gets to betraying the nervousness of a man who can reasonably expect to be gunned down any day now.
He fiddles repeatedly with his pack of L&M cigarettes, with his orange plastic lighter, with his sleek little Samsung cellphone, and, when he finally pulls it out from behind his belt, the silvery Smith & Wesson pistol with which he fired from a second-floor window at the Israeli troops who came for him in pouring rain at 3am back in February. He took three bullets in his left arm before escaping through the alleys of the Jenin refugee camp and hiding in a chicken coop until 9 o'clock.
Here on a warm sunny morning in the heart of the camp, where "every home has a weapon", he feels relatively safe. True, the intermediary who has arranged the interview gets up to peer through the half-closed shutters each time he hears a vehicle on the dirt road outside. But if the army comes looking for him, Zubeidi insists, "they will have difficulty getting out".
At night, and despite rotating where he sleeps, "I am a different person. I have weapons, guards, my finger on the trigger all night." His face, partly blackened by scorch marks left by a bomb which blew up when he was preparing it 16 months ago, cracks into a grin as he adds, "I sleep with one eye closed and the other open."
For the 28-year-old Zubeidi is the Jenin head of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the armed Palestinian faction linked to Yasser Arafat's Fatah, and one of the highest-profile armed militants in the West Bank. He rose to local prominence in the battle that came after Israeli tanks rolled into the Jenin refugee camp in April 2002, and which left 52 Palestinians - including one of his five brothers - and 23 Israeli soldiers dead.
He declines to discuss how many Israeli deaths he has been personally responsible for since then, or the details of the many operations the faction has conducted from Jenin against civilians, soldiers and settlers. But last month he boasted that "hundreds of Palestinians" had come to him offering themselves as suicide bombers to avenge the killing of Palestinian militants.
Zubeidi, 6ft 1in tall and notably thin, became suddenly famous when in July 2003 he kidnapped the then governor of Jenin, Heydar Irsheid, whom he accused of corruption and collaboration with the Israelis, releasing him only when he was personally ordered to do so by the one man to whom he professes allegiance in the Palestinian leadership, Yasser Arafat.
While on the subject of the PLO chairman, what about his periodic condemnations of murders carried out by Palestinian militants? "It's a tactic," says Zubeidi. About this at least, he and the Israelis, who hold Arafat's Fatah directly responsible for financing the Brigades, appear to agree.
Officially an employee of the Jenin municipality, Zubeidi cheerfully admits that he does nothing for them in return for his