Abu Mazen cannot commit suicide
DANNY RUBINSTEIN
Ha'aretz, 21 August 2003
Not even the bloody suicide bombing in Jerusalem will bring Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) to relentlessly pursue the activists of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad. He and his ministers in the Palestinian government will not use force to restrain the Islamic fanatics; they will not even confiscate their weapons. Abbas and his Minister of State for Security Affair Mohammed Dahlan are no doubt under great pressure from the Americans to do just that and the Israeli government is also insisting on it - but in the present reality in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, it is simply not possible.
In Gaza, ostensibly, it should not be a problem for Abbas and Dahlan to put down the Hamas and the Jihad by force. The security forces there are paying salaries to about 50,000 people. Many of them bear arms and quantitatively they are far more numerous than those who bear arms in the Islamic organizations.
Intelligence sources, both Israeli and Palestinian, estimate the number of the members of the armed branches of the Hamas and the Jihad (the Al Qassam Brigades and the Al Quds Companies) at several hundred, perhaps a thousand. Therefore there should be no problem for the Palestinian Authority to confront them.
But the problem is not just the number of soldiers the two sides have. Public opinion is very important, and in Gaza there are signs that indicate that the rate of public support for the Islamic organizations is no lower than the rate of support for the PA. Moreover, if Abu Mazen decides to use force against the strict Muslims, almost certainly the rate of support for them will increase and Abu Mazen will be considered a traitor who is serving Israel by bringing about a civil war.
Hamas and Jihad activists in Gaza have often proved that they do not give in. Nearly a year ago, for example, Hamas people, members of the Al Aql clan from the Nuseirat refugee camp, murdered Rjah Abu Lehiyya, a senior commander in the Palestinian security forces. They abducted him on a main street in Gaza and executed him because a year earlier he had opened fire to disperse student supporters of the Hamas, killing three of them.
Palestinian security people who came to the Nuseirat Camp to arrest the murderers were attacked by thousands of inhabitants of the camp and fled. For many months PA representatives negotiated with the Al Aql clan and the Hamas in order to calm things down. Another incident occurred a few weeks ago when a missile was fired on the office of General Moussa Arafat, the head of Military Intelligence, and he miraculously escaped with his life.
These are examples of the determination of the Muslim fanatics whose spokesman, Abed al Aziz al Rantisi, said with a fair amount of cynicism after the terror attack in Jerusalem that it should not be seen as the end of the hudna. "The hudna continues, but our response to the crimes of the Zionist enemy also continues," said Rantisi, who fully justified the terror attack.
In contrast to the Islamic determination in Gaza, the flabbiness and hesitancy of the Palestinian security organizations is evident. Back when Palestinian television filmed the arrests of Hamas activists in Gaza, the Palestinian policemen were shown with their faces covered. They were not secret police, but regular police. Probably they hid their faces from embarrassment at what they were doing and perhaps because they were afraid that the arrests would be avenged.
This is the situation in Gaza, where the security organizations have hardly been damaged. In the West Bank, however, the Palestinian security system was almost completely wiped out in Operation Defensive Shield in the spring of 2002. The elimination of the Palestinian security system in the West Bank in effect transferred the security responsibility in the West Bank cities from the PA to the Israel Defense Forces.
Thus, it is difficult even to complain to Abu Mazen and Dahlan that they are not forcefully suppressing the Islamic organizations in Nablus, Jenin and Hebron. Abu Mazen can, therefore, warn the Hamas, be angry with them and break off contact with them. But if he tries to confront them it will, as far as he is concerned, be an act of political suicide, and perhaps not just political.