With two gunmen brandishing rifles on his left and another on his right, Marwan Barghouti wielded a bullhorn Tuesday with a fiery passion that helped drive the collapse of an hours-old cease-fire between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian rioters.
“We will continue spilling our blood!” exhorted Barghouti, head of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement in the West Bank, to a crowd of young Palestinians at the funeral of a boy killed in battles that have raged across the West Bank and Gaza Strip. “The Israelis are the killers! And we, without fear, the great people, even their tanks won’t stop us!”
Within minutes, the youths were throwing stones at Israeli soldiers, getting the expected response: rubber bullets.
It was a violent dance repeated throughout the Palestinian territories on the eve of U.S.-moderated peace talks with Palestinian and Israeli leaders. Tuesday’s round of bloody battling raised the six-day death toll to 55 despite an agreement between Israeli and Palestinian security chiefs to stop the shooting.
The sequence shows that while Palestinian leaders such as Barghouti deny igniting the deadly conflict and insist they cannot stop it, they are helping to stoke the furor on the streets that erupted after Israeli right-wing politician Ariel Sharon paid a visit last week to Jerusalem’s disputed Temple Mount, or Haram ash Sharif.
The breakdown of Tuesday’s fragile cease-fire complicated hopes that U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright will find some way to defuse the latest Mideast crisis when she meets with Palestinian President Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak in Paris on Wednesday.
U.S. officials announced that CIA Director George Tenet also would attend the talks to help in the discussion of security matters.
The summit almost collapsed Tuesday night. According to the Israelis, Arafat announced he did not want to meet with Barak, who then said he would not go to Paris. After discussions with the Americans, both were persuaded to attend.
Meanwhile, officials announced plans for Arafat and Barak to meet again Thursday in Egypt with President Hosni Mubarak. That meeting is designed to show that support for a truce comes not only from Americans and Europeans but a major Muslim nation as well.
In 1996, the previous time the Mideast peace process was threatened by running gun battles between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian police, the crisis was defused when President Clinton hosted a summit between Israeli and Palestinian leaders. That crisis was sparked by Israel’s surprise opening of a tourist tunnel beneath the Temple Mount.
Although skeptics noted that Clinton declined to host a meeting this time, Israeli officials said they hoped the Wednesday session could restart talks toward the Mideast peace treaty that Clinton desperately wants before his term in office ends in January.
“The meeting is a step in the direction of the renewal of the negotiations and not just the end of violence here,” said Shlomo Ben Ami, Israel’s acting foreign minister and chief negotiator.
To put a lid on the violence, however, Barak and Arafat will have to return with something to show people such as Barghouti, who oversees the tanzim, a force of civilian gunmen who have been exchanging fire with Israeli soldiers in Ramallah and who may have more clout on the city’s streets than do local police commanders.
“There is no cease-fire. Screw the cease-fire!” Barghouti said to a caller on his mobile phone once he had followed the funeral-goers to the El Ayosh junction, where the clashes had begun moments before.
Under the shade of a sarou tree, he sat down next to a Palestinian police captain with a good view of the stone-and-bullet clash some 500 yards away. Granting interviews to television crews, Barghouti said the clashes raised the stakes in the peace process.
“I’m pretty sure there will not be any kind of results [from the summit] because the Americans and Israelis only want everything to be quiet,” Barghouti said. “But they can’t act now as if something hasn’t happened. We now have to change the rules of the [negotiating] game.”
For half a day Tuesday, it looked as though the worst of the fighting was over. Israeli and Palestinian leaders said a cease-fire had been agreed to late Monday night, and some Israeli soldiers even pulled back from flash points.
But as in previous days, fierce fighting broke out just after the day’s funeral processions for those killed in the Gaza Strip, Nablus, Ramallah and elsewhere.
The worst fighting was in Gaza, where the Israeli army again deployed combat helicopters and real, rather than rubber-coated, bullets against crowds of protesters trying to swarm over an Israeli outpost near the Jewish settlement of Netzarim. Outside another settlement, an Israeli tank fired at Palestinian gunmen for the first time.
In Nablus, civilians with guns headed straight from the funerals to the Jewish shrine of Joseph’s Tomb, where they engaged in gun battles with army guards and helicopter gunners for the fifth day in a row. Shots reportedly were also fired during the clashes in Ramallah.
Battles erupted again in some Israeli Arab towns, but they were less intense than Monday, when five people died. During the day, Barak met with Israeli Arab leaders about how to solve the grievances underlying the disturbances.
In all, seven Palestinians and one Israeli Arab were killed Tuesday, far fewer than the 19 people killed the day before. Hundreds more were injured, pushing the total of casualties in the past six days past 1,300.
Also Tuesday, the Israeli army admitted responsibility for the killing of a 12-year-old Gazan boy in a hail of bullets, a scene played on global television Saturday. Israeli Maj. Gen. Moshe Yaalon said a probe found that the bullets “apparently” came from an Israeli outpost, though he criticized the Palestinians for the “cynical use” of children at clash sites.
He said the boy, Mohammed Aldura, had been throwing stones at the outpost. His father, Jamal, who was critically wounded in the shooting, had come to the scene to take the boy away, but they became pinned down behind a concrete barrel, Yaalon said.
On the Palestinian side, uniformed police have been firing their assault rifles at Israeli positions. Police commanders insist the officers opened fire on their own, out of anger at seeing the Israelis shoot at unarmed Palestinian protesters and under pressure from the civilians not just to stand by and watch.
But a good part of the shooting also has been done by the shadowy Palestinian tanzim militia, an arm of Arafat’s Fatah movement that is trained and deployed for missions that cannot be carried out by Arafat’s police.
It is the ski mask-wearing tanzim who were seen charging at Joseph’s Tomb and firing their rifles blindly over the shrine wall. Others have sniped at Israeli soldiers from Ramallah buildings.
At the Ramallah funeral Tuesday, one tanzim gunman firing his rifle in the air next to Barghouti was wearing a golf shirt and tennis shoes. His weapon was an American-made M-16 rifle with a sniper’s scope. An extra bullet clip was tucked into the back pocket of his jeans.
Giving his name as Abu Thayer, he would not talk about where else he used his weapon, but said he got his orders for the current clashes at a Fatah meeting Friday night after clashes broke out at the Al Aqsa mosque earlier in the day.
Many Israeli officials insist that Arafat can stop the street violence on a moment’s notice because he controls the tanzim, a loosely knit organization founded in the 1970s whose members are believed to number in the hundreds.
“They are the brawn, not the brains, of the PLO,” said Hillel Frisch, a security analyst at Israel’s Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv. “Arafat controls them because he gives the orders. He is also the one who arms them.”
But Fatah leaders and tanzim militiamen say the reality is far more complicated. They say that Arafat and Barghouti do give the orders to shoot or stop in Ramallah but that given the emotions on the street, it would be nearly impossible to contain the outbursts.
“Marwan Barghouti can’t give us orders that aren’t suitable for the situation,” said Ibrahim Abu Ein, a lower-level tanzim leader in Ramallah.
“The orders came from the Israeli soldiers,” he said. “When we see them shooting a small child, this is the order.”
