Bumping along a ragged, trash-strewn road past an Israeli checkpoint, the convoy carrying Mahmoud Abbas rolled into town last week to bring the message of the leading candidate in the race for president of the Palestinian Authority.
With elections set for Jan. 9, the campaign was in full swing. Pennants with Abbas’ image were strung across the main streets of Tulkarem, and his face gazed from billboards on roads winding through the rocky hills of the West Bank.
The bespectacled gray-haired man in a brown suit who is famously reluctant to plunge into crowds is reaching out these days to ordinary Palestinians, trying to connect with a constituency from which he has habitually kept his distance.
Here and in the town of Qalqilya on Wednesday, Abbas did not emerge from his bulletproof Mercedes to press the flesh, nor did big crowds line the streets when he rode in. But he did receive an enthusiastic welcome from a few thousand people at stadium rallies, and he seemed to warm to his audiences as he spoke, stepping into a new role.
In Tulkarem, women in traditional dress holding baskets of dates lined the entrance to the soccer field of a local college, but the reception line was overrun by the tumult of Abbas’ arrival. As loudspeakers blasted a campaign song set to a deafening beat, the candidate was swept onto the stage by a phalanx of police and security men.
Useful image of Arafat
Huge posters of Yasser Arafat towered over Abbas, and he cloaked himself in the memory of the late leader, but he was speaking a different language. The slogans and rallying cries of Arafat’s speeches were replaced by a more measured tone, a call for a return to normality and negotiations after more than four years of punishing conflict with Israel.
“Abu Mazen for president, on the path of Yasser Arafat,” said the checkered Palestinian scarves distributed by campaign workers, using the candidate’s nom de guerre. But Abbas, the candidate of the dominant Fatah movement, seemed to be skillfully subverting the legacy of Arafat, invoking his name to chart a different course.
Contrary to many expectations, he told the crowds, Palestinian society did not lapse into chaos after Arafat’s death, and a smooth succession took place. Institutions built by Arafat ensured an orderly transition, Abbas asserted, glossing over the late leader’s autocratic style of rule and the patronage and corruption of his administration.
Now, Abbas said, the time has come to develop governmental institutions, carry out reforms and establish a state based on the rule of law. The unspoken message was that the mismanagement, lawlessness and gang rule by armed militants that had sprung up under Arafat would have to end, along with the humiliations and violence of Israeli occupation.
“We want to give our people safety and security, a life with dignity and stability,” Abbas said, addressing Palestinians who have suffered recent years of conflict. “We want a state of institutions and law. Without law we cannot build a state. No one is above the law.”
Yet even as Abbas made his pitch, members of armed militias were on the streets.
Outside the Qalqilya stadium, Rami Haddad, 18, brandished a homemade rifle. He wore a bandanna and a black T-shirt of Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a violent offshoot of the Fatah.
Haddad said he would vote for Abbas, but he rejected the candidate’s recent call to stop using weapons in the Palestinian uprising.
“The arms are for resistance, and resistance will continue even if he doesn’t want it to,” Haddad said. “We have to resist with every means at our disposal, whether it is stones or guns.”
On Saturday, Abbas rejected Israeli demands that he crack down on militants, saying in an interview with The Associated Press that he wants to protect them.
Referring to the warm welcome he received from Palestinian gunmen over the past week, Abbas said, “When we see them, when we meet them, and when they welcome us, we owe them. This debt always is to protect them from assassination, to protect them from killing, and all these things they are subject to by the Israelis.”
When Abbas visited the Tulkarem refugee camp earlier in the week to lay a wreath at a memorial for residents killed in the uprising, young men from Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades helped keep order and protected him by forming a ring around Abbas as he moved through a welcoming crowd. They wore yellow bandannas and olive-green jackets but, in deference to the candidate, they did not carry weapons.
In the Jenin refugee camp on Thursday, Al Aqsa gunmen brandished their weapons, hoisted Abbas on their shoulders and fired volleys of gunfire at an election rally.
Abbas told his audiences Wednesday that Palestinians were ready to extend a hand for peace, and on the ground there was evidence of cooperation with the Israelis as he moved from town to town.
On main roads in the West Bank, Abbas’ convoy, which included armed bodyguards, was led by an Israeli police jeep and trailed by another jeep of the Israeli military government.
Ulfat Mahajneh, a 20-year-old student who came to hear Abbas, said that Palestinians had grown weary of the grinding conflict with Israel and were ready for a change.
“I’m not renouncing resistance, but at this stage we have to give a chance for negotiations,” she said. “Our side has suffered heavy losses and so have the Israelis, and if this continues there will only be more loss. We have to give peace a chance, to show the world that we are a civilized people that wants freedom and independence like any other.”
On the stage in Tulkarem, Abbas was flanked by a youth in a wheelchair who was wounded in the uprising and by a representative of local women’s groups. When a little girl was thrust into his lap, he gently stroked her chin and smiled, looking almost grandfatherly.
He had a message for every constituency: Palestinian prisoners should be freed, he said. The problem of refugees who lost their homes in what is now Israel should be resolved according to United Nations resolutions. Women and young people should be given greater opportunities for economic and social advancement.
Wall `must be removed’
In Qalqilya he inspected Israel’s West Bank barrier, which surrounds the town on three sides. The barrier, built to block suicide bombers and other attackers from entering Israel, slices into Palestinian lands in the West Bank, cutting Palestinians off from fields, schools and hospitals.
“We say to our neighbors, this wall will bring you neither security nor stability,” Abbas said. “If we want to live together, this wall must be removed.”
Khaled Walwil, 32, who attended the local rally, said he used to install air conditioners in the neighboring Israeli city of Netanya but had been unemployed since the early days of the uprising, when Israel barred entry to most Palestinian workers.
“People are tired,” he said. “It has been war for the past four years. There’s 80 percent unemployment here and it has affected people. They want peace and quiet, to live like any other people. We should try the path of peace.”
Abbas ended his speech in Tulkarem with a phrase often repeated by Arafat.
“The Palestinian flag will be raised on the walls of Jerusalem,” he said, “and on the mosques and churches of Jerusalem.”
The campaign manager led the crowd in a hoarse rendition of Fatah fighting songs.
But at the edge of town, Faris Urabi, an unemployed laborer who earns a meager living carrying peoples’ belongings across the Israeli checkpoint in a cart, had more mundane concerns. What he wanted most from a new president was an easing of Israeli restrictions and improving conditions of everyday life, he said.
“We want work, any work,” Urabi said shortly before Abbas’ convoy swept by. “Without a living, there is no life.”
