A new leader, same old issues
Intifada fatigue among Palestinians, more than upcoming elections, may shape events
TULKARM, WEST BANK--On first glance, Mahmoud, a veteran guerrilla of the deadly al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, appears up for battle. Waiting in a crowded gymnasium to pay condolences to the families of three comrades killed in a 2 a.m. Israeli ambush, he has a submachine gun slung over his shoulder and a pistol under his olive-green military jacket. But up close, he looks exhausted. His eyes are bloodshot. Mahmoud, 37, who won't give his last name, doesn't sleep much anymore. He's on the run day and night from Israeli soldiers. After more than four years of fighting, he says he's ready now to put down his guns. "The intifada is over; we're only defending ourselves," he concedes quietly. "If the Israelis stop coming after us, we won't do anything to them."
Not the sort of words ordinarily associated with the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, whose bombings and shootings struck fear in Israelis, keeping all but the most defiant or fatalistic off downtown streets and buses for so long. No more, though. Now Israelis are bustling about freely, while Palestinian terrorists are in hiding. Guerrilla attacks haven't stopped but aren't remotely as successful as before, now threatening mainly Israeli soldiers and settlers in the West Bank and Gaza, not civilians in Israeli cities. Because of the Army's killings or arrests of several thousand Palestinian militants, its siege of Palestinian cities, villages, and refugee camps, and its erection of a high, concrete-and-barbed-wire security barrier in the West Bank, the intifada has failed--and the Palestinians now admit it. "People are very, very tired. We've lost everything in the past four years. There's no economy, no work, and the Israelis have killed most of the fighters," says Abu Khaled, 31, a political activist sitting in a Tulkarm cafe. "The intifada has set us back 50 years."
Historic moment. It is this turn of events, and this weakening of Palestinian fighting morale, that make the January 9 election for president of the Palestinian Authority a potentially historic watershed, a possible shift toward a brighter future for Palestinians and Israelis both. The result of the election, called after the November 11 death of erratic, belligerent president-for-life Yasser Arafat, is a foregone conclusion. Mahmoud Abbas, 69, the most eminent gray eminence of the Palestinian national movement's "old guard," has no serious challenger; he is expected to get about 60 percent of the vote.
But while Abbas has departed from Arafat's path by criticizing the "militarization" of the intifada and calling for an end to violence, he is no savior. He is not a strong leader; he cannot command Palestinian security forces to confront the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad as Israel and the United States insist. All he can really do is talk and hope people listen, and after his expected election, his voice should gain at least some added authority. But it is not Abbas's new presidential prestige that could, perhaps, lead Palestinians to silence their weapons and start back toward peace with Israel; rather, it is their own resigned understanding, after four years of futile warfare, that he happens to be right.
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