By Keith B. Richburg and Lee Hockstader Washington Post Foreign Service Friday, February 23, 2001; Page A15
GAZA CITY -- When Palestinian security men came to arrest a suspected bomb maker in Gaza's Jabalya refugee camp recently, they met a defiant response: Scores of young men poured out of the Al-Nour Mosque, surged at the police and pelted them with stones.
After firing into the air, the police finally arrested their suspect, Hamdi Khalil Sakani, a 17-year-old barber allied with the militant Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas. But the swelling crowd then marched on a nearby police station and stoned it until Sakani was released, local residents said. The siege continued until a Hamas activist arrived to help calm the crowd.
Five months into the Palestinian uprising against Israel, incidents like the one at Jabalya, in which angry crowds challenge the security forces of Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority, are said to be occurring more frequently. Long-standing discontent with Arafat's rule, in a hostile atmosphere encouraged by the clashes with Israel, may be taking a toll on his ability to administer the Gaza and West Bank territory that has been transferred to Palestinian control.
There is no evidence of a collapse of Arafat's administration. His personal authority has not been challenged directly and no one has emerged as an alternative to the 71-year-old Palestinian leader. But there are signs that Palestinian frustration, anger and violence -- directed not only at Israelis but also at the Palestinian Authority -- are fraying order among the 3.1 million Palestinians in the two-thirds of Gaza and the towns around the West Bank that fall under Arafat's rule.
Only occasionally seen in public, Arafat has rarely seemed so marginal to events here, analysts say. In five months of fighting, he has scarcely set foot in the West Bank, where two-thirds of his people live but where Israeli troops control 80 percent of the terrain. By most accounts, he neither directs the daily clashes with Israel nor tries to stop them.
"One wishes he would exercise more leadership, but whatever leadership he exercises is going to be costly," said Ziad Abu Amr, a lawmaker in the Palestinian Authority's Legislative Council. "The kind of leadership the Palestinians want him to exercise would alienate the Europeans and Americans. But if he exercises leadership on the other side, [halting the violence] to please the Europeans and the Americans, then he risks alienating the Palestinians."
In the West Bank town of Ramallah, Marwan Barghouti, a street activist from Arafat's Fatah movement, runs a local militia that seems only nominally allied with the Palestinian leader.
"The leadership is not prepared [for continued violence against Israel] but the people are prepared," he said in a recent interview with the Palestinian magazine Between the Lines. "I think every leadership has to deal with popular opinion....In this the Palestinian Authority is a little better than the [other] Arab regimes, but not by much."
Said Raji Sourani, a human rights lawyer in Gaza: "The real leader is the street, actually."
Adding to Arafat's problems is a severe cash crunch largely inflicted by Israel that has sapped the ability of the the Palestinian Authority to perform everyday functions. One top cabinet official, Nabil Shaath, said he recently paid the telephone bill for his Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation from his own pocket.
A $1 billion aid effort promised by Arab governments in October and handled by the Islamic Development Bank in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, has produced only a trickle so far. Maher Masri, the Palestinian economy and trade minister, told reporters Wednesday the authority has asked for more than $40 million a month but the bank is designed for development rather than emergency needs such as those facing the Palestinians.
The violence has also taken its toll on the functioning of government. In Ramallah, for instance, Israeli shelling last week heavily damaged four floors of the Ministry of Local Government. Israeli troops have blocked the minister, Saeb Erekat, from leaving his home town of Jericho for more than a week.
"You have to look at it in terms of the five-month siege and closure of Palestinian areas and lack of ability to function normally," said Erekat. "International passages are open one day, closed the next. The airport in Gaza is open one day, closed for a month the next day."
Alarmed at the prospect of further deterioration in public order and administration, top U.N. and U.S. diplomats have urged Israel to transfer tens of millions of dollars in customs and tax revenues it collects on behalf of the Palestinians -- the main source of income for Arafat's government. But Israel, which has withheld some $56 million in transfers since December, has balked, citing attacks against Israeli army outposts and civilians.
Freezing the funds, roughly the equivalent of a month's payroll for 115,000 Palestinian police officers and government workers, has resulted in a fiscal squeeze and delayed by two weeks the payment of January salaries to public sector employees. That compounded an already severe economic crunch resulting from Israel's campaign to blockade Palestinian territories since the outbreak of clashes. The Palestinian economy has lost more than $1.15 billion since the start of the uprising Sept. 29, and the losses are mounting by about $11 million a day, according to the United Nations.
Terje Roed-Larsen last week that the Authority faces a fiscal crisis that could lead to the breakdown of administration. "The Palestinian Authority will within just a few weeks not be able to pay its salaries, which as an effect may lead to the collapse of key Palestinian institutions," Roed-Larsen said.
Roed-Larsen's analysis struck many Palestinians as somewhat alarmist. The Palestinian Authority has never had very long tentacles of power outside the major cities, and Palestinian society has long been a battleground of competing political and ideological factions. Still, it is widely agreed in Gaza and the West Bank that whatever grip the Palestinian Authority had before the uprising is loosening and that the cash crunch is accelerating the process.
There are several sources of anger at Arafat's government, and some have been exacerbated since the outbreak of the uprising.
One major factor is the Palestinian security forces, which were overtly helping Israel deter anti-Israeli attacks and as a result were regarded by many as collaborating with the enemy. Since the uprising, cooperation with Israel has ceased, but the security forces are still seen as heavy-handed, inefficient and corrupt. In some instances, they have been in direct conflict with young street activists who have done most of the fighting against the Israelis.
This new class of leaders -- neighborhood fighters, freelancers and militia leaders -- are not always, or even usually, controlled by Arafat's security forces. More radical groups such as Islamic Jihad or Hamas have found increased popularity after being marginalized and harassed by Arafat in the past.
Ismail Abu Shanab, a Hamas leader in Gaza who teaches engineering at the Islamic University, said that after the incident in Jabalya, Arafat's Authority bowed to popular pressure and agreed that its security forces would make no "political" arrests -- meaning arrests of militants acting against Israel.
In what appears as an attempt by Arafat to reassert control, units of his own security detail, known as Force 17, were recently dispatched to patrol Gaza's streets alongside the regular blue-uniformed police, residents said. The move was as jarring to some Gazans as the appearance of Green Berets alongside city traffic cops.
Hockstader reported from Jerusalem