Amira Hass - Haaretz 4 settembre 2001
The difference between Jerusalem and Ramallah or Netanya and Rafah is that for the Palestinians, the sky has become a frightening space.
RAMALLAH - Suddenly, there is a loud explosion. Everything goes quiet: the flow of traffic, pedestrians' conversations, horns and birds that scattered hastily at the sound of the boom. Immediately, ambulance and police sirens, and pedestrians rushing to the scene break the momentary silence. How similar these scenes are in Ramallah and Jerusalem, in Netanya and Tel Aviv, in Nablus and Bethlehem - even though both sides would be shocked by the comparison.
Last Monday, Taisir Zabri, 56, was sitting in his office on one of the western corners of Ramallah's main street, Al-Irsal. Zabri, an engineer by training, was checking something on the Internet when a large boom was heard to the southwest. He realized the explosion was very close by. He looked out the window and saw a column of smoke rising. He hurried to the site and in the back of his mind thought about his brother, Mustafa Zabri (a.k.a. Abu Ali Mustafa), the secretary-general of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). After all, his office was nearby.
From a distance, he saw that the building housing the PFLP offices was intact. He tried to calm down. But then his cellular phone started ringing again and again with more and more people calling to find out if something had indeed happened to his brother. He again looked to the east and saw that the window of his brother's office was charred. Maybe he was not in the room just then, he thought. But someone came up to him and told him that the ambulance had just taken away his brother's body.
The last time they met was four days before, in the same office. They had discussed personal and family matters. They spoke occasionally about Israel's assassination policy, but very little about the threat to Abu Ali. "I realized from others who visited him that he wasn't in his office for the whole day. He was there for an hour or two and left. He was careful, as others are careful. But all the Palestinian leaders jointly decided not to hide and not to dramatically alter their way of life," said Zabri. Zabri is eight years younger than his brother. They were born in the town of Arabeh in the Jenin district; their father worked in the Haifa oil refineries.
The loss of his job in 1948 led to a deterioration in the whole family's economic situation. "We're the younger part of the family, we came out ahead: the older ones, including Abu Ali, are the ones who didn't finish their studies and from a young age helped support the family so that we, the younger ones, could study."
Abu Ali left in the 1950s for Amman and was arrested there for his involvement with the Arab Nationalists, which was attacking King Hussein's regime. Zabri essentially got to know his older brother while the latter was in jail. The younger Zabri was sent to study at a school in Amman for several years; he lived with his sister. She would cook, he would bring the food to his brother in jail. They met on opposite sides of the fence: Taisir would see his brother and other prisoners - some of whom later became prominent activists in the PFLP and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) - peering down, smiling at the kid carrying a pot of home-cooked food.
Their father died in 1996, a few days before it was learned that Israel had retracted its decision to allow Abu Ali Mustafa to return. Their mother, 90, lives in their home town, Arabeh. "After the fact," Taisir Zabri's summarizes, "you discover that somewhere in the back of your mind, it always seemed a reasonable possibility that Israel would assassinate my brother, who was a senior Palestinian political figure."
The Israeli charges, that his brother was involved in planning terrorist attacks inside the Green Line, do not convince Zabri. The failure of several terrorist attacks within Israel, which the Shin Bet internal security service attributes to the PFLP, erased those efforts from the Palestinian collective memory. This collective memory also makes it harder to monitor the number of Palestinian victims falling every day - children, adults, civilians and armed individuals alike. Like every Palestinian, Zabri is convinced that the Palestinian people, as an occupied people, have the right to fight against the occupation by any means. But at the same time, he himself has several times written and spoken out against the attacks inside Israel and against civilians.
`Why intensify hatred?'
"Even after my brother was killed, I told my friends we can't be drawn into immoral actions that afterward actually harm us. Ariel Sharon is not important to us; he's a criminal. The Israeli people are important to us. In the end, we'll live together. Once, we believed we'd be able to live in one democratic country. Now, with your extremists and ours, it seems there's no chance of that happening any time soon. But we'll live in two countries and why intensify the hostility and hatred by hurting civilians or a child eating a slice of pizza?"
He consciously avoids answering questions about whether such subjects arose in conversations with his brother; you might get the impression that they did not often discuss their political views. When the PFLP was set up in December 1967, he and his brother were members of the founding political core. But in 1969, the younger Zabri joined the group that broke away and set up the DFLP, which adopted a leftist, Marxist ideology. Only after the split, says Zabri, did the PFLP begin to adopt a Marxist worldview. This ideological split was so intense, apparently, that even 30 years later, Zabri does not want to go into detail.
After that, they decided not to ruin their family relationships with ideological and political clashes. Zabri also feels that discussing his conversations with his brother will divert attention from what he feels is the main issue: that Israel assassinated a Palestinian national leader whose life personified the Palestinians' struggle and their suffering.
Everyone is afraid
The difference between Jerusalem and Ramallah or Netanya and Rafah is that for the Palestinians, the sky has become a frightening space. Every plane that slices through the air or a flare fired in the middle of the night leaves a feeling of dread. Every political activist, and now every senior official, is a target and therefore, those around him are also targets for Israeli weapons. According to data from Law, the Palestinian association for the protection of human rights and the environment, from November 9, 2000 through August 27, 2001, Israel assassinated 29 Palestinians. A total of 16 bystanders who happened to be nearby - and evidently not targets - were also killed. The Palestinians are outraged that in Israel, they say "killed" and not "murdered."
Everyone is afraid, but acts as if the fear does not exist: They continue to meet, even though at any moment, any of them could be hit by a missile or a bomb concealed in a car, public telephone booth or booby-trapped cellular phone.
On Thursday, August 30, before midnight, the incessant droning of Israeli helicopters was heard in the homes of Ramallah in the northern neighborhoods of Al-Bireh. From a distance, there was the noise of exchanges of fire: a few bullets from the light Palestinian weapons and then the sounds of the heavy Israeli weapons. Kais Abd al-Karim, a senior DFLP official, was about to be interviewed on the local Palestinian television station, Al-Wattan. Taisir Zabri was also in the studio. Their colleagues came in to tell them that helicopters were hovering overhead. Abu Lila rushed home, gathered a few essential items and left his apartment.
A half hour later a large explosion frightened Ramallah's entire population. The storage area in a building adjacent to Abu Lila's building was destroyed and went up in smoke. Is it any wonder that everyone assumed it was another assassination attempt? Anyone who saw the place realized the explosion was inside: there were no signs of any external damage; the steel door was pushed outward, not bent inward.
People speculated that the helicopters had used a remote control detonator to activate an explosive device that had been mysteriously placed in the storage area. No one imagined that there was no connection between the helicopters and the explosion, and everyone sought a logical reason for it. And what is more logical than an Israeli attempt to continue the string of assassinations of senior political figures? Perhaps, this time it was to avenge the DFLP's attack on the IDF's Marganit outpost in Rafah?
However, senior Palestinian security officials quickly realized that they should search for a different explanation . They own the storage facility in which the explosion occurred. People know that Israel has sophisticated weapons and that it can strike at those it has targeted even without the help of collaborators. It is hard for them to imagine the scale of this technology. Therefore, the Palestinian Authority also automatically accused Israel of assassinating Taisir Khattab, 44, director of the office of the Gaza intelligence chief, Amin al-Hindi. He had traveled from his home in the southern district of Gaza City to the intelligence agency's offices on the north side. As he was traveling in his car through the refugee neighborhood of Sheikh Radwan last Saturday morning, there was a loud explosion. Khattab was seriously injured and died in the hospital. Israel denied any involvement.
Late Saturday night, an unknown group called the Shahid Bilal al-Ghoul brigades claimed responsibility for the assassination, accusing Khattab of being involved in security coordination with the Shin Bet. He was indeed responsible for coordination with Israeli security representatives and for arranging exit permits for Palestinians. Even before the intifada, Gaza residents related, fliers circulated accusing him of accepting perks in return for arranging exit permits.
Bilal al-Ghoul, a member of the preventive security apparatus headed by Mohammed Dahlan, and a Hamas member, was killed two weeks ago during an Israel attempt to assassinate his father, Adnan, also a Hamas member and an expert on weapons and explosives. The announcement claiming responsibility for Khattab's killing was sent to the offices of Agence France Presse. Does such a group really exist? Is it not logical that some Palestinians would want to send a message to those Palestinian security apparatuses still willing to renew security coordination with Israel?
On the other hand, who can guarantee, Gazans were asking yesterday, that this is not an attempt by the Shin Bet to intensify the existing hostility among the Palestinian security organizations, and cause the Palestinian public greater confusion and uncertainty about what is happening within its own ranks?