Remembering Abu Jihad and why, really, the Israelis killed him
The following year he ordered a “General Exercise” in and around Nablus. “General Exercise” was the code for a confrontation between the PLO’s supporters and the occupying Israeli army. It was Arafat’s way of testing the feelings and mood of Palestinians throughout the Occupied Territories. The response was exactly what Arafat and Abu Jihad had predicted it would be. The confrontation in Nablus took place, but there was no support for the idea that it should be sustained and extended. A popular uprising was still the stuff of dreams.
Arafat, Abu Jihad and Hani Hassan (Arafat’s chief adviser and trouble-shooter) then conducted a detailed investigation of why the “General Exercise” had failed to inspire even a token demonstration of widespread support for the PLO. “We came to a very dramatic conclusion”, Hani told me. “We discovered that the silent majority of our people in the Occupied Territories had given their hearts if not their minds to the Islamic fundamentalists.”
What explained this enormous shift of popular opinion, a change of heart which suggested, among other things, that Arafat’s moderate PLO was in danger of becoming an irrelevance in the Occupied Territories?
Short answer – despair.
There was first of all, and obviously, the despair born of 20 years of occupation and often-brutal Israeli repression. But in the wake of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and its siege of Beirut there were, as Hani Hassan put it, “two new factors of despair.”
The first was the realisation that Arafat’s policy of politics and compromise with Israel was getting the Palestinians nowhere.
The second, a bitter lesson for a new generation of Palestinians, was that they were on their own when the crunch came. The proof was the way the Arab regimes had sat on their backsides and watched for weeks as Sharon tried to finish the PLO in Beirut.
Against that backdrop it was inevitable that more and more Palestinians in the Occupied Territories would begin to see Islamic fundamentalism as the only force capable of changing the status quo. But what surprised and shocked Arafat and his leadership colleagues was the number of Palestinians who had moved or who were moving in the direction of the fundamentalists. Hani said: “We discovered that not less than 60 percent of our young people in the Occupied Territories were thinking that Islamic fundamentalism had more to offer than the PLO.”
The violent Islamic fundamentalism (Palestinian style) that Arafat and his leadership colleagues saw coming as the inevitable product of continuing Israeli occupation and the new wave of Palestinian resistance would be institutionalised in 1988, when Hamas was founded in Gaza by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a paralysed, wheelchair-bound religious teacher. In Arabic Hamas means zeal. It is also an acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement.
For Arafat the consequences of Islamic fundamentalists making the running in the Occupied Territories were terrifying. (As they ought to have been to rational Israelis). First there was the obvious danger that the PLO would become an irrelevance for a majority of Palestinians. But that was not the worst-case scenario. If there was a popular uprising, and if the Islamic fundamentalists could claim most of the credit for it, Arafat – even if the PLO did retain some credibility – might not be able to deliver the compromise that he had struggled for six years to sell to his people.
So what at the beginning of 1984 were Arafat and his leadership colleagues to do?
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