Torn Apart

By Matt Rees/Nablus

The stolen Volkswagen truck roared along the chaotic main street of Nablus. As Kamel Salameh wove the VW through the morning rush-hour traffic, he slammed into nine-year-old Islam Atallah. She spun off the hood like a doll, dead. With screaming tires, Salameh turned his truck and sped off. He headed for Balata refugee camp at the edge of Nablus. The patrolmen chasing him were nervous. The camp is a no-go area for Yasser Arafat's police. Salameh swerved into Balata's narrow streets and disappeared. Soon after, the police found the truck abandoned, but Salameh had melted into the alleys of his home patch. Car theft is big business in Balata, so police were not completely disappointed. They found a dozen other stolen vehicles at the edge of the camp and impounded them.

That afternoon, back at the police station, the officers heard gunfire. It was Balata's answer to the lawmen's incursion. Forty stolen cars rolled slowly out of the camp, each loaded with car thieves firing rifles in the air. Behind them walked hundreds of Balata residents. The criminals drowned the police station and the municipality in the deafening racket of their Kalashnikovs. The people of Nablus fled in fear, and their rulers--the mayor appointed by Arafat, the police chief, the Governor--all got the message: Back off. "Every day there's a fight between someone from Balata and a Nablus guy," says Hussam Khader, 39, the reform-minded leader of Yasser Arafat's Fatah Party in Balata. "It's something we've never known before."

In Balata's narrow streets, the chaotic traffic writhes slowly and fractiously between the cinder-block auto shops in the simmering heat of spring on the valley floor. More than 800 feet above the dusty camp, on the lush peak of Mount Gerizim, a monumental structure is rising, half Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, half Taj Mahal. It is the new home of a leading member of the Masri family, the most powerful and wealthy clan in Nablus. It is a reminder, too, of the differences between the unruly refugee camp and the Palestinian metropolis in the West Bank, and a symbol of the extreme tensions that exist within Palestinian society, riven these days between rich and poor, Christian and Muslim and dozens of other fractures. Even as Arafat struggled last week to deliver on his promise of a cease-fire, controlling anti-Israeli violence promises to be difficult because it also means trying to manage the divisions among Palestinians. It means trying to exert control in a land where impatience, fury and frustration conspire to divide instead of unify.

Down in the fifth of a square mile that is Balata, it is not venerated old families like the Masris who rule. The graffiti on the walls mark the territories of clan-based gangs like the Dan-Dan, or personal militias who owe their allegiance to local leaders with nicknames like Baz-Baz. Among the 30,000 residents of the camp, 65% of workers are unemployed, up from 25% before the Aqsa intifadeh kicked off eight months ago. It is estimated that there are 5,000 guns in the camp.

Between Balata and Nablus, the road bumps down a mile-long stretch of chop shops where cars stolen from Israel are gutted for parts. Arafat's police don't dare touch these garages. "It's a free-trade zone," jokes Khader. Outside the door of his second-floor office, Nablus mayor Ghassan Shaka'a keeps two guards armed with Kalashnikovs. Smartly dressed in a checkered sports jacket, Shaka'a is a member of the executive committee of the P.L.O., a confidant of Arafat's. "Balata is not against me," he says, laughing dismissively. Out on the street, however, he rarely shows his face for fear of assassination. The mayor smiles broadly when asked about the accusations of corruption made by Balata's people against his Palestinian Authority. It's "certainly a reason for discontent, but a minor one," he says. "It's a battle of good people against bad people." So, who's good and who's bad? The mayor laughs and answers a question he hasn't been asked. "The Palestinians are good, and the Israelis are bad."

There are good and bad people in Balata too. But the bad people got a leg up from this intifadeh. In the first intifadeh, from 1987 to 1993, Balata was the hot zone, a beacon of Palestinians' willingness to sacrifice. But seven years of Arafat's regime have destroyed that spirit. "People follow the religion of their king," says an Arab proverb. The religion of Arafat's henchmen has been corruption. So the people of Balata have learned to be crooks.

Balata and Nablus are not the only Palestinian communities torn by internal conflict. Tribal, social and regional enmities throughout the Palestinian territories grow more violent by the day. The intifadeh was supposed to free Palestinians from Israeli occupation, but it is fast pushing them into crime, poverty and gang war. Since the arrival of the Palestinian Authority seven years ago, the society of the West Bank and Gaza Strip has been cracking under the dual strains of Arafat's corrupt rule and continued occupation by Israel. The intifadeh took those fissures and blew them apart. This semi-anarchy has alarming consequences. Take a trip along the fault lines of Palestinian society and imagine what it is like to live astride them.

INSIDE AND OUTSIDE

At the U.N. food distribution center in the Gaza Strip's Tuffah neighborhood earlier this spring, Palestinians clutched small, pink ration slips for the emergency foodstuffs the U.N. Relief and Works Agency hands out to refugees who have been unable to commute to work in Israel during the intifadeh. Abu Amira had already collected his ration and loaded it onto his cart. He was sweaty, dirty and angry. He came early, but it was hot even at 8 a.m. First, he pressed through a crowd of men to hand his ticket to a clerk behind a chicken-wire grill. The clerk stamped his ticket and Abu Amira jockeyed at another window for the second stamp required for him to collect his meager ration for the month. His battered donkey cart was loaded with enough milk, oil, sugar and rice to last his family of five for a week. A few yards away, a man shoving to get to the clerk in his steamy booth threw a punch before others in the crowd held him back.

These refugees have the greatest anger for Arafat's Palestinian Authority. None of those jostling for handouts were among the elite who returned with Arafat from exile in Tunis in 1994. These refugees lived here and struggled against Israel's occupation through the first intifadeh. They expected Arafat to share the wealth on his return, to spread the billions of dollars pumped in by international supporters. Instead, they have seen it hogged by "the Tunisians." "I spit on the day they came," Abu Amira says. "I'd like to see them all shot in the street." This is more than just resentment of riches; it is a driving force for the intifadeh. No matter how much they might want to manipulate the intifadeh to pressure Israel, the "Outsiders" who arrived with Arafat from Tunis don't want to press so hard that Israel demolishes the Palestinian Authority's institutions and, with them, their power base. The "Insiders," leaders who were jailed by Israel or who remained underground during the first intifadeh, felt they didn't get a fair share of the wealth and position doled out by Arafat. So when this intifadeh began, many of the Insiders decided they had little to lose if they brought Arafat's system down on their heads. They figured they might be able to carve local power centers out of the general chaos.

The difference between Inside and Outside is more than just money. Insiders want reform, free elections and a level economic playing field, or, in some cases, just to be cut in on the corruption. Outsiders want to hold onto their power, squash the press and keep their business monopolies. The lawlessness of the intifadeh has made the squabbles more coldly violent. In February, Abu Amr, the owner of the Beach Hotel in Gaza City, invited Hisham Mikki, the head of the official Palestinian television station, to sit with him in his empty restaurant, smoking a water pipe and looking out over the Mediterranean. Mikki came back from exile with Arafat and amassed a fortune from corrupt deals. He began to puff on a nargileh filled with apple-scented Bahraini tobacco. Barely was the pipe lit when a man walked quickly toward him. Before Mikki could move, the gunman killed him with a three-shot combination known to hit men as "Mozambique style"--a bullet to the forehead and one in each breast. It was a local power play--a battle over cash that may have been spun off by a corrupt deal--but an example of the kinds of Palestinian-on-Palestinian violence that corrode the cause.

THE TOWN AGAINST THE TRIBE

At the top of Madbassa Street near Bethlehem's old souk, a group of peddlers recently set out wares at the side of the road. The intifadeh has hit the economy hard, and this was a chance for locals to buy good quality cheaply--all the goods were stolen. There was everything from jewelry to potted plants. A pair of "Nike" sneakers was $3. Shoppers jostled for bargains. From the rooftops all around, gunmen kept watch.

A Palestinian police officer arrived with his squad, all armed. The peddlers were trading illegally, so the officer told them to leave. But immediately the men came down from the rooftops and surrounded him. Paid by the peddlers for protection, they were armed with Kalashnikov and M-16 rifles. These were men from the Ta'amra tribe. Thought to be descendants of medieval Crusaders, they dwelled in goat-hair tents until a few decades ago, but in the 1960s they settled in villages on the edge of the Judean Desert and began to take over local farmlands. In the past few years, the Ta'amra have filled most of the jobs in Arafat's security services in Bethlehem. They have used the lack of central control during the intifadeh to cement their fiefdoms, pull in protection money and ride over townspeople. When the policeman showed up, it was time for the Ta'amra to show their muscle. "You have five minutes to leave," the police officer told the peddlers. The Ta'amra laughed. "You have three minutes to leave," one of them crowed at the cop. Then he delivered a hard slap to the officer's face. In the crowded street, the policeman sized up the dangers of a bloody gun battle and retreated.

But the Ta'amra were fired up for a fight. If the police wouldn't give them one, they decided to pick another. Across the street, they noticed a young activist from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine with a roll of posters and a bucket of paste. On the posters was the image of Raed Dabash, a 20-year-old P.F.L.P. member shot by Israeli soldiers. The activist set to work pasting up pictures of Dabash over the top of some older posters. That was his mistake. The martyr whose posters were obscured was Hussein Abayat, a gunman who became the first victim of Israel's policy of "liquidating" Palestinians with snipers and helicopter gunships. He was also a Ta'amra. In Bethlehem that makes him untouchable. The burly Ta'amra ran over, grabbed the P.F.L.P. youth and began to beat him in the marketplace. Within minutes, a gang of P.F.L.P. supporters arrived and a fistfight broke out. Some of the brawlers brandished guns. Later, people who were there said it was a miracle nobody started a gunfight. But Kamel Hemeid, local chief of Arafat's Fatah Party, dismisses the confrontation: "One guy got beaten up. That's a small problem." Hemeid is a Ta'amra.

WEST BANK AGAINST GAZA

A 19-year-old Bethlehem man hitched a ride home from a local wedding party one night this past March. Three off-duty policemen who spoke with Gaza accents picked him up. Soon after, they pulled the car over on a lonely road. Palestinian legal sources tell TIME that the policemen then sexually assaulted the youth. In the close-knit West Bank town, the attack was an unheard-of act that scandalized the territory in the same way a murder in American suburbia would shock the community. But the fact that Palestinians have begun attacking one another like this highlights the growing tension between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Gazans, particularly those in the police force, are unpopular in the West Bank. West Bankers say the Gazans take all the low-paid jobs; that they steal and run whorehouses; and that Arafat gave them all the top jobs in the security forces because they are more loyal to him than West Bankers. Of the 40 commanders on Arafat's Supreme Security Council, none are from the West Bank.

Principles like equality before the law for both Gazans and West Bankers have been widely violated by Arafat's regime. Two of the three men involved in the alleged roadside sex attack walked out of jail after just a couple of days. They have yet to be tried. Arafat is aware of the tension--he's hardly been to the West Bank during the intifadeh--but he has shown little inclination to combat the problem.

If there is a positive side to the abuses, it is that they are emboldening the reformers against Arafat's men. Says Khader, the West Bank politico: "They're afraid of democracy. We've succeeded in developing the concept of democracy on the street." So far, at least, Arafat has been able to keep the popular will jammed into place by the pressures of the intifadeh and by his unchallenged leadership. But as they look around, Palestinians see a society that is more fractured than ever before and further away from the goal of a free state than at any other time since the Oslo peace process began. Arafat cannot ignore those troubling facts. Now--particularly if his fresh cease-fire holds--he must face the difficult problem of leading his people beyond them.

--With reporting by Jamil Hamad/Nablus and Aharon Klein/Jerusalem

With reporting by JAMIL HAMAD/NABLUS AND AHARON KLEIN/JERUSALEM