JENIN, West Bank, 5 January 2005 — Borne aloft by cheering gunmen, Palestinian presidential hopeful Mahmoud Abbas cut an unusual figure in his gray business suit.
Smiling and raising his hand in salute, Abbas gave a demonstration of the careful diplomacy he has adopted to woo the fighters as he bids to succeed Yasser Arafat in Sunday’s election — a victory that looks in little doubt.
But bringing those same militants under real control will prove the greatest challenge for Abbas if he is to achieve his aim of ending more than four years of violence and restarting talks with Israel on Palestinian statehood.
Militants appear less than convinced by Abbas’s call to end armed struggle and emphasize there could be no truce while Israel continues to fight them. Israel, however, has ruled out negotiations if attacks continue.
“I am not rejecting a truce. But I still haven’t accepted one,” said Zakaria Al-Zubaidi, the top militant in the West Bank city of Jenin who put on the rowdy armed reception for Abbas.
Abbas has his best chance of securing a cease-fire from Zubeidi’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, armed groups within his own Fatah faction that were formed after an uprising began in 2000 following the collapse of talks with Israel.
Some gunmen privately admit exhaustion after years on the run.
They also worry about their fate after the death of Arafat, who was seen by Fatah militants as their ultimate leader, though he denied Israeli and US accusations of fomenting violence.
“I’m tired, the people are tired, and let’s be honest, we have not made any political gains,” said one fugitive member of the Aqsa Brigades. “I am constantly on the run. I had to sell some of my family’s belongings and my wife’s gold to buy a gun and bullets,” he said in a hideout down a dark and dirty alleyway.
Trying to win over the gunmen, Abbas has pledged to ensure the safety of “the fugitives” and also insisted that he will stick to Arafat’s basic demands for a state on all the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.
And in a sign of readiness to go along with Abbas, Nasser Jum’a, the Aqsa Brigades leader topping Israel’s most wanted list in the West Bank told Reuters “We will give Abu Mazen (Abbas) the chance to achieve statehood.”
Hopes for peace following Arafat’s death on Nov. 11 have been strengthened by a decline of violence in the West Bank.
A more serious challenge comes from the Hamas group, which has sworn to destroy Israel and is the greatest driving force behind suicide attacks that have killed hundreds of Israelis since 2000.
“If Hamas rejects a cease-fire, the Aqsa Brigades, who compete with Hamas for power, might follow suit and reject Abbas’s calls for calm,” said one Fatah official.
So far, Hamas has ruled out any suggestion of a cease-fire unless Israel first withdraws from all the land it captured in the 1967 war — a demand that it will certainly not meet.
Hamas has snubbed efforts by Abbas to secure a truce to create the atmosphere for talks. In fact, the group has stepped up rocket and mortar attacks on Israel and Jewish settlements from Gaza, where violence has surged as militants try to portray a planned Israeli withdrawal as a victory.
“We are worried Mahmoud Abbas actually believes the remarks he makes in public about achieving calm and ending the armed uprising and would actually work to implement it,” said Mohammed Ghazal, a leading Hamas official in the West Bank.
Abbas has made clear that he sees the way to win over the Islamic groups as dialogue rather than force, emphasizing that he would never want Palestinians to fight each other.
One hopeful sign for Abbas was the willingness of Hamas to contest municipal elections — in which it made a strong showing — and possibly parliamentary elections later this year. But if he fails to coopt Hamas and stop attacks, he could end up having to choose between abandoning hope of negotiations or trying to use Palestinian security forces to bring the militants under control.
“He would not hesitate to implement the law and crack down on any group that tries to hijack the decision of the majority,” said one Palestinian security official. “But his moves will depend on whether Israel reciprocates to ensure calm.”
The last time Palestinian militants agreed to stop attacks was in mid-2002 when Abbas was Arafat’s prime minister and trying to bolster a US-backed peace “road map”.
The truce collapsed amid violence within weeks.
