The children are playing with their new guns. Short, stubby pistols with removable magazines, black sniper rifles with scopes, silver revolvers, AK47s. None is real, of course. They are all toys. It’s Eid, the Muslim holy festival, and the day after the end of Ramadan, the holy month. All the children in Qalandiya refugee camp have presents. The girls get new dresses. The boys run through the street firing pellets from their toy guns.
Tariq Adnan (13) has an Uzi. ”This was 35 shekels and it’s great,” he said. ”But I’d rather have an M16.”
A few hundred yards away is the concrete barrier that the Israelis are building to wall off the West Bank. A watchtower looms over the flat, crowded, concrete roofs. There is a long queue of cars at the checkpoint where Israeli soldiers demand identification and search vehicles. Most contain local Palestinian families trying to get across to east Jerusalem to celebrate the holiday with relatives. Acrid smoke from burning garbage fills the air over the refugee camp and there is a strong smell of sewage.
As well as the first day of Eid, it is the first day of the post-Yasser Arafat era. A flat, blank calm replaced the febrile excitement, chaos and overt grief of the funeral the day before. Now, everyone knows, questions have to be answered: Who will be the Palestinians’ new leader? Who could possibly follow Arafat? Would the death of the former guerrilla leader, hailed as a hero by many Palestinians and reviled as a terrorist by an equal number of Israelis, jump-start the largely defunct peace process? What, in short, does the future hold for everyone in Qalandiya, in the West Bank, in Gaza, in Israel and in the region?
”The future?” Tariq asks, chuckles and shrugs.
The immediate focus is on elections for a new President for the Palestinian Authority, the administration established in the West Bank and Gaza in 1993.
According to the constitution, so far carefully followed by the Palestinian leadership, polls must be held before 9 January. Everyone knows they are crucial.
Any election will pit the ”old guard”, composed of those who spent the eighties in exile with Arafat in Tunisia, against the ”new guard” who never left the Occupied Territories. Men like the moderate veteran Mahmoud Abbas, who became the Palestinians’ first Prime Minister last year and succeeded Arafat as chairperson of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), will face off with people like Mohammed Dahlan, the smooth former Gaza security chief. The greatest challenge to the old guard — who may yet look for a reason to postpone the poll — comes from Marwan Barghouti, a firebrand leader currently serving a life sentence in an Israeli prison. Barghouti, who was deeply involved in running the recent al-Aqsa uprising, is hugely popular among Palestinian youth and is seen as a potential leader by many.
”If the leadership do not do the right thing, we will find ourselves in bloody turmoil,” said Dr Khalil Shiqaqi, an analyst in Ramallah. ”The old guard will have to embrace a coalition with the young guard. The status quo is not tenable.”
Then there is the stalled peace process. On Friday, US President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair said they wanted peace and a democratic Palestinian state. Israel is currently committed to a controversial, unilateral plan to withdraw thousands of hardline Jewish settlers and troops from Gaza. But there are currently no negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians — largely because Tel Aviv and Washington refused to deal with Arafat, blaming him directly for terrorist attacks.
On Saturday the Jerusalem Post newspaper published quotes from aides close to Ariel Sharon, Israel’s hawkish Prime Minister, claiming that Arafat had killed more Jews than anyone since Hitler. Sharon himself did not once mention his old adversary by name last week, though he spoke of a ”historic opportunity”. However, other Israelis have been vocal. Simon Peres, the former Foreign Minister, called on his countrymen to ”let bygones be bygones and let openings be openings”.
Over the next few weeks, it will be clear if Arafat’s death has indeed provided a chance to move forward. Palestinians say that the Israelis must assist with the elections, not disrupt them.
”We need a smooth transition to ensure democracy applies,” Mustafa Barghouti, head of the Palestinian People’s Party and the director of a medical charity, told The Observer. ”We need the Israelis to strip away the checkpoints [in the Occupied Territories].”
Others called on the Israelis to halt the repeated military incursions into Palestinian-run territory that have destroyed thousands of homes and livelihoods and caused significant civilian casualties.
Hassan Khreishih, an independent Palestinian legislator, called for Israeli troops to be withdrawn from the West Bank too. ”How can we have elections if we are under occupation? The troops must leave if they are to be free and fair,” he said.
Throughout last week tributes to Arafat, often known by his nom de guerre Abu Ammar, flooded in from world leaders. On the ground in the Occupied Territories, everyone from old ladies to young children spoke of their ”love” for their dead leader.
In a house a few metres from the Muqata, two elderly sisters sat on their verandah in chairs in the weak November sun and remembered the first time they heard about Arafat ”when he was a young man, still in the mountains, a long time ago”.
”Arafat was a good king,’ Hajer al-Abid (86) said. ”Now we need a new king, another good king.”
Yet, though publicly mourning, many took a different view of the dead leader.
In the university town of Bir Zeit, about 13km north of Ramallah, the atmosphere on the day of Arafat’s death was sullen, not grief-stricken. A handful of activists from Fatah, Arafat’s party, stood disconsolately in the main street. Local people expressed perfunctory sorrow but there was little genuine emotion. In Ramallah itself, hardcore loyalists from the al-Aqsa martyrs brigades, responsible for bomb attacks in Israel, had to threaten local shops with violence to get them to shut. And outside the Muqata complex itself, the small candle-lit shrine and the relatively small crowds during the week seemed unimpressive given Arafat’s historical stature.
Even the seething mass of bodies at Friday’s funeral, despite the chaos and the constant gunfire, numbered no more than 30 000 or 40 000, though Israeli checkpoints had stopped many coming from other cities and Gaza from attending.
Many Palestinians are well aware of Arafat’s faults. Khreishih, a legislator who led several anti-graft inquiries, blamed the dead leader for the pervasive corruption that has helped destroy the Palestinian Authority’s credibility.
Others, such as Ziad Abu Ammar, a reformist Palestinian politician, said Arafat was a ”Machiavellian” politician who ”monopolised power”. Others criticised Arafat’s tactical use of violence, saying that a non-violent mass movement would have been more successful.
One Ramallah taxi driver, whose brother is in an Israeli prison, was blunt. ”Arafat fucked this place,” he said. ”I won’t shed a tear for him.”
Others say that Arafat, confined to the Muqata by Israeli threats, failed to understand the changing political situation, particularly after the 9/11 attacks.
”The last years were extremely hard on him,” said Edward Abington, a former American diplomat who saw Arafat often. ”When he was in prison like that, the world started to shrink for him. He did not understand what was happening on the ground in Gaza or the West Bank.”
According to Yahia Said, of the London School of Economics, the result was a ”rudderless” Authority and a ‘per vasive decay’ for which Arafat was ”directly responsible”.
”Arafat elevated symbolism to a full-time job,” Said said. ”We are seeing the end of a generation of politicians who were seen as almost divine.”
Yet no one denies that Arafat was a historic figure and that his death signals the end of the era of major figures — such as Saddam, Hafez Assad of Syria and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt — who emerged from the various nationalist, socialist-influenced, post-colonial liberation movements in the Middle East in the second half of the twentieth century. Their doctrines are now being replaced, many say, by Islamic radical ideologies.
Recent polls show support among Palestinians for Islamic groups up from 17% to 35% in last four years while support for Arafat’s Fatah movement, slipped from 37% to 28%. A key question in the post-Arafat era now is the role of religion in any new political formulation among the Palestinians.
The main Islamist party, Hamas, will certainly be a player in any election — either by actively endorsing a candidate or because the organisation can make or break any incumbent by unleashing suicide attacks on Israeli targets. If local elections are held, Hamas is expected to win a number of municipalities, especially in Gaza. Ala Attari, an IT specialist in Bir Zeit, explained the Islamists’ appeal: ”I don’t like any of the present leaders. Hamas have a straightforward strategy and a clear programme.”
The shift to religious ideologies may still be a way off. According to Khalil Shiqaqi, Arafat’s twin legacy of Palestinian national identity and a belief in a ”two-state solution” involving separate political entities for Palestinians and Israelis living side by side is still very strong despite being ”completely contradictory” to the vision of the Islamists. But, he concedes, the threat from religious groups is real.
”Arafat failed in the peace process and state building,” Shiqaqi said. ”The Islamists now present a very strong challenge to the traditional leadership.”
Up in the poverty-stricken alleys of Qalandiya, where Tariq Adnan plays with his toy Uzi, the walls are covered in the green graffiti of Hamas. Arafat posters are few. – Guardian Unlimited Â