Anarchy,
Not Chaos In The West Bank
By Amira Haas
16 August, 2004
Haaretz
There's no theft in Nablus. Maybe here
and there, but it's not a phenomenon. About half the residents of the
town have been impoverished by the tough closure, and the classic tension
between the refugee camps has intensified. Anyone coming to the city
through the IDF blockade arrives with baggage full of nerves: for the
lost time, the rifles aimed at them by the soldiers, and the soldiers'
insulting language.
One Fatah group
starts a quarrel with another Fatah group. Someone from a third Fatah
group shoots at someone from the first Fatah group. Armed men are walking
around in the open with their weapons, even though the army comes into
the city every day and is constantly watching, and even though the army
has made it clear that any armed person will be shot. For that precise
reason, the Palestinian police do not carry weapons, and know that neither
their titles as employees of the Palestinian Authority nor their uniforms
give them any authority. And the courts are not working. In many other
places in the world, all it would take is just a drop of this to yield
to vandalism, economic vengeance, and empty streets as people stay home
in fear. But not in Nablus.
Quite a few surprises
await someone looking in Nablus for the fawda, the anarchy. The doors
to homes are not locked, the city has functioned without a mayor and
with a truncated budget, the streets are clean, roads that were chewed
up for two years by tanks are repaired and upgraded, and the university
insists on students not missing any school days, despite pressure from
the political organizations to observe days of mourning when their leaders
or others are killed.
When the results
of the matriculation exam came in, it seemed that everyone in Nablus
was only interested in the scores, not the latest internal Fatah dispute.
The local radio station broadcast the results for hours, and mothers
brought candies to work to celebrate the success of a son or daughter,
including a mother who lost her son in some lost battle with the army.
She explained that her mourning should not hurt the chances of the living.
And not everyone passed: to those who didn't, there were condolence
calls by friends and relatives.
The expression of
anarchy on the Palestinian side and the loss of control is grabbing
the headlines, and rightfully so. But two basic facts have not made
headlines. One, it's an anarchy typical of Fatah - an anarchy that matches
the traditional methods of control used by Yasser Arafat for decades
- and hundreds of its senior members and thousands of its junior members,
whether knowingly or without a choice or for personal reasons, have
submitted to it. An internal competition over resources and power, the
exploitation of young people by a few mysterious power players in Fatah,
the changing of loyalties every few weeks: it's anarchy, and people
guess that it also involves some collaborators with the Shin Bet, but
that suspicion only intensifies the certain sense of a lack of control.
But this anarchy
only skims the surface of the natural social fabric, and that leads
to the second fact: the Palestinian social structure preserves a surprising
stability, an internal solidity, a mutual trust at levels that are not
usually found in societies which have been through disasters, daily
fear, insecurity about the future, suspicion of collaborators, and the
economic crises that have shocked the Palestinians for so many years.
The clan structure
proves itself over and over as an anchor and spine, in an era of shocks.
The social solidarity
goes beyond the boundaries of the clan. Along with veteran mukhtars
- family elders who mediate conflicts and disputes - there are modern
arbitrators who are trusted for their political experience and years
in jail. There's the usual aid, the Islam-based charities or the charities
from the town's wealthy, or the cooperatives set up by the refugees
of 1948. And there's the non-profit groups founded by leftists.
Aside from the clan
structure, there is one other unifying factor: the Israeli occupation.
Like every occupation regime, it tries to divide and crumble and seduce.
The internal political debates are deep, but the vast majority of the
public is unified by its hatred of the occupation and its representatives.
That does not mean there is no mutual recrimination, mean gossip, jealousies
and rivalries, but where do such things not exist?
That internal contradiction
is quite characteristic of every Palestinian community in the West Bank
and in Gaza. Even in Ramallah, the capital of the humiliated Palestinian
Authority, which has the highest rate of "immigrants" who
do not belong to the old families of the town, where the economic gaps
are particularly glaring, and the residents do report break-ins and
assaults, there is a sense of basic domestic security. And opposite
the irresponsibility embedded in Fatah, which the Israeli occupation
strengthened so well, there is also the deep solidarity and sense of
mutual responsibility that derived from it. Don't let the headlines
and the Fatah thugs make you forget it.