Abstract
May 1994: Palestinian police enter their new police station, formerly an Israeli prison.
On October 23, 1998, the Clinton administration helped revive the nearly expired Israeli-Palestinian peace process by brokering the Wye River Memorandum, an agreement that stipulates further Israeli withdrawals from West Bank territory in exchange for tougher Palestinian actions to combat terrorism. A key component of the Wye document is the Palestinian Authority's agreement to “criminalize … any importation, manufacturing or unlicensed sale, acquisition, or possession of firearms, ammunition, or weapons in areas under Palestinian jurisdiction.”
Two days later, Wassim Tarifi, a young Palestinian activist, was shot and killed by Palestinian security forces during a demonstration in Ramallah. Tarifi and others were protesting a police raid, reportedly in search of illegal weapons, on the local offices of Tanzim, a Fatah organization. Less than a week later, following a Hamas attack on an Israeli school bus, the Palestinian chief of police in Gaza, Ghazi Jabali, issued orders to open fire–if necessary–on Hamas and other Islamic activists.
The death of the 16-year-old Tarifi (a nephew of a Palestinian legislator and Fatah official), and the prospect of violent resistance if Yasir Arafat and the Palestinian security forces seek to disarm Hamas and various secular opposition groups, points up the dangerous crosscurrents of violence and instability running through Palestinian society. Hanan Ashrawi, herself an eyewitness to Tarifi's killing, was quoted in the October 28 issue of Ha'aretz: “I simply could not believe my own eyes. … This sort of thing could have been expected under the Israeli occupation, but I never thought I would see such events taking place under our own national regime.”
According to reliable estimates, there are some 10,000 to 15,000 illegal weapons in Palestinian hands, ranging from World War II-vintage Sten guns and Webley pistols to modern AK-47 Kalashnikov and M-16 assault rifles–and perhaps grenade launchers and anti-tank and antiaircraft portable missiles.
The 1995 Oslo accords provided for 15,000 automatic rifles and sidearms, plus a few hundred heavy machine guns, for Palestinian police and security forces, yet there could be 30,000 or more weapons in the Palestinian community. While not large in absolute terms, given a Palestinian population of more than 2.5 million, the stockpiling of many thousands of modern automatic weapons by rival political factions and competing Palestinian security services is nonetheless worrying.
In the past few years, Israeli and Palestinian authorities have intercepted large shipments of weapons being ferried by small boats across the Dead Sea from Jordan, through underground tunnels into the Gaza Strip from Egypt, and even in stolen cars coming across the Green Line from Israel. Although the bulk of the trade consists of AK-47 assault rifles that originate in Lebanon, Egypt, and Sudan, smuggled weapons also include American M-16 automatic rifles and Israeli Galil assault rifles and Uzi submachine guns.
Armed and dangerous: Hooded gunman stands next to a speaker at a demonstration by the Islamic Jihad.
The market for illegal weapons in Palestinian territory is reportedly quite lucrative, with AK-47s and M-16s commanding prices as high as $2,000. While the price for a new AK-47 has reportedly declined in the past year, it likely will remain high because of the risks faced by smugglers trying to evade Israeli military and border police. In South Asia or southern Africa, where vast quantities of weapons are left over from civil wars, an AK-47 can cost as little as $20.
Despite the profits to be made in weapons smuggling, the main motivations for acquiring small arms and light weapons are political. The Palestinian Authority itself reportedly has purchased or confiscated hundreds if not thousands of weapons with which to better arm its police and security forces, in partial anticipation of a total breakdown of the peace process and violent confrontations with the Israeli army. Unlike Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which rely on explosives and have little need for large arsenals of light weapons, Arafat and his top commanders want a well-equipped and well-trained security force for both domestic and external reasons.
Meanwhile, large quantities of arms are also in the hands of the different factions of Fatah, criminal organizations, and individuals. A concerted effort by Palestinian police and security officials to confiscate these weapons will be a major test of Arafat's ability to fulfill the security provisions of the Wye Memorandum.
Of equal concern is the increasing level of violence between West Bank and Gaza Palestinians and the heavily armed population of Jewish settlers living in their midst. The months preceding the Wye talks saw an increase in the cycle of individual shooting incidents between Palestinians and settlers.
Last August, two settlers were murdered with an AK-47 as they patrolled the perimeter of the Jewish settlement of Yitzhar, near Nablus. Last May, a Palestinian was shot to death by a settler near the Jewish settlement of Eli, north of Jerusalem. In July, the right-wing settler group “Committee to Safeguard the Roads” took credit for firing on a Palestinian police jeep in what the group described as an “act of revenge for attacks carried out with the PLO's encouragement.”
By November 1998, some settler spokesmen were warning ominously of another “Goldstein incident.” (In 1994, settler Baruch Goldstein, armed with a Galil assault rifle, massacred 29 Palestinians at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron.)
The deadlock in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in 1997-98, and the uncertainty over whether the Wye agreement will survive, has produced a situation where neither Jewish settlers nor individual Palestinians completely trust their own military and police forces to provide adequate security in the volatile West Bank and Gaza Strip. Accordingly, neither community feels at all comfortable giving up the small arms and light weapons upon which they feel their personal security depends.
The already uneasy relations between the 160,000 Jewish settlers living in the West Bank and the Israeli Defense Forces (idf) soldiers who protect their settlements have grown even more tense at the prospect of impending transfers of West Bank territory to the Palestinians. Although the settlers are authorized to carry IDF-issued Galil and Uzi automatic weapons, and despite the fact that the settlements are part of the idf communications network in the territories, many of them feel that the Israeli Army does not do enough to protect their individual security. This has been especially true in and around settlements in Hebron and Kiryat Arba, where the settlers have clashed openly with the soldiers.
In June 1998, many Israelis were concerned when the Netanyahu government approved the creation of civil guard units in Ma'ale Adumim, Ariel, and other large West Bank settlements. Knesset member Dedi Zucker warned that the civil guards could “quickly turn into armed militias of extremist settlers serving as a private army of the Yesha (Jewish settler) Council.”
The Palestinian community similarly distrusts its official security services. Arafat and the Palestinian Authority control some 12 separate police and security organizations, many of which are in open competition with each other. Individual Palestinians often don't know who to turn to for help in dealing with street crime, or with family or neighborhood disputes that turn violent.
If a citizen gets no satisfaction from one particular police service, he or she turns to another, further increasing intra-police rivalries. Or he or she can turn to paramilitary groups like Tanzim (an organization led by former activists from the Intifada), which then provokes open conflict with Palestinian police and security services, as happened in the death of Wassim Tarifi.
For several years now, political factional violence, both within Fatah and between Fatah and official Palestinian Authority police, has often turned into running gun battles in cities like Nablus and Ramallah. When combined with the threat posed by the heavily armed Jewish settlers, it is not surprising that many individual Palestinians prefer to keep their sidearms and light weapons rather than turn them over to the Palestinian Authority.
Finally, part of the profusion of weapons among Palestinians is the result of cultural habits. Evidence of a growing gun culture in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, especially in the aftermath of Israeli withdrawals, could be seen in cities like Ramallah, where restaurateurs openly wear pistols while serving customers; in villages near Jenin, where volleys of shots are fired during wedding ceremonies; and in pastures near Hebron, where Palestinian shepherds carry firearms to protect their flocks.
Many Israelis fear that similar trends are occurring in Israel itself. In October 1996, the Netanyahu government proposed relaxing Israel's gun control laws, in response, it said, to recent double-digit increases in murder, armed robbery, and other types of violent crimes. A critic of the policy, Hebrew University criminologist Simha Landau, told The Jerusalem Report (November 13, 1997) quite the opposite, that “the proliferation of firearms definitely plays a role” in exacerbating Israel's violent crime rate.
Former idf Army Chief of Staff Dan Shomron likewise criticized the loosening of gun control laws, which could double or triple the number of private weapons in Israel, already estimated at 300,000. “Flooding the country with more weapons,” said Shomron in 1996, “no good will come of it.”
Such fears seemed to be confirmed with an increase in politically inspired violence during the fall 1998 campaigns for municipal elections, leading Israeli Chief of Police Yehuda Vilk to warn of “a significant rise in the level of violence in Israeli society,” which has extended to attacks on judges, mayors, police, and civil servants.
The increase in the number of personal firearms in Israel, added to the already large quantities of weapons issued to IDF personnel and Jewish settlers, comes amid a sharpening of long-standing religious and political polarization within Israeli society.
Israeli soldiers on guard in Hebron.
In recent years, historical tensions between Orthodox and secular Jews, and between Ashkenazi (European) and Sephardic (Middle Eastern) Jews, have been exacerbated by three major factors. First has been the arrival since 1989 of more than 850,000 immigrants, 725,000 from the former Soviet Union alone. In a country with a total population of only six million, this influx has exacerbated housing and job shortages and led to increased social and ethnic tensions.
Second is the continued uneasy relationship between Israel's Jewish majority and its growing Arab minority (14 percent). As Prime Minister Netanyahu's adviser for Arab affairs noted in the November 13 issue of The Jerusalem Report, Israeli Arabs feel a “deepening identification with Palestinian nationalist and Islamic elements, both of which bear the potential for conflict with the Israeli government.”
Third, and perhaps most ominous, political tensions spawned by the peace process are roiling as the prospect grows nearer of Israel actually abandoning Jewish settlements and giving up historic parts of Judea and Samaria.
This polarization found its most violent expression in the assassination in 1995 of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a fervent opponent of the peace process, Yigal Amir. Since then, the prospect that further political violence would undermine Israeli society has been a widespread concern. In the days following the Wye agreement, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was himself the target of politically inspired threats.
Arafat faces much the same politically motivated violence as he seeks to implement the Wye agreement. With his popularity among Palestinians already dwindling because of the few tangible economic and social gains produced by the Oslo peace process, Arafat now has to withstand charges from Hamas and others that the Palestinian Authority is collaborating with the CIA in confiscating illegal weapons (as called for at Wye River). As Israeli journalist Danny Rubenstein said in Ha'aretz on November 9, opponents of Arafat's policies may again invoke the chant, “Arafat, Arafat, remember what happened to Sadat,” which was heard during Gaza demonstrations in 1994.
Regardless of the fate of the Wye agreement and the prospects for moving to the final stages of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, relations are and will remain volatile, both between Israelis and Palestinians and within both societies.
The increased availability of small arms and light weapons poses significant challenges in three separate contexts. One is the stability of Israel's pluralist democracy at a time when the country faces the most contentious issue of its 50-year history. The second is whether a democratic society can take root in Palestine in the face of multiple, heavily armed political and official security factions operating outside the rule of law.
And the third is whether there can be any meaningful reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians–“two peoples living on one land”–when concepts of personal security between them remain so directly tied to the carrying of weapons and the deadly use of force.