Torn Apart

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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.