(2 of 5)
Between Balata and Nablus, the road bumps down a mile-long stretch of chop shops where cars stolen from Israel are gutted for parts. Arafat's police don't dare touch these garages. "It's a free-trade zone," jokes Khader. Outside the door of his second-floor office, Nablus mayor Ghassan Shaka'a keeps two guards armed with Kalashnikovs. Smartly dressed in a checkered sports jacket, Shaka'a is a member of the executive committee of the P.L.O., a confidant of Arafat's. "Balata is not against me," he says, laughing dismissively. Out on the street, however, he rarely shows his face for fear of assassination. The mayor smiles broadly when asked about the accusations of corruption made by Balata's people against his Palestinian Authority. It's "certainly a reason for discontent, but a minor one," he says. "It's a battle of good people against bad people." So, who's good and who's bad? The mayor laughs and answers a question he hasn't been asked. "The Palestinians are good, and the Israelis are bad."
There are good and bad people in Balata too. But the bad people got a leg up from this intifadeh. In the first intifadeh, from 1987 to 1993, Balata was the hot zone, a beacon of Palestinians' willingness to sacrifice. But seven years of Arafat's regime have destroyed that spirit. "People follow the religion of their king," says an Arab proverb. The religion of Arafat's henchmen has been corruption. So the people of Balata have learned to be crooks.
Balata and Nablus are not the only Palestinian communities torn by internal conflict. Tribal, social and regional enmities throughout the Palestinian territories grow more violent by the day. The intifadeh was supposed to free Palestinians from Israeli occupation, but it is fast pushing them into crime, poverty and gang war. Since the arrival of the Palestinian Authority seven years ago, the society of the West Bank and Gaza Strip has been cracking under the dual strains of Arafat's corrupt rule and continued occupation by Israel. The intifadeh took those fissures and blew them apart. This semi-anarchy has alarming consequences. Take a trip along the fault lines of Palestinian society and imagine what it is like to live astride them.
INSIDE AND OUTSIDE
At the U.N. food distribution center in the Gaza Strip's Tuffah neighborhood earlier this spring, Palestinians clutched small, pink ration slips for the emergency foodstuffs the U.N. Relief and Works Agency hands out to refugees who have been unable to commute to work in Israel during the intifadeh. Abu Amira had already collected his ration and loaded it onto his cart. He was sweaty, dirty and angry. He came early, but it was hot even at 8 a.m. First, he pressed through a crowd of men to hand his ticket to a clerk behind a chicken-wire grill. The clerk stamped his ticket and Abu Amira jockeyed at another window for the second stamp required for him to collect his meager ration for the month. His battered donkey cart was loaded with enough milk, oil, sugar and rice to last his family of five for a week. A few yards away, a man shoving to get to the clerk in his steamy booth threw a punch before others in the crowd held him back.