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A Palestinian police officer arrived with his squad, all armed. The peddlers were trading illegally, so the officer told them to leave. But immediately the men came down from the rooftops and surrounded him. Paid by the peddlers for protection, they were armed with Kalashnikov and M-16 rifles. These were men from the Ta'amra tribe. Thought to be descendants of medieval Crusaders, they dwelled in goat-hair tents until a few decades ago, but in the 1960s they settled in villages on the edge of the Judean Desert and began to take over local farmlands. In the past few years, the Ta'amra have filled most of the jobs in Arafat's security services in Bethlehem. They have used the lack of central control during the intifadeh to cement their fiefdoms, pull in protection money and ride over townspeople. When the policeman showed up, it was time for the Ta'amra to show their muscle. "You have five minutes to leave," the police officer told the peddlers. The Ta'amra laughed. "You have three minutes to leave," one of them crowed at the cop. Then he delivered a hard slap to the officer's face. In the crowded street, the policeman sized up the dangers of a bloody gun battle and retreated.
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.