Intifadah support seen to wane among Palestinians

RAMALLAH, West Bank -- When Abu Fahdi joined a Palestinian militant group and took up arms against Israel, he thought he was serving his people. Now he believes he only did them harm.

"We achieved nothing in all this time, and we lost so much," said Abu Fahdi, a baby-faced 29-year-old who, because of his status as a fugitive, insisted on being identified only by a nickname meaning "father of Fahdi." "People hate us for that and wish we were dead."

This young militant, a member of the militant Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, is not alone in such thinking. Among Palestinians from all walks of life, there is a quiet but growing consensus that their intifadah, or uprising -- which broke out four years ago today -- has largely failed as an armed struggle, and lost its character as a popular-resistance movement.

Moreover, many Palestinians fear that their effective military defeat at the hands of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has left them without leverage to extract political and territorial concessions that would help lay the groundwork for their hoped-for state.

The official Palestinian line is that the struggle continues. Veteran leader Yasser Arafat and old-line members of his Fatah faction insist that ordinary Palestinians are unbowed by the overwhelming degree of military force that Israel has brought to bear in cities and towns all over the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Palestinian militant groups such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, which have been responsible for more than 100 suicide bombings over the past four years, also insist that they will continue to hit Israeli targets with all their strength.

But relentless Israeli military strikes at the militant groups' senior leaders and field operatives, together with the partial construction of a security barrier meant to seal off the West Bank, are credited with bringing about an 80 percent drop in such attacks inside Israel.

For some time now, a range of influential figures in Palestinian society -- intellectuals, lawmakers, analysts, professionals, and well-regarded local officials -- have been asserting, in almost matter-of-fact fashion, that the violent confrontation with Israeli forces has reached a dead end, and that Palestinians must look to the future.

"We have witnessed the destruction of Palestinian society -- its civil institutions, its economy, its infrastructure," said Zuhair Manasrah, the governor of Bethlehem. "The result has been a complete disaster for the Palestinians, at all levels. Now we must think how to rebuild."

The Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qurei, made a statement last week that was extraordinary in its implicit assumption that a post-conflict phase was already under way. Interviewed on Israel Radio, Qurei spoke of the need to rehabilitate members of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed offshoot of Arafat's political faction.

"The Al Aqsa Brigades are part of Fatah, and we are ready to absorb them and deal with them, but for this to happen, I must ask that Israel guarantee their security," he said. "As long as Israel continues to hunt them and kill them and make their life difficult, this won't happen."

Abu Fahdi is a case in point. He joined the Al Aqsa Brigades about five months after the outbreak of the intifadah -- spurred, he said, by a surge of civilian deaths during Israeli military operations in his West Bank hometown, the name of which he did not want revealed.

"The Israelis are the ones who started it all, by coming to our towns and our homes," he said.

Beginning in 2001, Abu Fahdi took part in dozens of attacks against Israelis, mainly shooting at cars on West Bank roads used primarily by Jewish settlers. Although he fired at vehicles indiscriminately, he remembers being horrified when one of his fellow gunmen managed to kill three members of the same Israeli family.

Neither he nor most of his comrades-in-arms, he insists, had envisioned a conflict that would drag on this long, or would result in so much suffering on both sides. Casualty figures are disputed, but about 1,000 Israelis and more than 3,000 Palestinians have died, with the number of injured totaling around tenfold.

From the beginning, the tactics of Palestinian militants left civilians caught squarely in the middle. Abu Fahdi described the deliberate use of thickly populated areas as cover when staging attacks.

"It made me uneasy when we would use someone's house to fire at [Jewish targets], and know that the army would shoot back at the families in the area, or destroy the home," Abu Fahdi said. "But we thought it was something that had to be done in the short term, in order to inflict blows."

With a concerted Israeli campaign of arrests and "targeted killings" having thinned the ranks of the militant organizations, Palestinian teenagers and women are increasingly being recruited to carry out attacks.

Senior Israeli military officials acknowledge that unless they maintain a tight grip on Palestinian cities and towns, they risk a return to near-constant suicide attacks. At the same time, they are aware of the long-term dangers of holding a huge Palestinian population under oppressive conditions.

Major General Dan Halutz, the Israeli military's deputy chief of staff, was asked last week by Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper whether Israel would have to maintain its current military posture -- with troops deployed in force all over the West Bank -- into a fifth year.

"Yes, and if you ask me about 2006, I have nothing to indicate that the conflict won't enter a sixth year either," he replied.

While dogged resistance to the Israeli occupation helped keep the Palestinians' statehood hopes in the world spotlight, many now say visible public support for suicide bombings was a crucial error.

"In a post-9/11 world, that could only harm our cause," said Manasrah, the Bethlehem governor.

Israeli analysts credit the country's military and intelligence branches with containing a highly motivated guerrilla-style insurgency -- no small task, as US forces in Iraq have learned -- but warn that there is no substitute for a long-term political solution.

Two prominent Israeli journalists, Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff, authors of a much-discussed new book on the intifadah, drew similar conclusions about the pitfalls of short-term victory. Their title is telling: "How We Won and Why We Lost The War With The Palestinians."

The conflict has coincided with a series of failed or failing diplomatic initiatives, most notably the "road map" peace plan put forth with tremendous fanfare by the Bush administration. Talks between Israel and the Palestinians have completely broken down, and Sharon is under little US pressure to return to the bargaining table.

Despite the devastated social and economic landscape left behind by four years of intense fighting, some Palestinian political figures believe it will ultimately pave the way for crucial political reforms. "The first intifadah gave birth to Hamas," said Mustafa Barghouti, a leader of a pro-reform movement called the Palestinian National Initiative. "The second intifadah is bringing to life a new option, a Palestinian democratic trend. . . . It is consolidating a new young leadership."