Just another grim scene to come out of the Palestinian territories–or so you might think. But there is one difference. No Israelis were involved in the killing of Abdullah and two others that day. For the first time since the yearlong intifada began, Palestinian policemen shot down their own people with live ammunition. The confrontation started when Palestinians rallied in the thousands to support Osama bin Laden and denounce the U.S. attacks on Afghanistan. Yasir Arafat, fearing he would lose the sympathy of President George W. Bush and the international community, ordered a crackdown. When they realized they were facing Palestinian police, protesters aimed their stones at a glass-encased poster of Arafat. Others charged a security post, roughed up policemen inside and set it on fire. “We’ve come to expect the [Israeli] occupation forces to shoot at us but for Palestinian police to kill fellow Palestinians–it’s criminal,” says Abdullah’s father, Mohammed al-Ifranji.
For Yasir Arafat, America’s war on terror poses some hard choices. The Palestinian leader apparently decided late last week to ban such demonstrations completely. Though he has long claimed he has little control over Palestinian extremists, his police managed to stop the protests after the Palestinian Authority closed schools and universities and sealed its borders to the international media. No one knows how long Arafat can suppress his street. But for him, the question is similar to the choice that leaders across the Muslim world now face. Confronting Bush’s declaration that “you are either with us or against us”–and an ultimatum from bin Laden himself, who has insisted that all Muslims join his side–Islamic leaders and clerics are being forced to climb off the fence.
Arab autocrats have survived for decades by delicately balancing pro-U.S. policies with tolerance–or even support–for Islamic fundamentalism. “We don’t have protests, because we take away the reasons for protest,” says a senior adviser to the Saudi government. Repression and censorship stifled some dissent against their own rule, but many Arab leaders were happy to encourage public anger at Israel–and its American backers–as a further means of deflecting anger away from themselves. “You in the U.S. think we don’t care about public opinion,” says a former Saudi minister. “But we do. Oh, we do.”
In this new war, the Muslim dictatorships’ old carrots and sticks may not work. Satellite news of the U.S. strikes bypasses censors, whipping up anger the regimes may not be able to control. And just as publicly, the Bush administration is demanding the Arab leaders’ unconditional support. The gulf sheiks are off balance, no longer able to proclaim their friendship on visits to Washington while tolerating and even financing Islamic-extremist groups at home (a tactic that took the edge off popular anger against their regimes). In Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak may find it harder to collect billions in American aid while his government-controlled press preaches hatred of the United States.
Fear was palpable among the foreign ministers of the 57 countries in the Organization for Islamic Conference at an emergency meeting in Qatar last week. They condemned the Sept. 11 attacks, but they could not bring themselves to condone the American campaign in Afghanistan. In fact, they’re pleading with Washington to ease the pressure, at least rhetorically. “This term ‘war on terror’ is so muddy, and so dangerous,” said one influential gulf financier. They want the Bush administration to exclude guerrilla wars in Israeli-occupied territories from its definition of terrorism. They want assurances that Bush’s fight against terrorists “with global reach” won’t lead to direct U.S. interference in their countries. They are praying that somehow the Bush administration can force a final settlement between Israelis and Palestinians, thus depriving extremists of their most potent issue.
If not, many Arab officials privately say, this could be the eve of destruction for the old order in the Middle East. The very regimes that Washington is depending on as allies in the war on terror–from Saudi Arabia to Egypt–could be toppled. And that’s just what Osama bin Laden wants. While most demonstrations remained fairly small last week, pessimists fear a violent Islamic backlash that begins with street protests and pictures of bin Laden, and ends in a Taliban- or Iranian-style revolution. At a rally inside Cairo’s Al-Azhar mosque, people held the Quran in the air and raised banners declaring jihad is the solution.
Some observers of the region say that, in the long run, it may be well for the old order to fall; it is the corruption and failure of these Arab regimes that has helped to breed so much fundamentalist anger. Even if the regimes survive, a true crackdown on militant Islam could foster political stability and maybe even peace agreements between the Israelis and the Palestinians and Syrians. “There might be an opportunity here,” says Israeli historian Asher Susser. There were a few positive signs that Islamists were on the run. Last week one of the Islamic world’s most eminent scholars, Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi of Qatar, issued an instruction, or fatwa, backing the U.S.-led fight against bin Laden. That could help bolster the Arab rulers’ standing in the public eye.
For Arafat, who once embraced the rhetoric of jihad, the main fear is being caught on the wrong side as he was during the gulf war, when he backed Saddam Hussein. And he now seems more eager than he has in a long time to negotiate a deal with Israel, perhaps not unlike the one he let slip away last year. But after a year of brutal fighting in the West Bank and Gaza, punctuated by suicide bombings in Israel, bitterness runs deep on both sides. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon keeps blocking talks, while polls show more Palestinians supporting Hamas’ credo of eternal struggle against Israel than backing compromise.
Indeed, for a few tense hours last week, just after the killing of Abdullah al-Ifranji, some Palestinian officials feared they were facing the start of a Hamas-led insurrection. “If Hamas could have overthrown the Palestinian Authority, they would have done it,” Gaza police chief Ghazi Jabali told NEWSWEEK. Arafat and his fellow Arab leaders, having chosen to side with America, have every reason to fear their people are taking sides against them.
