Saturday, Aug 30, 2008
The Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a militant group associated with Arafat's Fatah faction, is supplanting Hamas as a crucial player in the bloody war between Palestinians and Israelis.
Mar 19, 2002 | Until recently, most of the attacks against Israelis were carried out by radical Islamists from Hamas or Islamic Jihad. But now a new, secular organization has started taking credit for the bloodiest attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians. They called themselves the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, and they have become a crucial and little-known player in the bloody confrontation between Israelis and Palestinians. In an exclusive interview with Salon, Nasser Badawi, one of the group's senior commanders, talked about why the Brigades started, what its goals are, how it differs from Hamas and Islamic Jihad and what political developments could lead it to lay down the gun.
Israeli analysts initially belittled the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades as "armed gangs," but they have become a deadly force, inflicting enough casualties to rival the Islamists from the Hamas and Jihad movements combined. The brigades claimed a shooting in Netanya the same day in which a baby and one other person died. They also carried out Sunday's shooting attack in Kfar Saba in which a woman was killed. The brigades also claimed the suicide attack in an orthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem in which 10 people died just over two weeks ago, the same weekend as the checkpoint attack. In addition, they participated in the recent destruction of an Israeli tank.
The group evolved from the Fatah militia, long the guerrilla heart of the PLO. "But there were those of us who understood that with the Oslo Accords and the establishment of the Palestinian Authority the struggle had not ended," Badawi says.
The Brigades was founded in the Balata refugee camp some six months after the outbreak of the latest intifada (i.e. in spring 2001) as what Badawi says was "a reaction to attacks by the settlers and the brutality of the Israeli army." Badawi denies that Fatah made a conscious choice to try and take the initiative back from the Islamic groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad, who had taken the lead in attacks on Israelis after the first few months of the intifada. In this he differs from another Fatah leader, Marwan Barghouti, who heads the Tanzim militia. Barghouti said at the beginning of the intifada, "We were forced to take the initiative in the street if we didn't want to lose our leading position." Badawi sees it differently, saying "the resistance is open to everyone, we hope the others will join us."
(Tanzim is a Fatah militia, not part of the Palestinian Authority, which was mainly involved in the clashes during demonstrations at the beginning of the intifada. Tanzim is not generally associated with terrorist attacks, although its members sometimes fire at settlers. The exact difference between the different militias is murky and nobody knows what all the relationships are.)
Badawi paints a picture of the Brigades as issuing forth from grass-roots activists on the local level without any coordination with or instructions from the political echelon. Its members recognize Yasser Arafat and even Marwan Barghouti as leaders of the political movement, but "there is no direct relationship at all" between those leaders and the Brigades, Badawi maintains. (For its part, the Palestinian Authority has said little about the Brigades.)
Badawi says the Brigades are bound to obey the political leaders if they issue direct orders to desist, "but they haven't done so yet." Badawi is angered by suggestions that his outfit is a group of loose cannons outside the control of the political leadership and sometimes not in a position to gauge the real interests of the Palestinian people. "We are still Fatah," he exclaims. He views the armed resistance as merely a way to advance the political goals of the movement and insists that the Brigades keep a close eye on political developments. "When Arafat declared a cease-fire in December, we obeyed, not one week as they demanded but three weeks, and the Israelis only responded with more violence."
The Brigades militants do not share the hard line of the Islamic groups, which vow to destroy Israel: Al Aqsa members say that, like Fatah, they are interested in a peace process. They demand that Israel fully withdraw to its 1967 borders and, like Arafat and the P.A., also insist on the right of return of refugees to Israel, which would in effect mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state, if they are serious about implementing it and not simply putting it forward, as some believe, as a bargaining position. But if they are politically more conciliatory, their tactics are equally severe. They strike both civilian targets inside Israel and soldiers in the occupied territories. Lately the Brigades have even started copying the hitherto exclusively Islamist tactics of suicide bombings -- and because they are secular, they accept women as well. "Nationalist ideas are motivation enough, we don't need religion for that," Badawi says.
In the short term, in the wake of Israel's bloody incursion into P.A.-controlled areas, attacks against Israelis seem likely to continue. Members of Al Aqsa say they will not be mollified simply by Israel's withdrawal from the Palestinian territory it has occupied over the last couple of weeks. Revenge is a powerful motive: "blood for blood, a killing for a killing," says Badawi several times. The Israelis have not yet been made to pay fully for the Palestinian deaths they caused during their recent offensive, he states ominously. On the other hand, the Brigades keep an eye on political developments. Badawi says a cease-fire may be possible, "if it comes from both sides" -- which means if Israel drags its feet on political negotiations and insists that security and a cease-fire come first, their attacks will likely continue.
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