TIPPING POINT ? :

Palestinian anger builds over leaders' alleged corruption : Officials are afraid full rebellion may erupt (Mary Curtius, 7/21/02, Los Angeles Times)

 "We are poor, we are critical, we are angry, and also we have a cause," said Ziad abu Amr, a Palestinian legislator and academic. "This is a small society, and cases of corruption are highly visible. People believe that we are supposed to be clean, because we are fighting for our rights. So, objectively speaking, in relative terms, our corruption may be less than people think, but it doesn't matter."

Palestinians, Abu Amr said, are fed up with seeing "an official whose salary is $1,000 a month who buys property worth millions. There was a lot of stealing, extortion, bribery."

"Where have the millions gone?" shouted thousands of unemployed workers who poured into the streets of Gaza City in a demonstration against the Palestinian Authority this month. It was a not-so-subtle question about how millions of dollars in aid from Arab countries and the international community have been spent by the authority since fighting erupted in September 2000.

"Soon, the situation will become so dangerous that people will start accusing everybody, including people like me, of being the symbol of destruction, of defeat," said Abbas Zaki, a Palestinian legislator from the West Bank city of Hebron and veteran leader in Arafat's Fatah movement.

This generation of leaders, Palestinian critics charge, has failed dismally both at making peace and at making war.
 
"For the people, they're finished," said Salah Abdul Shafi, a Gazan economist. "People now even talk about Arafat, and this is completely new."

Abdul Shafi said he worries that unless Arafat institutes the top-to-bottom reforms he has promised, "there will be a wave of internal assassinations." Palestinian ministers, the economist noted, no longer attend the funerals of Palestinians killed in clashes with Israeli troops, "because they are afraid of the people."

Once again, after an American leader gave an inherently unstable situation a push, things are happening far faster than anyone dreamed they could.
Posted by Orrin Judd at July 21, 2002 8:31 PM