RHETORIC IS REALITY:

Militants to give Abbas ‘a chance’ (Steven Erlanger, 1/05/05, The New York Times)

A fighter with the Aksa Martyrs Brigades who calls himself Qazzafi stood by a makeshift fire in the drizzling Casbah of this angry city, nervously pulling a grenade in and out of his pocket.

He was jittery anyway, having survived an Israeli rocket attack in June that killed a major Aksa commander, and his bodyguard was jittery, too, their eyes darting from face to face in the alley, through the random shadows of the firelight. They said all the right things about Mahmoud Abbas, their Fatah movement's candidate for the Palestinian presidency in Sunday's election, but their hearts were not in it - not even close.

"Fatah supports him, and so we believe he's the right person," said Qazzafi, who is 30 years old. "But he's coming to Nablus Thursday and we'll see him, and we have our own demands." And those are? "If he can guarantee our security and lives from the Israelis, me and my comrades, and get the prisoners released," he said. "End the occupation and get the Israelis out of our territory."

Yasir Arafat and company no doubt harbored a dream of destroying Israel completely, but forty years of claiming only an interest in Palestinian statehood has made that the end of the Road.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 6, 2005 10:47 AM