Palestinians Delicately Begin Debate on Circle of Violence

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AL BIREH, West Bank, March 8 — Muhammad Darraj, a 40-year-old construction worker with weathered hands and dirt-caked boots, moved his family into a new apartment with a commanding view of a Jewish settlement several weeks ago. His reasons were pedestrian but loomed large in his life: he wanted to own, not rent.

Now the new apartment is a house of mourning for his 9-year-old son, Odai, who became an accidental “martyr” for the Palestinian cause after an errant Israeli bullet pierced his bedroom window and then his heart while he was playing with a plastic truck last weekend. An apolitical worker, Mr.

Darraj still looks stunned that his family has been swept into the current of the conflict, and that government officials and gun-toting militants are parading through his living room with plaques and wreaths. Mr.

Darraj said he felt a surge of hatred toward the Israelis, whose troops were responding to gunfire in an area where Palestinian militants use a half-constructed building to shoot toward the settlement of Psagot. But his teen-age daughter, Jamileh, blames the gunmen, too, and strove to express that sentiment until her father shushed her anxiously.

Other Palestinian voices, though, those of clerics, academics, residents of hard-hit areas and even government officials, are starting to be heard. It is hardly an uprising against the uprising, but it is the beginning of an internal Palestinian debate about the violent nature of the intifada for the first time since late last September.

Some Palestinians are speaking out only against the militants’ use of residential neighborhoods as a base, especially after a wave of bystander deaths in Al Bireh, outside Ramallah, during the last few weeks. The sheik at the central mosque here, for instance, condemned the gunmen as “either collaborators or ignorant” in his sermon on March 2.

But the broader question of the intifada’s direction is being broached, too. Some Palestinians are gingerly asking if their leaders have a strategy that justifies the devastating loss of life, property, mobility and income — gingerly out of concern that their questioning be mistaken for disloyalty to the nationalist cause.

How this transcription was made

Transcribed from the slide scan by a reader working off magnified crops, not by optical character recognition. THE SCAN IS A REPRODUCTION RATHER THAN A PHOTOGRAPH OF NEWSPRINT AND ITS PUNCTUATION HAS NOT SURVIVED: almost every sentence-ending full stop is missing and the lower-case i is printed throughout without its dot. Those are artifacts of whatever process produced the image, not errors by the newspaper, and the sentence-ending periods and one colon have been restored in the text above; no word, spelling or comma has been changed. Nothing else in this archive’s records required that, and a photographic re-scan of this clipping would settle it. The clipping carries no masthead, no folio and no credit line of any kind, so the newspaper rests on the hand-typed slide label. The printed dateline is “AL BIREH, West Bank, March 8”, three days before the date recorded here, which is ordinary for a Sunday analysis piece of this kind; the year is fixed by the article’s reference to the intifada having begun in late September of the previous year.

Cite this clipping

"Palestinians Delicately Begin Debate on Circle of Violence," The New York Times, 11 March 2001. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2001-050. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2001-050