Focus / Filling Arafat's shoes

The three days of festivities marking the end of the month of Ramadan, Id al-Fitr, which began yesterday in the Palestinian Authority, give the leadership something of a brief time-out for consultations and assessments on how to act during this sensitive period in the wake of Yasser Arafat's death. Relative quiet prevails in the territories because all businesses are closed, studies have been suspended and residents are celebrating the holiday in family frameworks.

The entire leadership has gathered in Ramallah and they are welcoming to the Muqata hall the thousands of Palestinians who are coming to comfort the mourners and visit the chairman's grave in the courtyard.

The three holiday days were supposed to begin only today, Sunday, in keeping with the announcements by the religious leaders of Jordan, Egypt and most Arab states - but the Palestinian leadership decided Friday evening to follow the lead of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, which announced the start of the holiday yesterday. Hence, the residents of the West Bank and Gaza were informed on Friday evening that the next day, Saturday, would mark the end of the fast days and the start of the holiday.

The Palestinian leadership may have decided to bring the holiday forward in order to stave violent demonstrations and outbursts on the backdrop of the grief over Arafat's death. On Friday, therefore, spokespeople for the Palestinian government told traders in the territories that they were allowed to open their stores on Friday evening so that residents could purchase items for the holiday days.

In Ramallah, like in all the Palestinian cities, stores were closed in mourning over Arafat's demise; however, the moment they opened, Fatah's Tanzim activists in the city ordered the merchants to close them again and not to undermine the mourning strike. There were those who saw this as a sign that the new leadership, headed by Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) and Ahmed Qureia (Abu Ala), will have a tough time keeping control over the intifada activists, including members of their own movement.

An earlier incident took place on Thursday, when news of Arafat's death broke. Students from Bir Zeit University, who marched in a demonstration in Ramallah, chanted: "Not Dahlan and not Abbas; Abu Ammar [Arafat] is the foundation." The significance of the demonstrators' chants is that they are willing to accept only someone who follows in the footsteps of Abu Ammar.

The Palestinian leadership and public are completely united in the demand to hold elections for the post of PA leader in the second week of January, in keeping with the PA's constitution, which calls for elections within two months of the chairman's demise. From a technical point of view, elections in this time are possible because the Palestinian elections committee completed its update of the voters' roll a month ago.

There exist, of course, the well-known problems of the presence of the Israel Defense Forces in the Palestinian cities, and the roadblocks that do not facilitate a normal elections campaign; but the more pressing Palestinian problem perhaps is that among the top ranks of the ruling party, Fatah, there isn't a single candidate who is favored by the majority of the public.

Abu Mazen has hardly any support in the street, and Abu Ala isn't particularly popular, either. Both are seen as too prone to giving in and too moderate. Opposition to them does not come only from among Hamas and the left-wing fronts, but from within Fatah, too, in the form of the Tanzim, the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades (which are now named after Arafat), and those Bir Zeit students who demonstrated on Thursday in Ramallah.

The candidate who most of these would like to see is imprisoned Marwan Barghouti, who does not come from the movement's top ranks, and has been made very popular by the five life sentences imposed on him by an Israeli court.