More typically, the executive ignored the law and the courts did nothing. The arrest procedures applicable to Gaza required that anyone detained without a warrant be brought before a magistrate within forty-eight hours. Nonetheless, hundreds of detainees were held for weeks or months without seeing a judge.⁸² After terror attacks against Israelis, the Palestinian police often arrested dozens of activists affiliated with the group that had claimed credit, even if there was no suspicion that these individuals had any connection to the attack. In most cases, charges were never filed and the “suspects” were not questioned, which reinforced the impression that the sweeps were politically motivated. Similarly, torture of detainees was illegal in PA-controlled areas, but was used in dozens of cases against criminal suspects or accused collaborators—sometimes to extract information and confessions, often as a punishment in and of itself.⁸³ Between May 1994 and December 1995, six prisoners died in custody as a result of ill-treatment meted out by Palestinian police.⁸⁴ Even when prisoners were tortured to death, however, PA officials refrained from imposing penalties on the perpetrators, and no cases were ever brought before the courts.⁸⁵

With the PA police and government officials immune to having to obey the law, any rules that might have prevented them from clamping down on potential critics of the PLO-run dictatorship were effectively void. All the residents of the Palestinian Authority had to live with the consequences, but those who suffered most grievously were those connected to institutions that otherwise might have served as watchdogs in the nascent police state: The independent media and the organizations devoted to human rights. It is to their story, therefore, that we turn in the next two sections.

 

When the PA was established in May 1994, the Arabic-language press that served the territories was one of the main adversaries Arafat faced in election-proofing his dictatorship. The high-circulation daily al-Quds was sympathetic to Palestinian nationalism and the PLO, but also carried criticism of the dictatorial style and human rights abuses of Arafat and his organization. Its smaller competitor, the pro-Jordanian a-Nahar, constantly focused on the inadequacy of the PLO leadership, while the weeklies, whether sponsored by parties or by independent publishers, could be even more scathing. Despite years of threats from the PLO leadership and its local supporters, most newspapers clung stubbornly to their independence.⁸⁶

In confronting this challenge, Arafat took advantage of the monopoly on power that he enjoyed within the territories under his control—and of a startling Israeli reticence to take decisive action to protect the papers, all of which were under Israeli jurisdiction in eastern Jerusalem. Initially, the PLO head forced a shift in the editorial and news coverage of the two dailies, while hampering the ability of the less pliable weeklies to get their message out. To assure even more fulsome support for his government, he helped establish a number of PA-backed daily papers that supported the government’s line. In addition, he personally oversaw the creation and direction of a state-run broadcasting monopoly that did so even more effusively. The net result was to transform the media from a potential critic into a vocal source of support.

The most significant change Arafat brought about was in the daily press, the principal source of in-depth news for Arabs living in the West Bank and Gaza. Most dramatically, he used brute force to effect a shift in the news and editorial coverage at a-Nahar. In July 1994, after Israel and Jordan reached a peace agreement whose provisions on Jerusalem were not to the PA leadership’s liking, Palestinian police banned distribution of a-Nahar in the Gaza Strip, while PSS agents limited it severely in the West Bank. PA spokesmen claimed that the newspaper had failed to apply for a license from the government, but as noted by Human Rights Watch, “The pretext provided for the closure could not disguise what was clearly an act of political censorship.” Lest there be any doubt, the PA issued a statement the first day of the ban averring that a-Nahar advocates “a line that contradicts the national interests of the Palestinian people,” while Jibril Rajoub explained that it was “inconceivable that one country would act inside of a second country through certain newspapers.”⁸⁷

The attacks on a-Nahar were aimed not only at the newspaper as a whole, but at individual staff members, several of whom received written and verbal threats from the Fatah organization in Jerusalem and from members of Rajoub’s PSS.⁸⁸ Left with neither readers nor staff, publisher Othman al-Halaq had no choice but to shut down the paper for several weeks. He was able to reopen it only after meeting with Arafat and pledging to adopt a stance more favorable to the PA. A front-page editorial in the first post-closure issue declared that “this is a Palestinian paper to the bone” and vowed to support “the true opinions of our people.” Another article referred to Arafat as “the brother, the leader, the symbol,” and closed with the call, “It is a revolution until victory!” the slogan of Fatah.⁸⁹

More important, though less dramatic, was the PA’s success in making the popular al-Quds a dependable ally. The ban on a-Nahar was undoubtedly meant as a warning to al-Quds, but the PA offered more direct hints as well. In August 1994, when columnist Da’oud Kuttab organized a petition by 35 journalists to protest the ban on a-Nahar, PA officials demanded that his al-Quds column be discontinued and followed up with a phone call from Rajoub to Kuttab, informing him of the PA’s demand. Understanding the threat, the publisher of al-Quds meekly complied.⁹⁰

Once al-Quds’ staff became accustomed to taking orders from the government, officials from Arafat’s office, the PLO news agency WAFA, and Rajoub’s PSS repeatedly called editors at the paper to suggest where certain stories should be placed and how the headlines should read.⁹¹ These requests were backed up, on occasion, by sanctions, including attacks against individual journalists.⁹² In November 1994, a week after a clash between PA policemen and Islamic demonstrators left thirteen dead, Gaza police chief Ghazi Jibali ordered all newspaper editors to print that a rally organized by Hamas had attracted fewer than 5,000 supporters, and was therefore smaller than an earlier show of support for the PA. A number of papers balked, including al-Quds, and printed the foreign media’s estimate of 12,500, which led the PA to ban their distribution in Gaza for five days.⁹³ According to the PA minister of information, the order had come from Arafat himself. Jibali explained to distributors that, “Since your newspapers did not adhere to the number which I had set for you, the punishment is yours.” Jibali also explained that inclement weather had been a factor in the ban, but added: “All these journalists are collaborators, and the difficult weather conditions are likely to continue for another eight months.”⁹⁴

After that, al-Quds adhered even more firmly to the PA line, and when it lapsed briefly, PSS officers imposed punishments that reminded staff members to stay on the straight and narrow path.⁹⁵ The most spectacular such case occurred shortly before PA elections. On December 24, 1995, Maher al-Alami, a night editor at al-Quds, received a call from a high-ranking presidential adviser asking him to run a lead story the next day on a meeting in which the Greek Orthodox patriarch of Jerusalem had compared Arafat to Caliph Omar Ibn al-Khattab, a Muslim conqueror of Jerusalem renowned for his benevolence to Christians. Al-Alami, unimpressed with the story’s newsworthiness, ran a six-line summary on page eight, for which offense he was summoned the next day to Jericho by Rajoub. According to al-Alami, Rajoub called him personally, demanding to know, “Why didn’t you put the story on page one? Do you hate Yasser Arafat?” When al-Alami asked why he should come to Jericho, Rajoub offered the following answer: “If you don’t come, I’ll cut you into pieces, stick you in the trunk of my car, and bring you to me that way.” Al-Alami went to Jericho, where he was interrogated by Rajoub and held for nearly a week before being released.⁹⁶

For the most part, however, crass intervention proved to be unnecessary, as journalists at al-Quds and a-Nahar came to practice self-censorship. Reporters shied away from stories that might displease PA officials or police officers, and editors made sure that controversial articles were not published on their watch. Since the line between the permissible and the forbidden was unclear, the papers avoided printing anything that might offend anyone high up in the PA.⁹⁷ This policy resulted in a virtual blackout on news about PA infringements on human rights. In August 1994, al-Quds stopped carrying a weekly column on human rights by the al-Haq organization, declined to cover a poll by the Jerusalem Media and Communications Center (JMCC) showing that most residents of the territories opposed the ban on distributing a-Nahar, and in fact refused to report on the ban at all.⁹⁸ By December 1995, when al-Alami was detained in Jericho, not even his own paper, al-Quds, mentioned the arrest.⁹⁹

While Arafat and the PA police succeeded in intimidating the commercial dailies, they had a more difficult time with the ideologically motivated weeklies, and in some cases had to resort to the crudest forms of violence. The most extreme case was that of al-Umma, a small, left-wing paper that began publishing in Jerusalem in early 1995, and that ran articles and caricatures mocking Arafat and the PA. In April of that year, officers of Rajoub’s PSS, claiming to be acting on orders from the “highest level,” confiscated the galleys of one issue. When the paper responded with an editorial savaging the PA police, PSS agents raided its offices, confiscated documents and equipment, and burned down the building. After that, the paper never reopened.¹⁰⁰

In dealing with the weeklies published by the Islamic organizations, Arafat adopted a more sophisticated approach. When the Islamic Jihad began publishing al-Istiqlal in October 1994 and Hamas launched al-Watan in December of that year, the PA initially tolerated their scathing attacks. In early 1995, however, when suicide-bombing attacks by Hamas and Islamic Jihad provoked Israeli closures that left thousands of Gazans unemployed, Arafat seized the opportunity caused by the popular backlash against these groups. The first victim of this change in policy was Abed a-Sattar Qasem, a prominent academic from Nablus who wrote an article in al-Watan assailing Arafat and the PA for their dictatorial ways. In response, the paper’s editor, Imad al-Falouji, was brought in for questioning by the Palestinian police and told that Qasem would be attacked shortly. Qasem received death threats, and a month later he was shot in the arms and legs at point-blank range, apparently by members of Rajoub’s PSS.¹⁰¹