Dangerous Science
Why a Mob Attacked the Most Rational Man in the Middle East
Khalil Shikaki is very excited. A pollster working in the de facto Palestinian capital of Ramallah in the West Bank’s rolling hills, Shikaki is happily poring over census tract maps, explaining the intricacies of his polling data and how he collects it. “We take a tract,” he says, speaking in an office that is pleasant, professional, and antiseptic — glass doors, gray carpet, Dells — “split it up further. Randomize . . .”
This goes on for a good while — Shikaki is also a professor, comfortable, it seems, with lecturing. Then, perhaps sensing what I really want, he points to his window. “That’s where the mob came in from,” he says. “They broke the window, climbed in, and started smashing the office equipment. I barricaded myself in my office and some in the crowd started pushing me around, though others held them back.”
The mob had come to Shikaki’s office because of a poll about Palestinians’ right of return — the U.N.-recognized notion that Palestinians will eventually be allowed to return to the homes that their families left after the birth of Israel in 1948, and again after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war — even if those homes don’t exist anymore and are within Israel’s pre-1967 borders. The right of return is cherished by Palestinians. Ask nearly any Palestinian where he is from, and even if his family has lived in Jordan or Lebanon since 1948, he will tell you tell that he is “from” whatever village his ancestors lived in until they fled or were forced out. The Israeli government, meanwhile, disputes that such a right exists and has opposed allowing large numbers of Palestinians to return, largely because allowing them to do so could result in the majority of Israel’s population being Palestinian.
A compromise over the right of return, long considered one of the Mideast’s most intractable issues, had been suggested during the waning days of peace negotiations in January 2001. The proposal, pushed by Israel, would have symbolically recognized the right of return and offered Palestinians two basic options: 1) a limited though unspecified number could return to Israel if they adopted Israeli citizenship; 2) others could forgo returning in exchange for “fair” financial compensation.
Curious about what Palestinians would do if presented with such an offer, Shikaki polled about 4,500 Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, and Jordan. The poll was completed in June 2003 and contained surprising, even shocking, results: most Palestinians said they would accept such an agreement if offered and the vast majority, 72 percent, said they would rather receive compensation than return to Israel and become Israeli citizens.
But for many Palestinian political factions, especially for Yasir Arafat’s Fatah faction, which draws much of its support from refugees and has used the right of return as a major bargaining chip with the Israelis, this was heresy. Arafat in particular has always seemed to promise refugees that one day they’ll be able to return to their original homes. “To Jerusalem we march, martyrs by the millions,” he told supporters in a typical TV interview last year. And in early December, Palestinians in Gaza City protested the so-called Geneva Accord — a symbolic Middle East peace plan crafted by a group of self-appointed Israeli and Palestinian negotiators — in part because it all but rules out the right of return.
So Shikaki’s poll was more than just controversial. It was also a kind of test, just as Shikaki himself — an independent and dispassionate scientist in a land of fierce political passion — has been a test for Palestinian society, which has long been considered one of the freest in the Arab world but which has been rocked by upheaval over the past three years. How would Palestinians, in particular politicians and power brokers, react to something so contentious? Would they try to shoot the messenger?
Shikaki planned to announce the results on July 13 in a press conference inside his office. But as he was getting started the mob showed up. It didn’t seem to be a spontaneous gathering. They arrived in an orderly manner by bus and offered the gathered journalists their own press release. Calling themselves the Committee for the Defense of Palestinian Refugees’ Rights, and using stationery of the PLO refugee affairs department (the head of that PLO office criticized the poll and the violence, but also disavowed the attacks), they accused Shikaki of “selling himself to the U.S. dollar” and “deviating from the consensus of the Palestinian people.” The statement warned “anyone who considers harming the national rights that their fate will be similar to that of Shikaki.”
As Palestinian police officers stood by, the mob trashed Shikaki’s office and then made its way down the street to Arafat’s compound where, according to The New York Times, Arafat welcomed them — though the Times noted it was unclear whether Arafat knew what the mob had just done. “It’s possible Arafat wasn’t unhappy with the mob,” says Shikaki, carefully.
The seemingly organized mob exemplifies a murky new foe that independent-minded Palestinian journalists and intellectuals face. With the Palestinians’ de facto government, the Palestinian Authority, nearly destroyed after three years of violence, the territories and Gaza are witnessing what Hanan Ashwari, a Palestinian legislator and intellectual, calls a “regression to tribalism.”
While order still prevails in large parts of the territories, thugs, gangsters, and masked gunmen — sometimes current or former members of Palestinian security forces — are an increasing presence across the West Bank and Gaza. “There’s a rise of lawlessness. It’s a real problem,” says Miranda Sissons, a researcher at Human Rights Watch.
They most often target suspected collaborators or anybody who gets in the way of their criminal dealings (car theft is a big problem in the territories). But increasingly the targets are independent Palestinian journalists and academics, like Shikaki — just the sort of people the Palestinians need to build their society. According to officials from the Palestinian Independent Commission for Citizens’ Rights (PICCR), a quasi-official government watchdog group, by fall there had been at least fifty “violations of freedom of expression” in 2003 — attacks or threats against journalists and academics. “It’s higher than in 2002, which in turn was higher than 2001,” says Husein Sholi, who leads PICCR’s legal unit. “People are taking the law into their own hands.”
The list of incidents is long: in September 2002 the house of the former information minister was fired at after he criticized Arafat. In late November 2003, gunmen fired at the Ramallah home of the lead Palestinian negotiator for the Geneva Accord. He was in Geneva at the time. And in the most prominent case next to Shikaki’s, the Ramallah offices of the Arab satellite channel al-Arabiya were raided in September 2003.
Satellite dishes are common features on Palestinians’ roofs. They allow people to bypass the local, self-censoring TV stations in favor of the more independent stations like al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya. Hence the attack on al-Arabiya, two months before the mob showed up at Shikaki’s office. “Five masked gunmen with M-16s entered the office,” recalls Nabil Khatib, who manages the bureau, “and the guys started shouting and smashing the furniture and equipment. They locked employees in the video editing room, and said, ‘It’s a message.’ We said, ‘From whom?’ and they said, ‘You should understand. And it’s your last one.’”
Khatib says that as a result of this incident he’s working with other journalists to start a group they’re tentatively calling the Palestinian Committee to Protect Journalists.
At fifty, Shikaki, who wears a scraggly beard, has all the professional accoutrements of an A-list pollster: he publishes op-eds in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal; he has been a fellow at the Brookings Institution. And he regularly works with Israeli pollsters, who gush about him. “Shikaki is the best in the territories,” says Mina Tzemach, a pollster for the Dahaf Institute, a leading Israeli polling firm, who frequently does polls for Yediot Ahronot, Israel’s largest paper. “He’s meticulous. He’s careful about phrasing questions. And he’s a real man of peace.”
Shikaki didn’t seem a likely candidate for a career of such accomplishment and moderation. His family was forced from its home village in Israel in 1948, and a few years later Shikaki was born in the Gaza Strip, one of the world’s most densely populated places. Bereft of economic opportunities, it is a breeding ground for militants. And though Shikaki’s father was a man of modest means — he worked in construction — nearly all of his sons became professionals.
Not all of them stayed out of trouble, though. Shikaki’s brother Fathi, a doctor, was a founder of Islamic Jihad. He was killed in Malta in 1995, reportedly by Israeli undercover agents. Shikaki, meanwhile, has renounced violence, a rare stance among Palestinians. (Palestinian support for attacks on settlers and soldiers is nearly unanimous, and one of Shikaki’s polls found 75 percent support for the October suicide bombing of a restaurant in Haifa.)
Shikaki isn’t interested in philosophizing or trying to psychoanalyze why he and his brother took such different paths. “This is typical of most Palestinian families,” he says. “Some are nationalists, others are Islamists, and some are neither here nor there.”
Shikaki went to college in the West Bank and Beirut, and earned his Ph.D. in political science at Columbia University in 1985. In 1986 he returned to the West Bank to teach at an-Najah University.
It’s one thing to do polling work in, say, the U.S., and another to do it the Palestinian territories — where Shikaki has faced repression since the beginning of his career. In 1986, Shikaki says, he tried to do a poll with a colleague about rising support for Islamists at universities. “The Israelis wouldn’t allow it,” he says. “They threatened to deport us. My colleague went ahead and did the survey and he was eventually expelled for three years.”
The situation began to improve in 1992, he says, with the election of Israel’s first left-leaning government since 1977, and Israeli restrictions on Shikaki’s work essentially disappeared in 1993 with the signing of the Oslo peace accords.
The era spawned great hope for Palestinian journalists and intellectuals. But the Palestinian Authority, which began taking over responsibility for some towns in 1994, did not have many ACLU types in its ranks. In one of its first official acts, the Palestinian Authority closed down a daily paper after Yasir Arafat was offended by a story. At the time, an adviser to Arafat explained, “There are no restrictions on the Palestinian press, with one exception: that it should not be against the interests of the Palestinian people.”
“During those early years of the PA, reporters were the third most repressed segment of Palestinian society — behind Islamic radicals and collaborators,” says Nabil Khatib. “Dozens of journalists were arrested.” Khatib himself was arrested in 1996. “They released me after twelve hours, saying there had been ‘a misunderstanding,’” he says.
Many Palestinians talk proudly about their democratic tendencies. “Palestinian society is more democratic than any other Arab society,” says Khaled Abu Toameh, a Palestinian journalist who works for NBC News and others. “Frankly, I think we have been influenced by the Israeli democratic experience.” But most Palestinians also acknowledge that especially during the height of Palestinian Authority power in the 1990s, journalists and academics in the territories were not willing to take many risks and learned to deal with the Authority by censoring themselves. Such self-censorship was, and still is, bolstered by the fact that much of the Palestinian media — including two of the three major Palestinian newspapers — is owned by people connected to the Palestinian Authority.
In 1993, with funding from European NGOs — and seed money from the PLO — Shikaki started his own polling organization in Nablus, the Center for Palestine Research and Studies. His prominence grew, and by the mid-1990s he was quoted regularly in Western papers. He developed a reputation as one of the few Palestinian intellectuals or journalists willing to push the envelope of dissent. “I had done a poll saying that Sheik Yassin [founder of Hamas] was a more popular figure than Yasir Arafat,” he recalls. “Soon I got a copy of the poll back, with a note from Arafat on top, ‘It’s dangerous to play with numbers.’ I just ignored it.” In 1999, Shikaki’s research operation took heat for a report on corruption within the Palestinian Authority. “Arafat was angry, and I felt the board wasn’t giving me political backing,” Shikaki says. In response, Shikaki replaced his organization’s board of directors, changed its name to the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, and relocated to Ramallah.
Abu Toameh calls Shikaki a “unique phenomenon. He’s independent. But he also dared to touch on a very sensitive issue and he paid the price.”
Things began to change slowly with the beginning of the Intifada in September 2000. Shikaki and other analysts say the violence, led by young Palestinians (often affiliated with Hamas and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades), was partially directed at the Palestinian Authority out of disgust with the Authority’s corruption and repression. “The young guard has turned to violence to get Israel to withdraw from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip unilaterally and simultaneously to weaken the Palestinian old guard and eventually displace it,” wrote Shikaki in a widely read Foreign Affairs article.
With young Palestinians increasingly contemptuous of the Authority’s power, and Israel launching isolated retaliatory strikes against Authority police stations and guard posts, the Authority’s power continued its decline. Then came March 2002, when it was all but destroyed. January and February of that year had seen a torrent of Palestinian suicide bombings — roughly one a week. In late March, Israel launched what it called Operation Defensive Shield, and for the first time since the Oslo accords were signed Israeli soldiers reoccupied most cities in the West Bank. Israeli troops dismantled Palestinian security forces, demolished the services’ headquarters, destroyed Palestinian jails, and refused to allow Palestinian police and security service officers to surrender in uniform. (The Gaza Strip wasn’t occupied and Palestinian forces there were left relatively intact.)
It shocked Palestinians and caused many to openly question the Palestinian Authority, which hadn’t been able to slow the reoccupation or to efficiently restore public services once the operation was over.
The reoccupation of the West Bank and the decline of the Palestinian Authority have also resulted in a rise in thuggish, shadowy attacks of the kind that Shikaki faced.
Over the past few months, Arafat has consolidated his position, undermining reformers and successfully installing loyalists in top positions. But many Palestinian analysts say that no matter how much power Arafat grabs in the short-term, his long-term prospects look increasingly bleak. In October Israel threatened to “remove” him, and there have been endless reports that he’s ill.
The result of the perceived weakening of Arafat’s position, says Saib Zeedani, director of the Palestinian citizens’ rights commission, “is a competition for power.” And that, in turn, has fueled attacks on Palestinian journalists and academics like Shikaki. “If you criticize Mahmoud Dahlan for example,” says Zeedani, referring to the former security chief in the Gaza who is favored by the U.S. as a moderate, “you should expect a response.”
Bassem Eid, head of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, also sees official hands at work in the attacks. “I didn’t hear Arafat create investigations to look into what happened with the attacks. And what do you think that means?”
Still, “the fact that Shikaki has been able to undertake regular polling on the job performance, popularity, and approval rating of Arafat since the mid-1990s pretty much proves” that freedom continues to exist in Palestinian society, says Rex Brynen, a Middle East specialist at Canada’s McGill University. “There are no such polls on King Abdullah or Hosni Mubarak.”
But it’s not hard to see the chilling effects the attacks can have.
Shikaki’s controversial poll on the right of return generated intense criticism abroad, mainly from the Palestinian expatriate community. “Correct your wrongs, apologize for the lies, and resign your post for you have cast yourself into exile amongst the Palestinian community,” charged one editorial on a Web site called al-Jazeerah (not affiliated with the TV station). “You have failed yourself and the people.”
Most TV, radio, and newspapers in the Palestinian territories had a different response: silence. “I sat down with al-Quds for an hour,” recalls Shikaki, referring to the leading Palestinian paper. But “they didn’t publish anything. I did a lengthy interview with a Palestinian radio station, and yet they never covered the poll.” Shikaki says he became concerned about rumors that were spreading about the poll and tried to submit an ad to al-Quds detailing the poll results. The paper, says Shikaki, refused the ad. “They’re timid,” says Shikaki. “And in a situation of anarchy, it’s better to stay away from controversial positions.”
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