Bringing Non-Violence to the West Bank

As the Israeli Army intensifies its iron-fisted advance in the Palestinian territories and the bloody battle rages on, a strange calm has fallen on Yasir Arafat's compound. Just last week the prime target of the Israeli offensive, it now sits in the eye of the storm. Why?

"Because we entered," says Samir Alassi, a Belgian citizen.

The shelling stopped last Sunday, when he and 40 other concerned foreigners marched peacefully on the compound, past tanks and gunfire, and into the buildings where Arafat and his last hold-outs sit holed up in Ramallah.

In a test of non-violent tactics and strategies of international intervention, European and American civilians are serving as human shields for the last outpost of the Palestinian Authority.

"(The Israelis) were very surprised about our group coming in the streets very peacefully," says Alassi, talking from the compound Wednesday on a cell phone that cuts off every five minutes. "And the only thing they could do was just move their tanks around. I remember some soldiers of the Israeli Army started to shoot on the ground and also above our heads, but they didn't shoot at us, so we just went through and we entered the compound."

Their arrival lifted the spirits of those inside. "People were just waiting for their deaths," says Alassi, whose father is Palestinian. "But since we are here, there are no attacks on the building and the Palestinian people here can sleep. They can stop being worried about being killed the next hour." The calm set in, and the waiting began.

Alassi, 25, works with a group called Grassroots International Protection for the Palestinian People. But a couple dozen foreigners willing to dodge bullets to provide a buffer isn't his idea of "international protection."

"We should not be here," he repeats several times. "There should be an international protection force here to protect the Palestinian people." Disappointed in their countries' inaction, the internationals took on the tanks themselves.

With little else to do in the large, makeshift dormitory, which houses 150 to 200 people, they talk of what to do next, what will come next, and what, in the end, is the role of the internationals. They eat little, and only women are allowed a glass of scarce water. They have not been able to wash for days.

Arafat comes by occasionally to check on things. He teaches the 20-year-old soldiers, who have never seen such combat, how to blockade the windows with tables. One day he came offering a box of chocolates he had received as a gift. And, in nightly meetings with the entire compound crew, he often tells stories of his younger days -- of a battle in Egypt in the 1960s, for example, when most a regiment of engineers he belonged to was killed.

While Alassi and the others wait in Arafat's compound, Kate Rafael of Berkeley, Calif., waits in a refugee camp several miles away, hoping also that the presence of an American will mitigate violence if the expected Israeli raids take place.

In a nighttime interview from the camp at Aida, Rafael, a member of the pacifist group Women in Black, says that everyone in the house is huddled under blankets because there is not enough gas for heating. Food is running short. And because the towns and camps are ringed by tanks, the internationalists are barricaded in.

Like those in Arafat's compound, the volunteers in Rafael's group discuss what to do. Should they stay in one place so the Israelis can get them all at once and not rampage from house to house? Should they stay scattered among their host families so the search will take more time and they will be on the scene for a longer period? "Go back with your host families, the troops will go house to house anyway," the Palestinian group leaders say, so they do.