I haven’t written much here recently about the ever unfolding tragedy in Palestine. Partly because I find it so painful. I have so many, very good friends who have made huge sacrifices in their lives (sometimes, of their lives) in pursuit of the goal of an independent and basically secular Palestinian state. I have felt their pain, even at times when the vast majority of people here in the US seemed quite insensitive to it, and seemed quite happy to deride any Palestinian nationalist longings as “terroristic” from the get-go. The first year I was living here in the US, in 1982, was the summer the Israeli armed forces were battling the Palestinians and their allies in West Beirut. The summer of the Sabra and Shatila camp massacres. I had lived in Beirut until just the previous year. Many of my friends were trapped in the grotesque, extremely violent siege that the IDF– under Sharon’s orders– maintained around the city.
Jane Fonda, once the icon of the US left, went to Lebanon and was prominently photographed posing with some IDF soldiers on top of their tank, that was perched above West Beirut, ready to fire. That’s how strongly most members even of the US “left” supported the Israelis (and opposed the Palestinians) at that time.
I’ve been wondering recently how to describe the current, cascading collapse of Palestinian secular nationalism. It’s hard to do. There are so many causes.
In one real sense, Palestinian secular nationalism– in the form in which it became incarnated back in the 1960s– has been on life support since at least 1993. The current collapse is just the end (or maybe not quite the end) of a very painful and long-drawn-out decay…
In the summer of 1993, Yasser Arafat’s leadership of the Palestinian movement was teetering on the very brink of collapse. He was under strong attack from nearly every other party both within and outside the Palestinian body politic. In the late 1980s he had pretty much succeeded in seizing control of the (1st) intifada, the one that broke out in the occupied Palestinian territories in December 1987… but he never knew how to lead it, or where to. By summer 1993, the intifada was well on its ways to decomposing, leaving many nasty little sub-eddies of intra-Palestinian violence in its wake. Also, in 1990-91, Arafat made a mistake fatal to the relatively “secure” rear base that his movement, Fateh, had been able to enjoy till then in the small Arab states of the Gulf: He “wobbled” (to put it mildly!) in terms of opposing Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. This, though the “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force” has always been a prime pillar, under international law, for the Palestinians’ own continuing claims against Israel’s presence in the OPTs. By 1993, most of the Arab states were still very angry with him…
But he always thought he could wriggle out of anything by sheer deviousness and maneuvering. Throughout the first half of 1993, he was opening up a new channel of political communication– with Israel’s Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin. In late August of 1993… just as he was coming under unprecedentedly strong attack from his own people… Peres and Rabin threw him a lifeline. It was called Oslo. He then spun it so successfully to his own people– despite its always evident flaws and weaknesses as a process– that he won a vital reprieve from most of them. He was welcomed back to Gaza with rapturous adulation in early 1994, and was thereafter able to deploy a massive patronage machine there that kept him at the top of the political heap for some years…
He and a small group of friends had co-founded Fateh together back in the 1950s. In the late 1960s they used Fateh to take over the PLO; and Fateh has dominated all aspects of Palestinian politics ever since. Now, with the new and apparently sure-footed rise of Hamas, that situation is changing. What did those 35-plus years of Fateh domination bring to the national movement? I think those years were marked by two notable things:
- (1) A lack of any well-grounded strategy, and
(2) The propagation of a corrosive culture of individualism, clientilism, and dependency.
I’m planning to write a lot more about this topic over the weeks ahead. You can also read, e.g., these two articles I published in Boston Review in recent years: (2002, and 2004.) Right now, I just want to note that the second of those features I listed above played a big role in bringing about the current multiple crises within Fateh– and in the secular nationalist movement more broadly, which has for many decades now been completely dominated by Fateh.
Arafat and the other Fateh founders never had any strong and clear vision for the internal organization of their movement, with the responsibilities and rights of activists clearly delineated at all levels. Internal discipline in the movement? You have to be kidding! Every little Fateh princeling was given the promise he could open his own dukkaneh (“shop”). Few of the dakakeen (shops) were ever encouraged to cooperate with each other. The Old Man always feared the organization of the grassroots: he always maintained a delicate balance between trying to coopt whatever grassroots movement had already emerged, and seeking to squash anything that he sensed might ever get out of his control. He did this in a time-honored way by playing all his subordinates off against each other. Always. At every level.
Add to that the fact that there was never a clearly delineated and compelling political path laid out before the activists– which might at least have enabled them to all push in the same direction… and you can start to see all the kinds of tensions and jealousies that arose, time after time after time.
Add further the “cashing-in-quick” culture that came to pervade the entire movement. As I’ve written elsewhere before (probably here on JWN), you had a kind of kleptocratic Big-Man-ism setting in, in Palestine– especially after 1993– such as you’ve had in many African countries over recent decades… But at least in those African countries, most of those leaders had at least already won their respective peoples’ battles for national independence before the Big-Man-ism set in. In Palestine, no. Oslo proved to be an insubstantial chimera that– in the view of many or most Palestinians– ended up giving them fewer protections against Israel’s continued land grabs than the very unsettled situation that had preceded it. In the five years after Oslo, Israel doubled the number of settlers it had put into the OPTs. That is, it put in as many in those five years as it had put in over the entire preceding 26 years. And the pace of implanting colonists has continued in recent years, too.
Arafat and his people basically went along with all that. They had been bought off with a few paltry crumbs from the Americans’ table: a tiny handful of aid dollars and a few of those high-level summit meetings with world leaders that Arafat always adored and craved more of.
Another aspect of the ‘cashing-in-quick’ culture in Fateh was, most evidently, the leadership’s failure to come to do anything serious about implementing a workable mode for generational change. (That’s another failing of African “Big Men”, too.) Basically, Arafat and the other Fateh founders imagined back in the 1950s that they themselves could be the ones to gain the fruits of liberating Palestine. They thought that in the 1960s. They thought it in the 1970s (even after they’d made some terrible strategic errors in 1970 and again in 1975.) They thought it in the 1980s…
You’d think that some of them might have said at that point, “You know guys, it may be the case that we are not the ones who’re going to win this? Maybe we should think about building a real and durable organization here?” Well, I guess that maybe Abu Jihad (Khalil al-Wazir) did start to say that in the 1980s. (I’m not entirely sure about that.) But the Israelis killed him in 1988. And three years later someone– most likely Saddam Hussein– killed Abu Iyad (Salah Khalaf) in Cairo. So that was 100% of Fateh’s strategic brainpower completely gone. What was left was Yasser Arafat.
So yes, he continued throughout the 1990s blithely imagining that he was the one who could lead his people to liberation. Or maybe– even sadder this– he could have believed for a few years there that actually was leading them to liberation?
I went to a conference in Ramallah in summer 2000 and was totally amazed at the degree to which– even six years after they had moved back to the OPTs– the Fateh functionaries there continued to live in some cloud cuckoo-land, as oblivious to the facts of the land expropriation that was going on all around them as they were to the network of settler-only roads that was starting to strangle each Palestinian city and town from the next one. There was zero concept of using a disciplined, well-organized national public to confront the facts of Israel’s illegal land-grabs and its many other extremely humiliating means of control…
So anyway, if Arafat’s generation (which includes Abu Mazen and Abu Alaa’) saw itself as the one that was going to lead to liberation, what need did they have to build up a durable organization, and a disciplined new generation of leaders?
Inasmuch as there was a new generation of Fateh leaders, it ended up building itself up, and largely inside the Israeli prisons where Marwan Barghouti and so many of his colleagues still languish… But there are far too few “younger” Fathawis like Marwan– and what can they do from inside Israeli prisons, anyway, if they don’t have a broad and dsiciplined movement to connect to, on the outside?
At this point, it is very hard indeed to see that any form of secular Palestinian nationalism can survive. And I mourn that. Not because I have any particular animus for the vast majority of supporters and activists of the the organization that is far and away the largest non-secular movement, Hamas. I have met quite a number of Hamas activists and intellectuals over the years; and I know that they include some of the most dedicated, hardworking, and thoughtful people in the Palestinian body politic.
I note, too, that Hamas has suffered a lot throughout the past year for the high degree of disciplined support it has shown for the ceasefire that it (and Fateh) agreed to keep to, with respect to Israel, last March. That was not an easy decision– and it has been particularly hard to keep to it in recent weeks, with Israel’s lethal escalations continuing.
But I mourn the passing of the possibility of a secular nationalist leadership for two reasons: (1) Because I don’t think Hamas has yet come up with an inclusive enough vision of what it means to be a Palestinian– that is, a vision that can include the Palestinian Christians or those Muslims who might choose to pursue their faith in ways other than that mandated by Hamas, and (2) Because I think that a sustainable peace agreement between Israel and a Hamas-led Palestinian polity will be extremely hard to achieve; so I foresee many, many troubles and continued violence and suffering– for both Palestinians and Israelis– before we get there.
I know that some people in Hamas have started to talk in ways that suggest support for a two-state outcome with Israel. Can that trend be strengthened? I don’t know.
… Well, the coming days will be important ones for the Palestinians and Israelis. The March ceasefire (to which, of course, Israel never made any commitment whatsoever, either verbally or in its practice) is set to end at midnight on December 31… Then, there are supposed to be Palestinian parliamentary elections on January 25. Things might become considerably hotter between Israel and Gaza before then. (Condi Rice’s much-trumpeted great diplomatic “breakthrough” of last month, regarding Gaza, looks more pathetic with every day that passes.)
I was just reading this good piece of year’s-end analysis of the Palestinian scene, written by the percipient Hebron-area journalist Khaled Amayreh.
He wrote:
- Many Palestinians actually pinned a lot of hope on Abbas, given his positive image in the international arena, as a reformer, and as a man untainted by the canard of “terror” used continually by the Bush administration to vilify Arafat.
However, Abbas’s “acceptability” didn’t yield tangible results for the Palestinians, despite the more or less honest observation of the tahdiya, or calm, by Palestinian resistance groups. The de facto ceasefire was brokered in Cairo in March and was inclusive of all the Palestinian resistance factions, including Fatah and Hamas. Israel, however, displayed little respect — indeed, if any — for the ceasefire, regarding it as an intra-Palestinian affair and not binding on Israel.
Indeed, Israeli occupation forces never stopped carrying out highly provocative raids, air strikes and assassinations encompassing both Palestinian resistance activists and ordinary Palestinian citizens. Moreover, Israel’s permanent repression of Palestinian life — restrictions on movement, closures, humiliation, curfews, and checkpoints — persisted, affecting Abbas’s public standing among Palestinians.
Now, as Amayreh noted, the continuation of the political talks between Israel and the PA that were supposed to start soon after Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza are, for many reasons, completely on hold. One of those reasons is the Israeli election campaign. Others are: the plummeting of Abu Mazen’s political standing with the Palestinians; the collapse of the PA’s security structures (or rather, Abu Mazen’s inability to revive them, given that they had been completely torn apart by Sharon’s armies in 2002); and the resulting decline in Abu Mazen’s standing with the Israelis and the Americans.
And so, once again as so frequently throughout the past 38 years, the Israelis and Americans will claim that there is no interlocuteur valable on the Palestinian side. With this difference between them: this Israeli government (and its most probable successor) most likely do not actually want a Palestinian interlocutor. Sharon, as we know, strongly prefers unilateral action to negotiation. For their part, the Americans probably would prefer to have an ongoing Israeli-Palestinian negotiation, and thus for there to be a Palestinian participant in this. But how strongly do they want this? Strongly enough to actually use even a teeny little bit of the diplomatic and financial leverage that they could bring to bear on Sharon, if they really wanted to? Strongly enough to agree to work with whatever leadership might emerge from a democratic election process in Palestine?
I doubt it. I get no sense whatsoever from Washington that anyone in power there cares very much about Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking, at all.
Which is tragic. Because over the weeks ahead we might see some extremely bad escalations between those two peoples. This will be very harmful for both of them. It will also, most likely, make the Bushites’ complex negtotiations over Iraq much harder to pursue, and may thus prolong and deepen everyone’s agonies there in Iraq.
These ongoing tragedies could and should be stopped. This would be much more likely to happen if the Bush administration didn’t have the EU and so much of the United Nations still under its sway. There are sadly few powers in today’s world willing and able to take vigorous action for de-escalation and negotiated rersolutions of crises– whether in Iraq, or in Palestine.
“There are sadly few powers in today’s world willing and able to take vigorous action for de-escalation and negotiated rersolutions of crises”
Helena, so true! The world is bereft of leadership at this critical juncture as instabilities both political and economic rise throughout the globe.
I very much appreciate your being willing to dive into these difficult waters. I don’t know how these two peoples can find a way to live in proximity to each other when one has so wronged the other and retains a near monopoly of force. But I do know that people in the US can appropriately seek to restrain our government from pouring fuel on the fire through its unequivocal support of Israel.
”Which is tragic. Because over the weeks ahead we might see some extremely bad escalations between those two peoples. “
Helena, you are optimistic in your time setting, this tragic it’s 75 years old. This done basically by Balfour Declaration in 1917 to Israelis and thereafter tragic happened till now.
I think the elite Israeles have no willing to set down this tragedy, despite many Arabs offers the last one came from King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia which give Israel what’s dreamed about it.
If in 1870 the Plains Indians had united around a single leader to defend themselves against White settlers, our government would have assassinated him, set up a Quisling alternative movement, and labeled the Indians a threat to the entirety of Western Civilization. After all, Jehovah gave us this land. Luckily for our racist ancestors, those Indians never quite formed white-like institutions which we might be forced by international opinion to respect. I wonder if the Indians had put up a better fight, would Oklahoma still be the Indian Territories, and would it look like Gaza now?
However, the death of Palestinian nationalism has a short-term advantage and long-term disadvantage for Israel. The dilemma of identity is: either there’s a Palestinian Nation or there’s an Arab Nation. By denying that the Palestinians are a nation, Israel tried to keep them as amorphous and friendless as “redskins”. But that might lead the Palestinians to a larger Arab nationalism, just as the grievances of 13 American colonies led to a larger nationalism over time. Hamas is one of the roads for that to happen even though its agenda is Islamic. The Arabs are as destined by history as the Italians, Germans, Vietnamese and Chinese to be unified one day (none of those was true in 1850), by one ideology or another.
I think Israel assassinated many of the people who could have replaced Arafat. They had a strategy of eliminating his peers in the PLO organization.
I wonder to what extent these fundamentalist organizations can address the problems in the Middle East. If Iran is a guide eventually there may a reaction for a more secular approach.
We live in a world which respects power. These rules have been created by powerful states like the U.S., which benefit from such a system.
The US probably does exert a great deal of effort to rein in Israel. The latest effort by Rice in the Gaza port dust up is one example and the whole Gaza pull-out is another — it was probably forced by Washington.
The whole Arab-Israeli thing has been somewhat mysterious for some time. Neither party seems to be acting rationally or according to any plan that I can see. The “Roadmap” is pure wishful thinking. The Hamas point of view completely unrealistic, and Sharon’s strategies hidden and opaque. I, for one, do not understand why Arafat wasn’t simply killed decades earlier by the Israelis…
Some parts of Israeli society seem to want more of the West Bank but Israel in general doesn’t want to break enough eggs to make that omelette. The Arabs seem intent on persuading Israel that permitting the creation of a Palestinian State would be deadly for Israelis. Indeed, their original formulation was “No negotiation, No peace, No recognition”. That is over but it is not clear that there is anything whatever in its place. Sharon came in like a Lion and is continuing like a Lamb. Or is it a wolf in lambs clothing? Giving up Gaza but now using artillery to create a “No-go” zone in northern Gaza to suppress rocket attacks. Hamas seems intent on launching rocket after rocket that misses it’s targets and Israel retaliates by shelling empty fields.
Something has calmed down the situation in recent months. In the last year the Israelis lost far more to traffic accidents than to the Intifada and the same might be true of the Palestinians. This is a small war taking up a lot of column-inches. The “Calm” probably comes from a combination of the deaths of Yassir Arafat, and Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, and the contruction of the Peace Wall. The Bush adminstration came in with the idea of letting the Arab-Israeli conflict settle itself out (!) but now seems intent on meddling where it has little competence.
And neither Sharon nor Abbas seem very healthy, physically or politically. Although Sharons political health may be better than Abbas’, the reverse seems true on the physical front. Everything is unstable.
The Israelis elected Barak under the Labor banner to negotiate; but the Intifada, in effect, elected Sharon to be tough on security. Let’s watch and see how the security situation impacts the various elections.
Hamas is doing extremely well in the voting so far and the PA seems to be searching around for an excuse to delay the elections. Mubarak doesn’t like the Moslem Brotherhood at all and might have a vote in the matter. A Hamas victory in some area but not in others might help Israel. If the Palestinians are aggressive enough Israel will have a freer hand and not have to decide if it will trust or make a deal with the Palestinians.
Israel has by far the superior military force but seems to get no advantage out of it. Putting more settlers into land already under Israeli control is not a military advantage, it’s a diplomatic maneuver. If Sharon were Napoleon the Palestinians would all be wading the in the Jordan River or in the Mediterranean.
The recent IDF emphasis on artillery contains echoes of Grozny or Hama but the echoes are faint indeed.
If this comment doesn’t seem to have a single conceptual thread that’s because I don’t think the Arab-Israeli conflict does either…
I am a student of history and I read Gibbon who writes about the Jews living in Palestine. In the inside cover are the maps of the mediterranean area before the common era and Palestine is clearly listed. These maps should be the logo of the Palestinian movement and the right of Palestine to exist. There is a geography game I play with my children and it is called “Where in the World”, Palestine isn’t even listed. Shame!
Tom Aylward
I would love to see those maps, are they online?
Palestine, at the time Gibbon wrote, was the name of a region of the Ottoman Empire, just as the Yukon is a region of Canada and the Middle East is a region of the world. Unlike the Yukon, however, Palestine didn’t have it’s own government.
The idea of Palestine as an independent country is an invention of the 20th century. This is okay, things can be invented. But it was invented in response to the creation of the State of Israel in order to disrupt Israel. The original heads of the PLO were Egyptions at the behest of the Egyptian government.
I guess that there will be a Palestinian State within 5 years — but I wonder if it will make things more or less peaceful.
As usual, it’s hard to know where to start with WarrenW’s distortions.
Palestine wasn’t “invented” in order to “disrupt Israel”. The people who lived in Palestine objected to the forced division of their land between them and a group of foreigners, most of whom had arrived in the previous 20 years.
I suppose there’s some benefit in WarrenW’s reliable contribution of untrue “facts”, distortions, and propaganda. It reminds us of what we are up against. So, WarrenW, thanks for serving a useful function here. Do keep it up.
The good news is, doctors have found the hole in Sharon’s heart. Let’s hope they can fix it.
Tom wrote “In the inside cover are the maps of the mediterranean area before the common era and Palestine is clearly listed.”
Yes, indeed: it was a Roman province (named after the Philistines, actually), and with no more freedom than now. Sorry about that.
The people who lived in Palestine objected to the forced division of their land between them and a group of foreigners, most of whom had arrived in the previous 20 years.
How many begged questions can you spot in this sentence, readers?
Leaving aside the ongoing (and ultimately unproductive) debate over the justice of partition and the origins of Palestinian nationhood, I have two minor nitpicks and one major one with the main post:
First, I think it’s much too early to write the death certificate for secular Palestinian nationalism. There are at least two presently existing secular nationalist groups – Mustafa Barghouti’s National Initiative and the Fayyad/Ashrawi “Third Path” – that have the long-term potential to replace Fatah. Neither has Hamas’ track record of providing social services or local administration, but both have strong civil society roots that might enable them to develop such a track record. Current polls suggest that these factions are supported by about 10 to 15 percent of the electorate, which is more than enough to build upon in future elections.
Even Fatah itself isn’t necessarily down for the count. The reformist wing isn’t limited to Barghouti, and the recent struggle over the election lists shows how much depth the young guard has. The new Fatah slate, which is much stronger than the old one, includes many candidates who aren’t party hacks and have extensive public service backgrounds within the West Bank and Gaza. In many ways, the current power struggle is actually a good thing for Fatah, because it has brought some discipline into the party, broken intra-party monopolies and allowed promising members of the farm team to rise to prominence.
Given the current support and – even more critically – the potential of both Fatah and the independent secular factions, I’d argue that secular Palestinian nationalism has both a present and a future. (Even the PFLP, which while hard-line is secular as can be, has continuing electoral support.) In addition, as Hamas gets closer to power, its own cleavages are beginning to show, as evidenced by Sheikh Hassan Yousef’s withdrawal of his candidacy and the armed clashes between dissident and “official” Hamas members over control of Gaza mosques. Hamas has often seemed like a juggernaut during the past year, but it’s still in the process of finding its political role, and its long-term viability vis-a-vis secular nationalism hasn’t been determined.
Second, the Gaza border agreement is still two-thirds in effect. The Rafah crossing has stayed open, and Israel has abided by its agreement not to close Karni to Palestinian export traffic (with the exception of a temporary closure to foil an attack on the crossing itself).
Of course, the third part of the agreement, the Gaza-West Bank convoys, has been a crashing failure, but the negotiations for the convoys were on track before the Netanya suicide bombing and the Qassam escalation. Some of the terms Israel was proposing weren’t very reasonable, but that would have been worked out if not for the bombing. The issue will probably come back on the table after the election.
Third, and this is the big one, I think you’re mistaken in not assigning the Palestinians any responsibility for the failure of Oslo and (especially) the current ceasefire. The Palestinian factions haven’t been mere passive or reactive participants in a conflict driven by Israel. I acknowledge that Israel is the more powerful party and therefore has the greater responsibility for prolonging the conflict, but the armed Palestinian groups have their own agendas, and they haven’t always shown good faith in pursuing them against the Israelis.
In particular, Khalid Amayreh is disingenuous in arguing that the Palestinian factions were “more or less honest” in their observation of the ceasefire. This is largely true of Hamas, although there have been exceptions such as its launching of 30 Qassams into Israel as a distraction from its own tragic mishandling of explosives. On the other hand, groups like Islamic Jihad, al-Aqsa and the Popular Resistance Committees haven’t been “more or less honest” in observing the truce. They, like the Israelis, have often treated the ceasefire as a matter of convenience, and while some of their attacks have come in retaliation for Israeli violations, many others haven’t. The current round of violence represents an Islamic Jihad escalation as much as it does an Israeli escalation.
But more to the point, the PA has taken very little responsibility for enforcing the ceasefire, even in Gaza where its security forces have had unobstructed operation since February. I think that, just as Israel has its damaging addictions, so does the PA, and one of those addictions is irresponsibility. Arafat choked at Camp David and Taba when he kicked over the table rather than making a counteroffer, and I don’t think there’s any reasonable doubt that Abbas has choked in taking control of Gaza. Forget about preventing attacks against Israel – he hasn’t even done anything to prevent gunmen from taking over his own government buildings and border posts, and he has allowed the police to become just another armed faction. This, as much as anything Israel has done, is the cause of the Palestinians’ current misery.
This is one reason why I see some hope in the incipient Barghouti takeover of Fatah. Unlike the older generation of secular nationalists, the young guard isn’t afraid of responsibility. A parliament with a capable secular majority and a conscientious Hamas opposition might be able to prevent Gaza from turning into New Somalia, and prevent groups like Islamic Jihad from exercising a veto over progress toward peace. Maybe there is a future in secular and religious nationalists working together.
Many good points there, Jonathan. I wish I could share your optimism re Mustapha Barghouthi and Hanan’s abilities to win strong political support as I have great admiration for both of them.
Mustapha is a much more serious contender than Hanan, who has always been viewed (not altogther fairly) as merely the creature of the west. And he has built up a very long record of providing services to the people already through the excellent network of Medical Relief Committees that he spearheaded.
Most of my post was not about “assigning responsibility”, which is only one part of what needs to be done. It was about explaining why the Fateh/PA leadership has imploded so spectacularly. Of course they “could have done more” in various regards– if they had had any kind of a working organization with which to do it.
As you said, though, Israel is by far the stronger party. So it must take a huge degree of responsibility for what has happened… including for the fact that it has always systematically worked against the emergence of any coherent political organizations within the Palestinian community. (Remember that the Shabak actually supported the MB back in the 19080s as a counter to Fateh.)
In my 2004 piece in Boston Review I warned that after the completion of Sharon’s then recently-announced unilateral disengagement from Gaza the Israeli government might rapidly turn to treating Gaza as a free-fire zone… The whole thing is unbelievably tragic, and the blind support that most members of the US Congress give to Israel regardless what it does is one of the most tragic (or perhaps let us say craven) things about it.
But more to the point, the PA has taken very little responsibility for enforcing the ceasefire, even in Gaza where its security forces have had unobstructed operation since February
Jonathan, during the heavy fighting of 2002, the first thing the IDF invariably did after a Hamas or Fateh Hawk attack was attack the local Palestinian security forces, who usually had nothing to do with it. Israel destroyed the organized Palestinian security forces during the intifadeh. Israel bears much of the responsibility if those forces are unable or unwilling to restrain militants now.
Helena,
Mustapha is a much more serious contender than Hanan, who has always been viewed (not altogther fairly) as merely the creature of the west.
Ashrawi on her own account would probably be a non-starter, but I was counting her because (1) she’s teamed up with Fayyad, and (2) they’ve put together a pretty impressive reformist slate. Still, the Third Path is fundamentally a technocratic party, and as such can’t reach as deep into the grass roots as a civil-society-based party like Independent Palestine (which is the name of the National Initative’s electoral list). Technocrats usually do best when they merge with a grass-roots organization, so the Third Path may end up folding into Mustafa Barghouti’s party or rejoining Fatah.
In any event, the latest polls give Independent Palestine anywhere from 5 to 10 percent of the national vote, and Third Path 2 to 5 percent. Mustafa’s list also has a chance at capturing one or two of the territorial seats. If the high-end figures pan out, then IP could hold eight or nine seats in the next parliament and potentially affect the balance of power. That could in turn improve its long-term prospects as a secular nationalist force, not least by enabling it to establish a presence on the ground in Gaza.
(My ex cathedra prediction at this point, BTW, is 60 to 70 seats for Fatah, 42 to 52 for Hamas, 5 to 8 for Independent Palestine, 5 to 8 for the PFLP, two for Third Path, zero to two for Qais Abdul Karim’s Alternative, and a few seats going to independents. We’ll see how much of a fool I look like in three weeks.)
Most of my post was not about “assigning responsibility”, which is only one part of what needs to be done. It was about explaining why the Fateh/PA leadership has imploded so spectacularly.
Fair enough, so I won’t belabor the point further, except to note that Khalid Amayreh was certainly “assigning responsibility” by attributing the failure of the ceasefire to Israeli bad faith. In fact, there was bad faith – or possibly mistrust that looked like bad faith – all around.
[Israel] has always systematically worked against the emergence of any coherent political organizations within the Palestinian community.
Its ability to do so has been much reduced since 1993, and in Gaza it now has no real ability to affect Palestinian political development. Palestine currently has the most vibrant civil society and democratic politics of any Arab country of which I’m aware, which would suggest that the link between the current political situation and the Israeli occupation policies of the 1980s is attenuated. (Most of the civil society, BTW, is secular, which is another reason not to write the death warrant of secular nationalism.)
In my 2004 piece in Boston Review I warned that after the completion of Sharon’s then recently-announced unilateral disengagement from Gaza the Israeli government might rapidly turn to treating Gaza as a free-fire zone…
I don’t think “free fire zone” is an accurate term, given that Israel has avoided attacks on populated areas. In a way, what’s going on in Gaza right now is almost a virtual war – lots of Qassams and artillery shells being expended, but few people (and AFAIK almost no civilians) injured or killed.
And here, also, I wouldn’t assign the responsibility for this to any single party. I don’t think Israel can reasonably be expected to tolerate Qassam barrages – they do cause damage, and if enough of them are fired, people do get killed, like those two Ethiopian-Israeli schoolchildren in Sderot.
No Preference,
Jonathan, during the heavy fighting of 2002, the first thing the IDF invariably did after a Hamas or Fateh Hawk attack was attack the local Palestinian security forces, who usually had nothing to do with it.
In 2002, sure. The thing is that since February 2005, the Palestinian security forces in Gaza (the WB is another story) have been fully armed, fully deployed and unobstructed. They have 300 Egyptian advisors and tens of millions in EU money, so they’ve had both the time and the resources to rebuild. And as I mentioned above, preventing militant attacks against Israel is the least of it – you’d figure they wouldn’t need much motivation to prevent attacks on their own government.
If all this were happening a month or two after the PA deployment, I’d agree that they need time to rebuild from damage done during the intifada. At this point, though, that dog’s getting a little old to hunt.
Palestinian elections – not that different from Iraqi ones
Helena
I find it a bit disingenuous to blame Israel for supporting the MB (who would, eventually, become Hamas) in the 1970’s – especially given that those who bring it up are often those who castigate Israel for undermining the “moderates”. Well, in the 1970s, the MB (the Palestinian branch, at least) were the moderates – unlike their PLO counterparts, they were largely nonviolent.
Jonathan, your Most of the civil society, BTW, is secular is really not true. The portions of civil society that people in the US see and know about are of course not the ones in which Hamas has taken a commanding role. But anyone trying to organize/run social-service projects in the WB and even more so in Gaza knows that nearly all the networks that reliably and non-corruptly deliver actual services are those affiliated with Hamas. (The exception to this is a handful of non-Fateh secular organizations in the WB such as Mustapha Barghouthi’s MRC’s).
Also, look at the pro-Hamas networks in all the professional unions.
All the above kinds of networks constitute the strongest part of the Palestinians’ organized civil society. But the big parts of them affiliated with Hamas neither get nor seek funding or (much) visibility in the west, so westerners tend to think of “Hamas” as being only men of violence. Far from it. (You can also go back and look at what I wrote earlier in the year about many Hamas people having had the chance to study at “Hizbullah U” in southern Lebanon in 1992. On that occasion, Rabin gave intellectuals and activists from the two organizations a wonderful opportunity to brainstorm together over a period of many weeks over how to combine civilian-based mass organizing with armed action. Certainly, Hizbullah for its part could never have attained the achievements it won without its extremely well-organized civilian mass base.)
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