Abu Mazen plays hardball (but not with Israel)

I regret that I didn’t get to see PA president Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) when I was in Palestine recently. It seemed that whenever I was in Gaza, he was in Ramallah, and vice versa. (He was also out of the country for a while there.)
Anyway, I did get to speak to some old friends who know him well. One man of great political smarts and great political connections told me, off the record, back at the end of February that,

Abu Mazen felt badly wounded by Hamas in the [January] election. Now he wants to humiliate them in return… That’s why we’re facing some months of wrangling between the President and the PLC.

Well, my friend was right. In the past few days, Abbas has launched a number of political initiatives designed to circumsrcibe Hamas’s power, even though (or, in my friend’s view, precisely because) Hamas trounced Abbas’s Fateh Party at the polls. These intiatives have included moves to grab as many as possible of the (admittedly meager) levers of power at the disposal of the PA to his office in the Presidency, and away from control of the Hamas-led government.
(Ironic, of course, that when Abbas was the PM and Arafat was the Prez, the US had striven mightily and with great success to get these powers shifted to the PM’s office… )
In addition, according to this article by Chris McGreal in today’s Guardian, Abbas is delivering a letter to Hamas PM-designate Ismail Haniyeh today. According to “sources close to Mr Abbas” this letter “is intended to ‘draw the battle lines’ with Hamas, but it also serves as a warning to Israel and foreign powers that threats to sever aid and links are likely to strengthen rather than weaken the Islamist party.
McGreal said he “saw” the letter before it was delivered. (Was he able to read it as well, I wonder?)
Anyway, HaAretz’a Akiva Eldar also has a piece about this letter in his paper today (on Shabbat? How does that work? Maybe they just have an online edition on Shabbat?). He writes that though he didn’t ‘see” the letter itself, he and a group of other reporters were briefed about its contents by Abbas’s aide Tayeb Abdel-Rahim.
Kind of interesting and significant, I think, that the content of this intra-Palestinian letter would, at a time of continuing, very tough conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, be briefed to Israeli reporters even before it is transmitted to PM-designate Haniyeh?
I guess the letter is part of Abbas’s attempt, discreetly, to have some influence for the good on the Israeli elections. (I.e. by showing that he is “standing up to” Hamas, and therefore that “there IS someone to talk to on the Palestinian side”– i.e. him.)
This was also, even more clearly, the intention of the interview that he gave to Eldar last Wednesday.
Eldar wrote there about Abbas that:

He is clearly weighing every word carefully, so that the message that “there is a partner” that he wants to convey to the Israeli public will not immediately become a right-wing election slogan. He is counting on the discerning to understand.
“You are going into very important elections,” Abu Mazen says. “We are in a historic period, in which we must decide whether we will move toward peace and a better future for our children. I can promise that you have a partner for this peace. On the day after the elections you will find us ready to sit in negotiations with no prior conditions. The leadership of both peoples and also of the international community has a supreme responsibility to exploit this opportunity. It may be the last hope to accord the two peoples their right to live in security and stability. The coming generations will not forgive us if we let it slip by.
“If I am not a partner, ask yourselves who is a partner. I am one of those who signed the Oslo agreement and was a patron of the negotiations that were conducted prior to it in secret for eight months. I supported, and I continue to support, a clear peace plan, based on the legitimacy of international law, to which we all agreed, and on the road map. I have called ceaselessly for a hudna [cease-fire] in order to enable the continuation of negotiations, and I achieved a period of calm when I was prime minister.
“I have often swum against the current, but when our public hears from Israel that there is no Palestinian partner – that is something that I cannot explain. For example, in the matter of the prison in Jericho, when I call on all the Palestinian organizations to respect the agreements we signed, I am asked why the Israelis kidnapped the prisoners, contrary to our agreement with the Americans? What I am supposed to answer?
“I will remind you that on the day I was elected, there were attacks on Gaza and already then, one of your senior army personnel said that there is no partner for negotiations. I am afraid that Israel does not want negotiations and has found itself the excuse that it has no partner.”
…
A large portion of the Israeli public will go to the polls in order to vote for Ehud Olmert’s unilateral plan. What’s wrong with that?
“Olmert’s plan may bring about a 10-year hudna and a state with temporary borders. But it will not bring you peace. Plans like that leave the problem open, but do not resolve it. We saw what happens when the end of the conflict is postponed. I cannot promise you what will happen in the coming generations. According to Oslo, we were supposed to reach a final-status agreement by May 1999, and we saw what happened. Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated, Shimon Peres lost the elections and Benjamin Netanyahu destroyed everything. I am proposing to you to sit now and discuss the end of the conflict. I proposed to Peres and the Americans to open a back channel of talks, far from the spotlight. And I am convinced that within less than a year, we will be able to sign an agreement.”
Can you offer the Israelis a two-state solution without the Palestinians’ right of return to Israel?
“Our solution is based on the Beirut declaration of 2002, which was the biggest gift Israel received since its establishment. It has special importance because its origin is Saudi Arabia, the land of the Islamic holy places, and because all the Arab states and all the Muslim states at the conference declared their readiness for normalization with Israel after the occupation of the territories ends. Seventy percent of you supported the initiative, and it is a pity that it was shunted aside.
“As regards the refugees, Israel cannot disavow this problem morally and judicially. At Camp David both the Israeli delegation and the American delegation agreed that action is needed to find a solution. Give me reason why we should not sit at the table and continue the effort to find a settlement on the basis of the five options proposed to the refugees by President Bill Clinton in his blueprint, and on the basis of the Arab League declaration, according to which the solution must be just and agreed, on the basis of United Nations [General Assembly] Resolution 194.”
Are you ready to say that the solution of the refugee problem has to be agreed to by Israel?
“Definitely, but I want to remind you that it was Ehud Barak who stated, at Camp David, that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. I propose that we sit and discuss the refugee issue like every other issue, which was raised in the Clinton blueprint or discussed at Taba. The negotiations were disrupted in September 2000 in the wake of Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount and the violent intifada that erupted after that. I did not stop calling for a cessation of the violence and I will not cease extending my hand in peace, even if this causes my downfall. But you are the strong side and it is in your hands to end the conflict.
“We must come to the negotiating table in good faith and with a genuine and true desire to resolve the conflict. I have to put myself in your shoes and you will put yourselves in my shoes. When each side understands the rights of the other, there is a chance that we will reach a solution. It will not happen if you ambush me in the corner in order to grab a slice here and a slice there. I accept the right of every Israeli citizen to live in security and within agreed borders, which are the borders of 1967. I know well the meaning of life in a situation of unstable security. On the other hand, we, too, have the right to live in an independent state in the 1967 borders, without fences, without settlements and without military attacks. You should know that not a day passes without a funeral here, without people being wounded and without arrests.”
Will you agree to a territorial swap that will make it possible for Israel to retain some of the settlements?
“I do not rule it out. In the negotiations each side will present its requests. It will all be done according to international law. For years you said there is no Palestinian people and we refused to recognize Israel’s existence. President Bush said that a viable Palestinian state with territorial contiguity has to be established alongside Israel. Translate that into facts on the ground.”

I don’t have time to write a long commentary on all this here. But I do want to say that I’ve admired Mahmoud Abbas for a long time. I first met him, in Tunis, in 1987 or so. (When I was Beirut in the ’70s, he didn’t spend much time there. Then, he was mostly in Qatar.) I remember during one of those meetings at the end of the ’80s he said something to the effect that his strategy regarding Israel was “to hug it and love it and reassure it so much that in the end they’ll be bound to give us our rights.”
I think he has continued to hold to that theory to this very day– despite what looks to me like considerable evidence that often when he reaches out to “hug” Israel, the Israelis just respond by kicking him in the face… As with the recent raid on the prison in Jericho, which was deeply humiliating for him.
I also believe that his plea to prove to Israelis that “there is a partner for negotiations” represents a serious misreading of the mood of 80% or more of Israelis which is one of repudiation of any idea of a negotiated peace, and embrace of unilateral Israeli actions. Kadima’s strong position in the polls is just the tip of that iceberg.
I do continue to admire Abbas’s immense moral courage in hanging on to a very principled (and determinedly nonviolent) political position in which, evidently, he must believe very deeply.
I do believe, though, that he and his allies in Fateh have completely failed to get any grip on the other part of the traditional Gandhian program of nonviolent action, which is to understand the absolute need for civilian mass organizing. In fact, I think it is many, many years since Fateh had any concept of civilian mass organizing, at all. Its leaders have always, continuously since about the mid-1970s (and maybe even before then) followed a path premised on the success of secret, elite-level negotiations with foreign governments, without devoting very much effort at all to building and maintaining effective and accountable organizations on the internal front.
That is where Hamas has clearly outperformed them. It was Hamas’s civilian mass organizations and networks that rallied the people out to vote for the non-incumbent party back in January. Remember, Hamas had never competed in a national election before– but it won, handily!
During my recent time in Palestine, I talked with PLO Executive Committee member Qais Abdel-Karim (Abu Leila), someone I’ve known for >25 years. Abu Leila is a longtime leftist-Arab nationalist. He recently won a seat on the PLC by running on a joint list (Badil) with the Palestinian People’s Party– the former Communist Party. Let’s just say that Abu Leila understands political organizing very well indeed. He told me,

Hamas nowadays seems to be the only Leninist party we have here. They understand about ‘serving the people.’ And they have strong internal debate– but you never hear about it from the outside: they have excellent internal discipline.
Also, their organization of the election campaign, and on election day itself, was very impressive. They didn’t lose one vote through bad organization. They brought women in their 80s to the polling stations, in wheelchairs…

Anyway, as you can maybe see, I’m going through the notes of my trip here, trying to piece together some things I need for the big Boston Review piece I’m now writing. But I really needed to bookmark those Akiva Eldar articles and the McGreal article, as well, since I’ll be traveling to NYC tomorrow and need to have all this stuff easily accessible on the web when I sit in Cakeshop tomorrow afternoon wifi-ing away.
So y’all, the readers, get the benefit of that here. If you have something constructive or informative to add re the issues I’ve been writing about, please do post them in the comments.