Khalida Jarrar is a senior activist in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the longtime Palestinian wing of the Arab Nationalist Movement that was founded by the late Dr. George Habash. She was Number Three on the PFLP’s list in the 2006 parliamentary elections and therefore just squeaked into the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC). (Jarrar is also married to someone who’s a cousin of AFSC’s Raed Jarrar, hence the shared family name. Actually, one of the things she achieved during the short time the PLC was still a bit functional was to get legislation enacted that would allow Palestinian women to keep their birth names rather than having to take their husband’s, which is what she still uses.)
On February 21 I found Jarrar in the office she maintains not far from the PLC’s Ramallah building. Her office is on an upper floor of one of those many incongruous large buildings that cluster onto the streets around Manara Square and that, once you go into them, reveal themselves to be large, and really rather unkempt and ugly, indoor shopping malls. The rooms on the upper floors tend to be used by professionals– or unused. From her office there was a fine view out over the hills around but the weather was extremely ugly that day: thunder, lighning, and a massive hailstorm that left marble-sized hailstones in drifts on the streets below.
She started out by defining the five key principles that, she said, informed the work of the PFLP and the other leftist parties inside the PLO/PA:
First, we strongly believe in the need to have dialogue between all the different parties and civil society. We need to develop an effective ‘national front’ in order to meet the challenges that our people faces by being under occupation, rather than using violence amongst palestinians.
Second, we believe strongly in the need for regular elections.
Third, we think the election law should be changed to make it 100% constituency-based, rather than being the mixture of constituency-based seats and national list seats that we currently have. We think that would make the parliamentarians more responsive to their constituencies.
Fourth, the PA is part of the PLO, so clearly the PLO needs to be reformed as well. We need to see the Palestine National Council, which is the PLO’s parliament, elected rather than appointed or having its seats allocated, as at present. This would be in furtherance of what was stated both in the Cairo Agreement reached in 2005 between the major Palestinian parties and the ‘Prisoners Document’ of 2006.
Fifth, the Palestinian security forces shouldn’t belong to any party. Indeed, I wonder why we need to have such large security forces since we are still under occupation? Anyway, the security forces should deal only with the small matters of daily life and they should respect the law.
Jarrar made clear that the PFLP judged that Oslo process had been flawed from the outset. “We need to have a deep review of what has happened since Oslo and because of it,” she said, adding:
That review needs to be undertaken within the highest level of political institution, that is, the PLO. Oslo itself went strongly against the longstanding principles of the PLO. Such a review would be difficult to conduct, of course, because it is not only a Palestinian issue at this point, but it’s also related to the Arab and international situation.
It should be the PLO that directs the course of negotiations, though, not the PA. And the PLO should return to basing all its positions on international resolutions and international legality.
The way we look at the way the negotiations have been conducted up until now, we see that Israel has merely used them as a cover for its continued aggression against us.
I commented that the position she had outlined so far seemed very similar to Hamas, and asked her what the differences and similarities were between the PFLP and Hamas. She replied by identifying these three differences:
Firstly, Hamas said they would agree to a ‘long ceasefire’ and to hold off on resistance actions against Israel’s occupation for 15 years. We say that people under occupation have a continuing right to resist the occupation, even if they are also always able to choose how they should resist.
Secondly, Hamas says they should establish an alternative to the PLO, but we say there should be only one front for a people suffering from occupation and exile.
Thirdly we differ in our social and economic programs. They believe in free markets and things like that whereas we are for a deep form of social democracy. Our struggle is at the national and democratic stage. We support democracy not just at the procedural level but also in society in general.
I think she somewhat mischaracterized Hamas’s position on the PLO, which it does currently want to enter, rather than replace. Also, I was interested that in specifying the differences with hamas on social issues she did not single out the issue of the role of religion in society. Jarrar is, I think, a Muslim; but she is one who wears her hair uncovered and wears fairly form-fitting pantsuits rather than any form of hijab. That would be in line with the strongly secularizing and ‘modernizing’ social program that the PFLP has long pursued. Fwiw, Habash and many other PFLP founders were Christians.
Jarrar said she was “not optimistic” about the Palestinians’ short-term political prospects. “We face so many obstacles, and they are not only internal.”
Regarding the PA’s security forces, she said,
The current security concept is totally based on the idea of security coordination with Israel. This has to be stopped. We loudly call for it to be stopped! In addition, the security forces have committed so many human rights violations and made so many political arrests.
We see the whole ‘Road Map’ process as solely a security track, not a track towards the political resolution of our conflict. But going down the security track is a dangerous trap for a people that is still under occupation. The US general, Keith Dayton, who’s been training the PA’s security forces here, and Tony Blair [who’s been coordinating some institutional reform of the PA on behalf of the ‘Quartet’] have both been seeking to avoid the political track.
She put at “around 300” the number of political prisoners currently being held by the PA’s security forces, ading:
Now, the prisoners they’re holding are all from Hamas and Islamic Jihad. But during the Gaza War people from the PFLP and the DFLP were also arrested by the PA. After the war they were released by the PA– but then, they were immediately picked up and rearrested by Israel. This is what I ean by ‘security coordination.’
In Gaza, our people’s situation has been even worse. Including that two members of the PFLP were killed by Hamas during the Israeli invasion.
We speak out strongly against the human rights violations committed by both sides! They should both stop those violations, and completely stop the use of violence amongst Palestinians.
They always say they have a ‘security’ excuse– whether here or there.
We find that Hamas is open to discussing this issue, but we question their commitment to implementation of what they’ve agreed. This is particularly puzzling to us because we both still have so many of our members and leaders in Israeli jails. You know that our General secretary, the general secretary of the PFLP, was arrested by the Israelis on 14 March 2006.
That is Ahmad Sa’adat, who from 2002 on was held in a PA prison in Jericho under a complex arrangement overseen by Britain and the US. In January 2006, still in jail, Sa’adat was elected to the PLC on the PFLP’s “Martyr Abu Ali Mustafa” list. In March 2006 the British and American guards who were supposed to be overseeing the prison mysteriously left their posts. A large IDF detachment then surrounded the prison. The PA guards also abandoned their posts (perhaps also by pre-arrangement), but the prisoners continued to resist the IDF’s assault. Only after its tanks shelled the prison for ten hours was the IDF force able to go in. It snatched Sa’adat and took him to Israel, where a military court sentenced him to 30 years in prison for heading an “illegal terrorist organization” and for his responsibility for all actions carried out by his organization.
Jarrar knows a lot about the situation of the many thousands of Palestinian political prisoners held by Israel. Prior to running for parliament she headed the “Ad-Dameer” prisoners’ aid organization, and in the parliament she has also headed its Prisoners’ Affairs Committee.
She said that the number of elected PLC members kidnaped and held by the Israelis as of the day of our interview was 38– from the PLC’s total membership of 132. Hamas was the party with the greatest number of detained parliamentarians, but she noted that four Fateh parliamentarians were also still in jail. Three of them, including Marwan Barghouthi had been elected while in jail, and the fourth had been detained after he was elected. (This Wikipedia list of PLC members and their detention/assassination status seems a little out of date, but is generally indicative.)
Since my interview with Jarrar, the Israelis have kidnaped and detained an additional four Hamas parliamentarians.
“We say that our fellow parliamentarians should be released immediately,” Jarrar said, “while the ‘exchange of prisoners’ being negtoated in exchange for Gilad Shalit should be focused more on our prisoners who’ve already been held for a long time, in some cases several decades. But the Israelis are so unpredictable! We never know what they will do.”
I asked whether she thought that Marwan Barghouthi, if released, could resolve the many problems inside Fateh. She expressed some skepticism about that prospect.
Unlike Ghassan Khatib, whom I’d interviewed a couple of days earlier, Jarrar thought the increase in popularity that Hamas had won amongst Palestinians after the Gaza war, as shown in opinion polls, was not just a temporary uptick. She said,
Hamas has become a movement that’s popular within Palestinian society. Their arguments about the need to maintain our resistance to the occupation and their warnings about the dangers of collaboratin with Israel have clearly resonated with the public. And people can see that the PA’s policy has failed.
Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas] faces big difficulties now. He really needs to undertake the comprehensive review of the PA’s and PLO’s policies that we are pushing for
He needs to start taking some initiative!
Salam Fayyad has no party to speak of. He can do a technical job perhaps, but he is only relevant because of the strong support he gets from outside…
You know, there are many inside fateh who support a national reconciliation that includes Hamas, and Abu Mazen really needs to do this if he is to survive politically. But there are some around him in Fateh who oppose it for their own private reasons.