Fateh’s role after its electoral calamity

On my third and last day in Amman I
had a number of good, quick
meetings…  Including one with Mouin Rabbani, a very smart guy who tracks
Palestinian developments for the International Crisis Group.  He suggested baldly that “some elements in Fateh” might now be
preparing to act as Palestinian “Contras”….

I’ve just been reading this well-reported
article on the post-election developments inside Fateh.  It’s by
Charmaine Seitz, who’s a
freelance journalist based in Jerusalem. She writes that the
series of Fateh leadership meetings held soon after the Hamas victory
identified two key goals for the party/movement: “
first,
to work for early elections that would cut
short the government’s usual four-year term, preferably in a matter of
months, and second, to ensure that Fatah wins the second time
around.” 

,
She quotes Fateh spokesperson Ahmad Abd al-Rahman as saying that
if Fateh wants to win the next PA elections, it needs to get its
internal organization into some sort of order. (Duh!)

She writes that Fateh insiders
describe a six-month-long process that would  starting with the
registration of party “members” (which is already, I have to tell you,
a very revolutionary concept of Fateh, which has for long considered
itself to be– sort of like the Church of England, in England– the
“natural” affiliation for any Palestinian who does not consciously opt
out of it), and would then move through the local party elections to
holding gatherings of the — by then, hopefully revamped– national
party leadership organizations, viz., the 40-person Revolutionary
Council and the 10-person Central Committee…

“The
Central Committee, over time, is becoming irrelevant,” he predicts.
“After that, we might be able to have a conference. It could be that we
will split, that we will split into two, three, four or five movements.
We would like for Fatah to stay united, but we don’t believe that in
the coming months, the top leadership of Fatah is willing to do
anything serious for Fatah.” While he supports the registration and
activation of members, Faris says that the Central Committee and
Revolutionary Council are trying to shirk responsibility and place it
on the local leaderships.

Of
the president himself, Faris says that he and his circle reached out
repeatedly since the elections, only to be ignored. “[Abbas] has been
kidnapped by the old leadership in Fatah,” he says bitterly. “They are
trying to use his power against the new generation.”

And then, this:

The US push for
elections sought to rejuvenate
Fatah by organizing its younger ranks. Instead, the leadership of Fatah
finds itself in a Gordian knot of mutual interest with the United
States and its allies that in the end can only damage the Palestinian
faction [i.e., Fateh] in the eyes of the Palestinian public.

In addition, as Seitz notes further
on in this slightly ill-organized
piece, there are already signs that the splits inside the movement have
become even deeper since the election than they were before it:

Exploring the confluence of (anti-Hamas) interests between the Bush
administration and some key Fateh leaders, she writes:

In
the face of its defeat, Fatah and its allies quickly sought to assure
the US and the international community that it was still in the game.
These efforts led to rather bizarre exchanges…

Former
national security adviser Jibril Rajoub was said by the Times
of London to have told an audience at a February 8-9 follow-up meeting
to previous bilateral talks that the elections had been a reversible
“political accident.” The implication of the article was that the
Palestinian president’s office meant to plot with the US against Hamas,
a charge that the president’s office [i.e. Pres. Abbas, I think ~HC]
roundly denies.

There
is no denying, however, the confluence of Fatah’s aspirations with the
interests of the United States, which has boxed itself into a position
criminalizing material or other support of any one Hamas member, or the
government as a whole. The State Department’s
review of the $404
million earmarked for the Palestinian Authority areas cut out not only
money for roads that could be construed as support for the government,
but also tens of millions of dollars in private-sector projects.
Legislation moving through Congress would further tighten the ban on
financial support, while allowing exceptions for humanitarian
assistance and aid routed through the Palestinian president’s
office.

We should recall here that the PA president’s office has control over
at least two of the PA’s five “security forces”.  Continued US
funding and support for these– at the expense of the security forces
under control of the PA’s Hamas government– could indeed lead to a
Contras-type situation.

One of the few political arguments that the Fateh peole have been
making against Hamas that has some possible political traction amongst
Palestinians has been their criticism of Hamas’s failure to sign onto
all the international agreements previously entered into by the PLO–
which has been the Palestinians’ longstanding political umbrella
organization, and has been dominated by Fateh since 1969.  This
has been described by some Fateh people as Hamas’s “failure to
recognize the PLO.” 

However, it looks as though Mustafa Barghouthi’s cousin, the imprisoned
Fateh “young” generation leader Marwan Barghouthi, might not agree with
Mustafa’s recommendation… Seitz quotes Marwan’s ally Qaddoura Faris
as “railing” to the effect that, “Hamas lied to
the
Palestinian people… They lied that they succeeded in the
resistance. They lied about reform, too. It must be made clear to the
Palestinian people that Hamas is a group of liars.”

Seitz writes that, in general, “the confluence of interests
between Fatah and the US or Europe will most definitely reap new
constituencies for Hamas.”  I think that judgment is basically
correct.  She is also correct in noting that if the Fateh people’s
anti-Hamas campaign ends up destroying what is left of the institutions
of the PA government, this would cause huge problems both for Fateh
itself (which would end up, even if it won the next election,
inheriting the PA’s wreckage) and for the international community:

While I think her argument is
basically sound here, I do think it’s a little over-stated. 
Palestine is not Somalia; and you don’t have to draw in the “specter of
Somalia” to make the case that the situation in the OPTs in the event
of a complete PA breakdown would be very bad.

Let’s just hope no-one in Fateh is crazy and destructive enough to
participate in any such scheme. nWhat a sad, sad fate that would be for what was once a determined Palestinian nationalist organization.