Palestine
In Suicide
By Roni Ben Efrat
12 July, 2007
Countercurrents.org
June
5, 2007 marked forty years of Israeli Occupation. Five days later Hamas
began its conquest of Gaza, and on June 14, PA President Mahmoud Abbas
of Fatah formally dissolved the unity government. After forty years,
Israel has finally succeeded in breaking the Palestinian national project.
Defeating the Fatah apparatus
of Muhammad Dahlan, the Hamas fighters committed war crimes, aimed at
warning other potential nests of opposition. The surviving Dahlan loyalists
escaped from the Strip with Israel's assistance. Israelis take a grim
satisfaction in the new Palestinian tragedy, but in this they remain
as short-sighted as ever: their country's national/colonial enterprise
cannot long survive without a viable Palestinian counterpart that accepts
its legitimacy.
One outcome of the violence
is that Abbas—also known as Abu Mazen—has performed his
own disengagement from Gaza. He voices no interest, for now at least,
in finding common ground with Hamas. Another outcome is clarity of line:
after the start of the second Intifada in September 2000, Palestinian
discourse became blurred, with Hamas adopting nationalist language and
Fatah religious. Now the ruler of the West Bank is Fatah, anchored in
the secular, Israeli, pro-American camp, while the ruler of Gaza is
Hamas—militant, anti-American, Islamist, isolated from the Western
world.
The wider Arab context is
divided as follows: Egypt and Jordan support Abu Mazen alone. Qatar
too recognizes his legitimacy, but not as exclusive; the Hamas government,
it says, is also legitimate. Saudi Arabia, which recently ushered Hamas
and Fatah into the Mecca Agreement, supports Abu Mazen but believes
that the two sides must return to the table.
From Oslo to Mecca
Few recall that toward the
end of the first Intifada—when the PLO was at a low point—Israel's
initial concept was to set up a Palestinian state in Gaza, over which
Yasser Arafat would preside. The idea was to deck it with the symbols
of sovereignty: the Palestinians would settle for that, it was thought.
Under the same concept, the Oslo Accords never specified the territory
that the Palestinians would receive in the West Bank, or the fate of
Jerusalem and the settlements. In the course of the second-stage talks,
Yasser Arafat managed to nail down the unity of the West Bank and Gaza.
He even got control of the major Palestinian cities.
The Oslo process had been
hampered all along by the opposition of Hamas (which refused to take
part in the parliamentary elections of 1996). Hamas never accepted the
legitimacy of the Palestinian Authority (PA), an Oslo creation. It did
all it could to stop the process. Its suicide attacks, which began in
1994 after Muslims were massacred in Hebron, made the whole PA untrustworthy
in Israeli eyes. Israel demanded that Arafat clamp down, but he could
not do so completely. An all-out fight against Hamas would have alienated
other Palestinians, who were already criticizing the PA for its corruption
and impotence.
In this way a vicious circle
developed that has been with us ever since. Israel said, and continues
to say, that it cannot make concessions toward a peace agreement unless
the PA first dismantles the terror apparatus; the PA answered, and continues
to answer, that it cannot gain the popular support it would need to
dismantle Hamas unless it first can show achievements in the peace process.
Within the stalemate created by the circle, Hamas gained legitimacy.
Its new status became evident during the second Intifada, which erupted,
we recall, after the Camp David talks of July 2000 broke down. Why did
they break down? Because the Palestinians—under closure while
Israel thrived and the settlements swelled around them—had by
then lost faith in both Israel and Arafat. The PA president no longer
had a domestic or pan-Arab mandate to sign an agreement with Israel.
It was the militant wing
of Fatah, the Tanzim ("Organization"), that started the second
Intifada. The Tanzim did so without a national strategy. The revolt
was motivated largely by resentment, aimed not so much at Israel as
at Arafat's PA. (The Tanzim members had been marginalized—edged
out of the better PA jobs—by Arafat's cronies from Tunis.) Two
further factors then joined the uprising. One was Arafat himself, scrambling
to keep his leadership. The second was Hamas, which welcomed the collapse
of Oslo. None of these contributed a strategy. The national question
was merely sidetracked into an arena of blood. Fatah's al-Aqsa Brigades,
competing with Hamas for the hearts of the people, adopted the tactic
of suicide attacks. The practice of atrocity became a habit. We have
just now witnessed its boomerang in Gaza.
The Second Intifada ground
to a halt after three major actions by Israel: (1) Operation Defensive
Shield, which destroyed Fatah's military apparatus in the West Bank;
(2) assassinations of the top Hamas leaders; and (3) unilateral disengagement
from the Strip, which Hamas viewed as its own victory. For various reasons
(one was the ease with which Israel had picked off its leaders) Hamas
decided to turn toward politics. The decision, we shall see, had implications
it failed to think through. Hamas entered the elections of January 2006,
winning 74 seats in parliament, compared to 45 for Fatah (23 for other
parties).
The landslide plunged Hamas
into a dilemma. On the one hand, it had entered elections whose framework
and legitimacy derived from the Oslo Accords. But those Accords are
based on Palestinian recognition of Israel—a thing Hamas refuses
to do.
The party was in a peculiar
position. Because Palestine was a state-in-the-making, there was hardly
anything to govern: rather, the main task of government would be to
engage in a political process leading to statehood. Those who had voted
for Hamas expected and wanted it to engage in that process. Disgusted
with Fatah corruption, they believed that Hamas would do better. To
engage in the process, however, Hamas would have to negotiate, and negotiate
it could not.
The impossibility of its
position weakened Hamas. Meanwhile, the Western world imposed a boycott
on the PA, and four million Palestinians found themselves under economic
siege.
In response, Hamas attempted
to wear two faces. There was the moderate governing party that tried
to use Fatah as a mediator with the West. Second, there remained the
rigidly fundamentalist movement, whose leaders went East in search of
money for salaries, bringing it back—literally—in suitcases.
The predicament of Hamas
opened the crack through which Fatah (especially Dahlan's forces in
Gaza, supported by the US) could return to the fray. Fatah had never
accepted the decision of the people (just as Hamas, earlier, had never
reconciled itself to Arafat). The Mecca Accord, signed in February 2007,
was an attempt to paper over very basic differences. Behind the new
unity government stood two shadow regimes, one belonging to Fatah, which
included the military wing of Dahlan, and the other belonging to Hamas,
which fired Qassam rockets from Gaza into southern Israel.
Where are you going, Palestine?
After being ousted from Gaza,
Abu Mazen—in his fourth presidential year—made the decision
that the US and Israel had long demanded: he dissolved the Hamas government.
On a superficial view, Abu
Mazen killed two birds with one stone: he ended the boycott on the PA
in the West Bank and he isolated Hamas. On a deeper view, however, the
national project (and he is among its last surviving founders) has been
smashed to bits.
Suppose Israel were to make
a separate peace with Abu Mazen? This would solve nothing, because there
would still be none with Hamas, which has forces in the West Bank. The
split between Hamas and Fatah has provided Israel with excuses not to
withdraw, not to dismantle settlements and not to permit the rise of
a Palestinian state. It can say: "How can we cede land to Abu Mazen,
knowing that Hamas could use it for launching rockets toward Tel Aviv
or the airport? Our army must remain in the West Bank to keep Hamas
from taking that too—and to defend Abu Mazen!"
The PA president, by ditching
Hamas, has diminished his bargaining power: he can no longer say to
his Western protectors or to Israel, "Excuse me, but I have an
internal opposition to contend with, so I cannot accept your terms."
What is more, in the absence of honest leadership, the Western money
soon to hit the West Bank will likely find its way into private pockets,
creating new resentment and strife.
As for Hamas, which had once
hoped to conceal its agenda beneath Abu Mazen's table, it is now the
sole ruling party in Gaza. It will have to justify the rash operation
in which it divided the unity package. It faces 1.4 million hungry citizens.
It has no industry, no donor money, no infrastructure, and no international
legitimacy. All it can offer is the Qur'an. Hamas will see the support
of the people crack. Charity will likely give way to a reign of internal
terror, like that which occurred in Iran, Algeria and Afghanistan. If
Hamas again seeks unity with Fatah, it will find that it has to bend.
And what about Israel? It
frolics in its villa behind walls and checkpoints, but the Palestinian
problem never ceases to knock. Israel could not cope with a united Hamas-Fatah
front, but it cannot cope with their separation either. It doggedly
seeks tactical solutions for a basically strategic problem. Each solution
becomes a new impediment, requiring further tactical solutions. An example
is the proposal to release Marwan Barghouti, currently serving five
life sentences; he, it is thought, is the only Fatah leader with the
strength and credit to stand against Hamas. But who is Barghouti? He
is head of the Tanzim, the group that started the misconceived second
Intifada largely for the private motives stated above.
The solution, for Israel,
is not to create another collaborator. The solution—despite new
excuses to avoid it—remains what it has always been: real Palestinian
sovereignty over all the lands conquered in 1967. But such a thing will
not happen, cannot happen, unless a different kind of leadership emerges
on both sides. The Israelis will have to find leaders who are willing
to pay the price of peace. Among the Palestinians, a leadership will
have to emerge that resembles neither Hamas nor Fatah. It will have
to be both honest and realistic. It will have to put the common people
first, the workers and refugees—rather than trying to buy them
off with the drug of foreign charity or the promise of an otherworldly
paradise.
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