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it's a long read folks, but very compelling and well written. from one of the leading scholars on palestine.
LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS
LRB | Vol. 27 No. 3 dated 3 February 2005 | Rashid Khalidi
After Arafat
Rashid Khalidi
The autumn of the patriarch is finally over. These are difficult times for
the Palestinians, and Yasser Arafat's death presents them with a daunting
challenge. The first of their difficulties is the long-standing
fragmentation of the Palestinian people. Nearly five million still live in
some part of what was once Mandate Palestine, and can be divided into four
distinct groups. More than a million have been citizens of Israel since
1948. Over 3.5 million, in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, are
in their 38th year of military occupation, hermetically sealed off from one
another. Each of the four groups - those with Israeli citizenship, 250,000
Arab Jerusalemites, more than two million West Bankers and 1.3 million
Gazans - is subject to different laws; the last two face stringent
restrictions on their movements.
A further five million Palestinians (there are no reliable figures) live
outside Palestine, some of them in the utter misery of the refugee camps in
Lebanon, others in widely differing conditions in different Arab countries,
Europe and the US. The Palestinians of the diaspora possess a variety of
passports, laisser-passers and refugee documents, and some also face
restrictions on their movements. The largest single group, perhaps three
million, carry Jordanian passports. One thing they all have in common is
that they are barred from living in any part of their ancestral homeland.
The second difficulty the Palestinians face is the extraordinarily close
relationship between the Sharon government and the Bush administration. Some
of the same consultants work for American and Israeli political candidates,
and some funders bankroll both Israeli and American political movements,
charities and foundations. The economies of the two countries are
intertwined: the incoming head of the Israeli Central Bank is an American,
and a huge amount of capital flows from the US to Israel, including $2
billion a year in military assistance. Economic aid, loans, investment,
charity donations and other transfers amount to as much as 10 per cent of
Israel's $120 billion GDP. Israeli writers, artists and academics commute to
and from the US; tens of thousands of Israelis live in and visit the United
States, and there are similar numbers of Americans in Israel.
The connection between Bush and Sharon goes back to Bush's first visit to
Israel, in 1998, one of the three trips abroad he made before he became
president; Sharon showed him the Occupied Territories from a helicopter. The
old general seems to have made a powerful impression on the Texas governor:
ideological factors alone can't explain a closeness sealed by ten meetings
between the two men during Bush's first term as president. Tony Blair may
see Bush just as often, but he doesn't have the same influence over him. The
military and political consequences of their collaboration, which was
cemented after 9/11 and during the second intifada, have been devastating
for the Palestinians. With American approval, Israel reoccupied the small
areas of the West Bank it had evacuated under the 1993 Oslo Accords, turned
Palestinian towns into an archipelago of open-air prison camps, and wrecked
the fragile Palestinian economy. The administrative apparatus of the
Palestinian Authority was destroyed, police stations and government offices
were demolished, and official records looted.
Last April Bush stated that Israel would have the right to annex the
considerable areas of the West Bank where the largest of its illegal
settlements are located: a significant departure from previous American
policy, which had always maintained that these settlements were illegal, and
an 'obstacle to peace'. At one stroke, the Bush administration had discarded
one of the core principles of Security Council Resolution 242, the
internationally recognised basis for Arab-Israeli peace negotiations - viz.
the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force. The
settlements were now described by the president as 'realities' that would
have to be taken into account in any agreement. Dealing exclusively with the
Israeli government, the US behaved as if the Palestinians had neither
interests nor rights in these matters - as if they didn't exist. Sharon's
plan for a unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip (while maintaining
complete control of the region from outside), in order to retain indefinite
control of most of the West Bank, is grounded in these Bush-Sharon
understandings.
The third difficulty the Palestinians have to contend with is the absence of
an effective political structure which would enable them to further their
aims as a people, and therefore of an effective strategy for ending the
occupation and achieving self-determination. This is a long-standing
weakness, as Edward Said often argued in these pages. It dates back to the
Mandate era, when the Palestinians, unlike many other Arab national
movements of the same period, failed to build up the centralised
institutions of a para-state, or to take control of the institutions of the
colonial state. Partly in consequence, they remained weak and divided.
Although they had a relatively strong sense of national identity, they were
denied most of the attributes of statehood by the British Mandate
authorities, and failed to develop them on their own. This crucial failing
contributed to their resounding defeat between 29 November 1947, when UN
General Assembly Resolution 181 mandated partition of the country, and 15
May 1948, when Israel was established, troops from four Arab armies entered
the country, and the second phase of the war over Palestine began. In less
than six months, two of the three largest Palestinian cities, Jaffa and
Haifa, fell to the Zionists, as did scores of villages and towns; about half
of the 750,000 Palestinians who became refugees during the war were forced
from their homes.
In 1964, after the 'lost decade' of the 1950s, the PLO was created by the
Arab governments as a way of controlling the Palestinians. Taken over by the
Palestinians themselves in 1968, the PLO eventually established a para-state
structure, with the equivalent of ministries carrying out financial,
educational, medical and social tasks. It was hampered by having to do this
in exile, in Jordan, Lebanon and elsewhere, and often clashed with the
governments of the host countries. The institutions it created were neither
very democratic nor very efficient, but many of the PLO cadres who had run
them were imported into the Occupied Territories after the 1993 Oslo Accords
(most of the lower-ranking employees came from the Occupied Territories).
The Palestinian Authority, when it came into existence in 1994, was expected
to do the impossible, to function even though sovereignty was denied it by
the Accords and subsequent agreements with Israel. Israel retained ultimate
security control over the Occupied Territories; while the PA had only
partial control over small parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Building
stable, smoothly functioning institutions in such a situation would have
been exceedingly difficult for even the most disciplined, competent and
incorruptible political movement.
It's true that the PLO had managed to run some of the structures of a
para-state in Lebanon relatively effectively during the 15 years before its
expulsion from Beirut in 1982, but cronyism, excessive centralisation,
capriciousness, corruption and an inability to impose discipline on its
various factions seriously marred its performance. This led to the
alienation of the great majority of the Lebanese from the PLO and the
Palestinians, which cost them dear in 1982 and afterwards. Moreover, the
cadres who had run these institutions in Lebanon spent the dozen or so years
after leaving Beirut in enforced idleness in various Arab countries.
Whatever good qualities they had possessed in the 1970s had been eroded by
the time they returned to Palestine in the mid-1990s, older, greyer and
thicker, to take up the reins of power, and finally enjoy its perquisites.
It was little wonder that the PA exhibited in magnified form the many flaws
of the PLO's para-state in Lebanon.
A final set of problems has included the monopolisation of real power in the
PA by Fatah, repeating a pattern formed by the PLO in Beirut. This has
combined with the PA's inability to co-opt or incorporate Hamas and its
other Islamist rival, Islamic Jihad, as Fatah had earlier succeeded in doing
with secular rivals such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine. By 2000, moreover, Palestinian public opinion had increasingly
come to see the Oslo approach as a failure: it had failed to end the
occupation, halt the expansion of Israeli settlements, ease the growing
Israeli restrictions on the movement of Palestinians, or reverse the decline
of the Palestinian economy. By this point the PA was in grave trouble.
The situation came to a head with the outbreak of the second intifada in
September 2000, triggered by Sharon's provocative visit to the Haram
al-Sharif/Temple Mount. Several weeks of extreme Israeli repression of
largely unarmed but violent demonstrations, with scores of Palestinians
killed and wounded, was followed by an increase in the use of weapons on the
part of the Palestinians, followed by intensified repression. Thereafter,
Hamas and Islamic Jihad began to up the ante on Fatah and the PA, launching
spectacular suicide attacks on Israeli civilians. Fatah's al-Aqsa Martyrs'
Brigades soon took the same disastrous path. These militant groups, and the
politicians with whom they were connected, played into the hands of the
Israeli army, which in spring 2002 carried out long-standing plans for the
reoccupation of Palestinian towns and cities, causing massive destruction,
and shattering the PA infrastructure, before turning its attention to the
leadership and infrastructure of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
A last critical problem has been the failure of the PA to establish a
separation of powers between the executive, legislative and judiciary
branches, a difficult task for any national movement moving from
semi-clandestinity into the open, and from liberation to state-building.
Many states that gained full independence decades ago have not yet succeeded
fully in this. For a people whose land was still under occupation, it was
particularly hard. But while the PA initially established a reasonable level
of law and order, at least before the intifada began, the proliferation of
squabbling security services, and the bribery, featherbedding, corruption
and favouritism which were rife in the PA, contributed significantly to the
alienation of public opinion, as well as harming investment and offending
donors. Vital social services languished (or were provided by Hamas or
NGOs), while the PA lavished money on cars, apartments and travel for its
senior cadres.
Equally serious was the failure of the Palestinian Legislative Council,
elected in January 1996 at the same time as Arafat was elected president of
the PA, to impose itself on the executive branch, as Arafat retained control
in all important spheres. This was a moment when change had been possible,
and their failure to take advantage of it haunted the Palestinians even
before Israeli troops re-entered their cities and towns in 2002, shattering
the pretence that the PA had any real authority. It haunts them still.
It became customary for the media, and the American media in particular, to
ascribe every decision, every characteristic of Palestinian politics, to
Arafat himself. This wasn't altogether inappropriate: not only did Arafat
deserve much of the credit for reviving the Palestinian cause after the
debacle of 1948, he was also an easily caricatured and larger-than-life
figure who did not arouse sympathy in most Western observers - and he lent
himself to this personalisation. In some measure he even encouraged it. He
revelled in attention, was jealous of rivals, and worked ceaselessly to keep
all the strings controlling Palestinian politics in his own hands. As the
pre-eminent and founding leader of Fatah, as the chairman since 1969 of the
PLO Executive Committee, and as the elected president of the PA, there is no
question that he towered over Palestinian politics for most of the last
forty years.
While Arafat was largely responsible for the successes and many failings of
Fatah, the PLO and the PA, the failure of the Palestinian polity from the
Mandate period onwards to develop most of the attributes of statehood was
more structural than anything else. Nor should he alone be blamed for the
many strategic errors made by the PLO leadership over the decades. They
include the constant equivocation about a two-state solution, the failure to
put a stop to armed violence long after violence had supposedly been
conclusively renounced; the egregious failure to impose internal discipline;
siding with Saddam Hussein after the invasion of Kuwait in 1990; and
accepting the 1993 Oslo Accords and the interim accords that followed it
with all their flaws. Many of these gross strategic blunders grew out of
collective decision-making by the entire Fatah-PLO-PA leadership.
On the other hand, the assassinations of Fatah leaders by Israel and Arab
states played their part in all this. Particularly after the killings in
Tunis of Arafat's closest collaborators, Abu Jihad in 1988 and Abu Iyyad in
1991, there remained virtually no one who could stand up to the Old Man,
'al-Khityar'. Although he was always first among equals, before the
assassinations Arafat had at times been obliged to defer to his comrades,
particularly on the rare occasions when they succeeded in banding together
to oppose him. Several founding leaders of Fatah even had their own
organisational bases and sources of support. They could defy Arafat
(although given his temper and autocratic tendencies they were loath to do
so), and in consequence from the 1960s until the early 1980s there were
serious internal and public deliberations about strategy within Fatah and
the PLO. One example was the debate over whether to pursue reconciliation
with the Hashemite regime - the 'Jordanian option' - as a way of forging
closer links with the Occupied Territories. In the past decade and a half,
by contrast, Arafat became increasingly inclined to make most decisions
himself, surrounded by a coterie of yes-men.
His brush with death in an air crash in the Libyan desert in 1992 made
dealing with him more difficult. His memory, always one of his most powerful
weapons, wasn't what it had been. In recent years, his alertness appeared to
vary from day to day. He had lived a hard, dangerous life for five decades,
but seemed to age little until his late seventies, when his health visibly
declined. His increasing feebleness was more apparent after the Israeli army
immured him in the wreckage of his headquarters in the spring of 2002. The
elected leader of the Palestinians (technically, his term as president ran
out in 2000) was now immobilised and virtually imprisoned. Increasingly
isolated from reality, largely cut off from his own people, receiving only a
few visitors compared to the many who had flocked to see him in Beirut and
Tunis, and in Gaza and Ramallah before 2002, Arafat was even more dependent
on a tight circle of aides.
Even in infirmity, however, Arafat was a more formidable politician than his
colleagues Mahmoud Abbas and Ahmed Qurei, both of whom, as successive prime
ministers in 2003, failed to impose themselves against his will. He then
showed himself more able than men half his age, rapidly crushing an open
challenge to his authority in the summer of 2004 by Muhammad Dahlan, the
former chief of Preventive Security in Gaza (one of a dozen competing PA
security services created by Arafat). But his isolation and increasing loss
of focus left the Palestinian polity without any recognisable strategy at a
time of supreme crisis, as the intifada ground on with devastating effects.
Not surprisingly, his death was met with both sadness and relief among
Palestinians, a sense of anxiety at the disappearance of the only leader
most people had ever known, combined with a sense that change was imperative
after so many years of going nowhere. Resentment at a father figure who had
clung to power for too long was accompanied by deep insecurity at the
disappearance of the icon who symbolised the Palestinian cause. A mixture of
melancholy and mild elation prevailed at the funeral and in the days after
Arafat's burial, when the meaning of his absence began to sink in among
Palestinians everywhere. It was soon replaced by concern about the future,
mixed with cautious hopes for an improvement in the situation.
The opportunities facing the Palestinians are less enticing than they were
at first portrayed, when the West seemed so excited to find the Arafat era
at an end. Peace is not about to break out, if peace means a binding,
mutually satisfactory resolution of the 'final status' issues in dispute
between Israel and the Palestinians: Jerusalem, refugees, sovereignty,
recognised borders, settlements and water. The reason is simple: the two
most powerful Middle Eastern actors, the United States and Israel, have
shown no intention of allowing negotiations about these matters (with the
exception of the abortive Camp David-Taba episode, they haven't been allowed
at any time in the past 15 years). Sharon's plans are predicated on no
negotiations with the Palestinians, because any Palestinian negotiators,
however feeble, would object to Sharon's stated aim of establishing
permanent Israeli control over most of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Without a ceasefire, nothing can move forward. Egypt has tried for months to
bring one about, but it is still unclear whether Israel will agree to halt
its assassinations, incursions and airstrikes; and equally unclear whether
armed Palestinian factions will halt their attacks on civilians inside
Israel, or on soldiers and settlers in the Occupied Territories. This is one
of the first challenges Mahmoud Abbas faces, and he cannot meet it on his
own. Co-operation must come from his own Fatah movement, which sponsors the
al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, from other Palestinian groups, from Israel, and
from the United States and Egypt. If there isn't a ceasefire, binding on
both sides, Abbas's second term in power will be no more successful than his
first, when Arafat made and unmade him as prime minister.
The Palestinians face a second challenge, which is also an opportunity: to
bring about Palestinian national reconciliation on the basis of an agreement
among the main factions. To be successful, this must involve power-sharing
with Hamas and other opposition groups, and it isn't at all clear how this
would work. Fatah has never shared power; and it is impossible to determine
the limits of the ambitions of Hamas, or to know whether the militant groups
will be prepared to renounce violence, even for a fixed period. Yet to be
effective, negotiations will have to take place on the basis of a national
consensus on a halt to violence that is respected and, if necessary,
enforced. What must be avoided at all costs is a continuation of the
situation in which a violent minority is dragging the entire Palestinian
people into confrontation with Israel. And if negotiations with Israel were
to fail, unity between the groups would be all the more important.
For the first time in years, Palestinians have had the opportunity of
deciding between violence and negotiation, of determining what limits to put
on violence, whether violence has achieved anything, what negotiations have
achieved, and what they might be able to achieve. The country is deeply
ambivalent about these questions. The latest polls show that most people
believe the intifada has harmed their cause and want to give negotiations
another chance, but a majority also believes, paradoxically, that the
violence of the second intifada forced Israel to decide to withdraw from the
Gaza Strip. (Polls show that Israelis are similarly ambivalent about their
options in relation to the Palestinians.)
There are those who believe that Israel has suffered more than the
Palestinians from the violence of the past four years. Such illusions are
unhelpful. Given that more than three times as many Palestinians as Israelis
have been killed in that time, it is hard to understand how Palestinian
apostles of violence (as well as partisans of Israel) can make such a claim.
In the past year, after three years of heavy casualties and economic
stagnation, the number of Israelis killed has fallen sharply, and the
Israeli economy has grown at a rate of 3.4 per cent. Conversely, Palestinian
casualties are almost as heavy as they have been at any time since the
intifada began, and the Palestinian economy is in ruins. For nearly two
years now, majorities in both societies have been convinced that they cannot
prevail by violence. Many of the hard men who lead the Israeli military and
the Palestinian armed factions pay no heed to this view.
The decision to end the violence is not just up to the Palestinians: the
initiative is often in Israeli hands, and the desire to deliver the last
blow, to show dominance, to achieve unequivocal victory, dies hard among
military men. But since Arafat's death, the leaders of Palestinian militant
factions have made a series of statements suggesting that they realise it is
time to try a new tack. How capable they are of sticking to it if provoked
by Israel is questionable, however, just as it's questionable whether any
external power is willing to restrain Israel, even in the face of
Palestinian provocation. Meanwhile, in the absence of a ceasefire, and with
intense political jockeying inside the PA, as well as between the PA and its
rivals, violence continues.
It is time for the Palestinians to establish solid democratic institutions.
That they have a powerful desire for democracy was demonstrated in the
recent municipal and presidential elections. But elections, crucial though
they are to opening up the stale ranks of a leadership dominated by
returnees, aren't the only issue. It is essential for the Palestinians to
appeal directly to American and Israeli public opinion on the basis of a
clear programme that is the product of democratic decision-making. They have
never done this before, but they must if they are ever to succeed.
If the PA is to deliver desperately needed social and other services, it
must be overhauled, to root out not just corruption, but also featherbedding
and nepotism. This must be done delicately - jobs for the boys is as sacred
a principle of political life in Ramallah and Gaza as it is in Chicago and
New York. The security services, too, must be reorganised and retrained,
though there is a potential danger here: a unified and competent security
apparatus may prove a ready instrument for the Bonapartist ambitions of some
officer, a pattern all too familiar in the Arab world. The security services
must provide security first and foremost for the Palestinian people,
something they have so far signally failed to do.
Yet even if a binding, mutual ceasefire can be arranged, if a Palestinian
national pact involving power-sharing and a clear agreement on strategy,
including an end to the use of violence, is worked out, if municipal and
legislative elections are held successfully, and if the PA and its security
services are reformed, there will be further challenges. For even if Israel
responds with reciprocal measures, such as withdrawing its troops, removing
roadblocks and checkpoints, releasing prisoners, and co-ordinating its Gaza
Strip pullback with the Palestinians, the question remains whether serious
final status negotiations will take place.
Even if Bush and Sharon do agree to such negotiations, there will be no
resolution if Sharon's plan for Israel to retain permanent control of
between 40 and 60 per cent of the West Bank and East Jerusalem is the bottom
line rather than an opening gambit. Having accepted that 78 per cent of
Mandate Palestine is irrevocably part of Israel, no Palestinian leader could
win majority support for agreeing to cede any of the remaining 22 per cent.
Something that was barely noticed in the Western rejoicing over the
flowering of Palestinian democracy during Abbas's election was his pledge to
submit any final status agreement to a plebiscite of Palestinians inside and
outside their homeland. Will we now be told that too much democracy is a bad
thing? What is certain is that a network of Bantustans linked by tunnels and
bridges, as imagined by some Israeli planners, will never be accepted as
constituting a Palestinian 'state', even temporarily.
It may well be that failure to agree this time round on a solution based on
the 1949-67 armistice lines will mark the end of the two-state approach.
This approach has disadvantages, not least of them that it is unfair that
the Palestinians should be obliged to accept less than a quarter of their
homeland. Another is the difficulty of returning to the 1967 lines after 38
years of settlement building, and the legal and logistical integration of
more than 400,000 settlers into Israel. Not to speak of the vexed issues of
refugees and Jerusalem. But this approach has one distinct advantage:
majorities of both peoples seem to want national states in which they
predominate, and fair or not, this is the only internationally recognised
basis for such a solution.
If there is no agreement along these lines in the near future, and if the
inexorable incorporation of the West Bank, or most of it, into Israel
continues (and even if Israel does evacuate the Gaza Strip), we will all
have to accept the reality of a sovereign Israeli-dominated entity ruling
uneasily over two peoples between the Mediterranean and the Jordan. This
entity would eventually have a Palestinian majority, and would continue to
have millions of discontented Palestinians outside its frontiers. Most
Palestinians (and most Israelis) do not want such an outcome. Should it come
to pass, the Palestinians would have to decide how to achieve their national
aspirations under a single sovereignty dominated for the foreseeable future
by their historic adversary. The difficulty of this task seems to be
apparent to most Palestinians, which may be why they have overcome their
bitter memories of the Oslo era, and grudgingly given Mahmoud Abbas a last
chance. Will the bleak future that otherwise faces everyone concerned,
including the Israelis, impel them to do everything possible to avoid it?
===
Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies in the
department of history and director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia.
Resurrecting Empire appeared last year.
LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS
LRB | Vol. 27 No. 3 dated 3 February 2005 | Rashid Khalidi
After Arafat
Rashid Khalidi
The autumn of the patriarch is finally over. These are difficult times for
the Palestinians, and Yasser Arafat's death presents them with a daunting
challenge. The first of their difficulties is the long-standing
fragmentation of the Palestinian people. Nearly five million still live in
some part of what was once Mandate Palestine, and can be divided into four
distinct groups. More than a million have been citizens of Israel since
1948. Over 3.5 million, in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, are
in their 38th year of military occupation, hermetically sealed off from one
another. Each of the four groups - those with Israeli citizenship, 250,000
Arab Jerusalemites, more than two million West Bankers and 1.3 million
Gazans - is subject to different laws; the last two face stringent
restrictions on their movements.
A further five million Palestinians (there are no reliable figures) live
outside Palestine, some of them in the utter misery of the refugee camps in
Lebanon, others in widely differing conditions in different Arab countries,
Europe and the US. The Palestinians of the diaspora possess a variety of
passports, laisser-passers and refugee documents, and some also face
restrictions on their movements. The largest single group, perhaps three
million, carry Jordanian passports. One thing they all have in common is
that they are barred from living in any part of their ancestral homeland.
The second difficulty the Palestinians face is the extraordinarily close
relationship between the Sharon government and the Bush administration. Some
of the same consultants work for American and Israeli political candidates,
and some funders bankroll both Israeli and American political movements,
charities and foundations. The economies of the two countries are
intertwined: the incoming head of the Israeli Central Bank is an American,
and a huge amount of capital flows from the US to Israel, including $2
billion a year in military assistance. Economic aid, loans, investment,
charity donations and other transfers amount to as much as 10 per cent of
Israel's $120 billion GDP. Israeli writers, artists and academics commute to
and from the US; tens of thousands of Israelis live in and visit the United
States, and there are similar numbers of Americans in Israel.
The connection between Bush and Sharon goes back to Bush's first visit to
Israel, in 1998, one of the three trips abroad he made before he became
president; Sharon showed him the Occupied Territories from a helicopter. The
old general seems to have made a powerful impression on the Texas governor:
ideological factors alone can't explain a closeness sealed by ten meetings
between the two men during Bush's first term as president. Tony Blair may
see Bush just as often, but he doesn't have the same influence over him. The
military and political consequences of their collaboration, which was
cemented after 9/11 and during the second intifada, have been devastating
for the Palestinians. With American approval, Israel reoccupied the small
areas of the West Bank it had evacuated under the 1993 Oslo Accords, turned
Palestinian towns into an archipelago of open-air prison camps, and wrecked
the fragile Palestinian economy. The administrative apparatus of the
Palestinian Authority was destroyed, police stations and government offices
were demolished, and official records looted.
Last April Bush stated that Israel would have the right to annex the
considerable areas of the West Bank where the largest of its illegal
settlements are located: a significant departure from previous American
policy, which had always maintained that these settlements were illegal, and
an 'obstacle to peace'. At one stroke, the Bush administration had discarded
one of the core principles of Security Council Resolution 242, the
internationally recognised basis for Arab-Israeli peace negotiations - viz.
the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force. The
settlements were now described by the president as 'realities' that would
have to be taken into account in any agreement. Dealing exclusively with the
Israeli government, the US behaved as if the Palestinians had neither
interests nor rights in these matters - as if they didn't exist. Sharon's
plan for a unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip (while maintaining
complete control of the region from outside), in order to retain indefinite
control of most of the West Bank, is grounded in these Bush-Sharon
understandings.
The third difficulty the Palestinians have to contend with is the absence of
an effective political structure which would enable them to further their
aims as a people, and therefore of an effective strategy for ending the
occupation and achieving self-determination. This is a long-standing
weakness, as Edward Said often argued in these pages. It dates back to the
Mandate era, when the Palestinians, unlike many other Arab national
movements of the same period, failed to build up the centralised
institutions of a para-state, or to take control of the institutions of the
colonial state. Partly in consequence, they remained weak and divided.
Although they had a relatively strong sense of national identity, they were
denied most of the attributes of statehood by the British Mandate
authorities, and failed to develop them on their own. This crucial failing
contributed to their resounding defeat between 29 November 1947, when UN
General Assembly Resolution 181 mandated partition of the country, and 15
May 1948, when Israel was established, troops from four Arab armies entered
the country, and the second phase of the war over Palestine began. In less
than six months, two of the three largest Palestinian cities, Jaffa and
Haifa, fell to the Zionists, as did scores of villages and towns; about half
of the 750,000 Palestinians who became refugees during the war were forced
from their homes.
In 1964, after the 'lost decade' of the 1950s, the PLO was created by the
Arab governments as a way of controlling the Palestinians. Taken over by the
Palestinians themselves in 1968, the PLO eventually established a para-state
structure, with the equivalent of ministries carrying out financial,
educational, medical and social tasks. It was hampered by having to do this
in exile, in Jordan, Lebanon and elsewhere, and often clashed with the
governments of the host countries. The institutions it created were neither
very democratic nor very efficient, but many of the PLO cadres who had run
them were imported into the Occupied Territories after the 1993 Oslo Accords
(most of the lower-ranking employees came from the Occupied Territories).
The Palestinian Authority, when it came into existence in 1994, was expected
to do the impossible, to function even though sovereignty was denied it by
the Accords and subsequent agreements with Israel. Israel retained ultimate
security control over the Occupied Territories; while the PA had only
partial control over small parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Building
stable, smoothly functioning institutions in such a situation would have
been exceedingly difficult for even the most disciplined, competent and
incorruptible political movement.
It's true that the PLO had managed to run some of the structures of a
para-state in Lebanon relatively effectively during the 15 years before its
expulsion from Beirut in 1982, but cronyism, excessive centralisation,
capriciousness, corruption and an inability to impose discipline on its
various factions seriously marred its performance. This led to the
alienation of the great majority of the Lebanese from the PLO and the
Palestinians, which cost them dear in 1982 and afterwards. Moreover, the
cadres who had run these institutions in Lebanon spent the dozen or so years
after leaving Beirut in enforced idleness in various Arab countries.
Whatever good qualities they had possessed in the 1970s had been eroded by
the time they returned to Palestine in the mid-1990s, older, greyer and
thicker, to take up the reins of power, and finally enjoy its perquisites.
It was little wonder that the PA exhibited in magnified form the many flaws
of the PLO's para-state in Lebanon.
A final set of problems has included the monopolisation of real power in the
PA by Fatah, repeating a pattern formed by the PLO in Beirut. This has
combined with the PA's inability to co-opt or incorporate Hamas and its
other Islamist rival, Islamic Jihad, as Fatah had earlier succeeded in doing
with secular rivals such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine. By 2000, moreover, Palestinian public opinion had increasingly
come to see the Oslo approach as a failure: it had failed to end the
occupation, halt the expansion of Israeli settlements, ease the growing
Israeli restrictions on the movement of Palestinians, or reverse the decline
of the Palestinian economy. By this point the PA was in grave trouble.
The situation came to a head with the outbreak of the second intifada in
September 2000, triggered by Sharon's provocative visit to the Haram
al-Sharif/Temple Mount. Several weeks of extreme Israeli repression of
largely unarmed but violent demonstrations, with scores of Palestinians
killed and wounded, was followed by an increase in the use of weapons on the
part of the Palestinians, followed by intensified repression. Thereafter,
Hamas and Islamic Jihad began to up the ante on Fatah and the PA, launching
spectacular suicide attacks on Israeli civilians. Fatah's al-Aqsa Martyrs'
Brigades soon took the same disastrous path. These militant groups, and the
politicians with whom they were connected, played into the hands of the
Israeli army, which in spring 2002 carried out long-standing plans for the
reoccupation of Palestinian towns and cities, causing massive destruction,
and shattering the PA infrastructure, before turning its attention to the
leadership and infrastructure of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
A last critical problem has been the failure of the PA to establish a
separation of powers between the executive, legislative and judiciary
branches, a difficult task for any national movement moving from
semi-clandestinity into the open, and from liberation to state-building.
Many states that gained full independence decades ago have not yet succeeded
fully in this. For a people whose land was still under occupation, it was
particularly hard. But while the PA initially established a reasonable level
of law and order, at least before the intifada began, the proliferation of
squabbling security services, and the bribery, featherbedding, corruption
and favouritism which were rife in the PA, contributed significantly to the
alienation of public opinion, as well as harming investment and offending
donors. Vital social services languished (or were provided by Hamas or
NGOs), while the PA lavished money on cars, apartments and travel for its
senior cadres.
Equally serious was the failure of the Palestinian Legislative Council,
elected in January 1996 at the same time as Arafat was elected president of
the PA, to impose itself on the executive branch, as Arafat retained control
in all important spheres. This was a moment when change had been possible,
and their failure to take advantage of it haunted the Palestinians even
before Israeli troops re-entered their cities and towns in 2002, shattering
the pretence that the PA had any real authority. It haunts them still.
It became customary for the media, and the American media in particular, to
ascribe every decision, every characteristic of Palestinian politics, to
Arafat himself. This wasn't altogether inappropriate: not only did Arafat
deserve much of the credit for reviving the Palestinian cause after the
debacle of 1948, he was also an easily caricatured and larger-than-life
figure who did not arouse sympathy in most Western observers - and he lent
himself to this personalisation. In some measure he even encouraged it. He
revelled in attention, was jealous of rivals, and worked ceaselessly to keep
all the strings controlling Palestinian politics in his own hands. As the
pre-eminent and founding leader of Fatah, as the chairman since 1969 of the
PLO Executive Committee, and as the elected president of the PA, there is no
question that he towered over Palestinian politics for most of the last
forty years.
While Arafat was largely responsible for the successes and many failings of
Fatah, the PLO and the PA, the failure of the Palestinian polity from the
Mandate period onwards to develop most of the attributes of statehood was
more structural than anything else. Nor should he alone be blamed for the
many strategic errors made by the PLO leadership over the decades. They
include the constant equivocation about a two-state solution, the failure to
put a stop to armed violence long after violence had supposedly been
conclusively renounced; the egregious failure to impose internal discipline;
siding with Saddam Hussein after the invasion of Kuwait in 1990; and
accepting the 1993 Oslo Accords and the interim accords that followed it
with all their flaws. Many of these gross strategic blunders grew out of
collective decision-making by the entire Fatah-PLO-PA leadership.
On the other hand, the assassinations of Fatah leaders by Israel and Arab
states played their part in all this. Particularly after the killings in
Tunis of Arafat's closest collaborators, Abu Jihad in 1988 and Abu Iyyad in
1991, there remained virtually no one who could stand up to the Old Man,
'al-Khityar'. Although he was always first among equals, before the
assassinations Arafat had at times been obliged to defer to his comrades,
particularly on the rare occasions when they succeeded in banding together
to oppose him. Several founding leaders of Fatah even had their own
organisational bases and sources of support. They could defy Arafat
(although given his temper and autocratic tendencies they were loath to do
so), and in consequence from the 1960s until the early 1980s there were
serious internal and public deliberations about strategy within Fatah and
the PLO. One example was the debate over whether to pursue reconciliation
with the Hashemite regime - the 'Jordanian option' - as a way of forging
closer links with the Occupied Territories. In the past decade and a half,
by contrast, Arafat became increasingly inclined to make most decisions
himself, surrounded by a coterie of yes-men.
His brush with death in an air crash in the Libyan desert in 1992 made
dealing with him more difficult. His memory, always one of his most powerful
weapons, wasn't what it had been. In recent years, his alertness appeared to
vary from day to day. He had lived a hard, dangerous life for five decades,
but seemed to age little until his late seventies, when his health visibly
declined. His increasing feebleness was more apparent after the Israeli army
immured him in the wreckage of his headquarters in the spring of 2002. The
elected leader of the Palestinians (technically, his term as president ran
out in 2000) was now immobilised and virtually imprisoned. Increasingly
isolated from reality, largely cut off from his own people, receiving only a
few visitors compared to the many who had flocked to see him in Beirut and
Tunis, and in Gaza and Ramallah before 2002, Arafat was even more dependent
on a tight circle of aides.
Even in infirmity, however, Arafat was a more formidable politician than his
colleagues Mahmoud Abbas and Ahmed Qurei, both of whom, as successive prime
ministers in 2003, failed to impose themselves against his will. He then
showed himself more able than men half his age, rapidly crushing an open
challenge to his authority in the summer of 2004 by Muhammad Dahlan, the
former chief of Preventive Security in Gaza (one of a dozen competing PA
security services created by Arafat). But his isolation and increasing loss
of focus left the Palestinian polity without any recognisable strategy at a
time of supreme crisis, as the intifada ground on with devastating effects.
Not surprisingly, his death was met with both sadness and relief among
Palestinians, a sense of anxiety at the disappearance of the only leader
most people had ever known, combined with a sense that change was imperative
after so many years of going nowhere. Resentment at a father figure who had
clung to power for too long was accompanied by deep insecurity at the
disappearance of the icon who symbolised the Palestinian cause. A mixture of
melancholy and mild elation prevailed at the funeral and in the days after
Arafat's burial, when the meaning of his absence began to sink in among
Palestinians everywhere. It was soon replaced by concern about the future,
mixed with cautious hopes for an improvement in the situation.
The opportunities facing the Palestinians are less enticing than they were
at first portrayed, when the West seemed so excited to find the Arafat era
at an end. Peace is not about to break out, if peace means a binding,
mutually satisfactory resolution of the 'final status' issues in dispute
between Israel and the Palestinians: Jerusalem, refugees, sovereignty,
recognised borders, settlements and water. The reason is simple: the two
most powerful Middle Eastern actors, the United States and Israel, have
shown no intention of allowing negotiations about these matters (with the
exception of the abortive Camp David-Taba episode, they haven't been allowed
at any time in the past 15 years). Sharon's plans are predicated on no
negotiations with the Palestinians, because any Palestinian negotiators,
however feeble, would object to Sharon's stated aim of establishing
permanent Israeli control over most of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Without a ceasefire, nothing can move forward. Egypt has tried for months to
bring one about, but it is still unclear whether Israel will agree to halt
its assassinations, incursions and airstrikes; and equally unclear whether
armed Palestinian factions will halt their attacks on civilians inside
Israel, or on soldiers and settlers in the Occupied Territories. This is one
of the first challenges Mahmoud Abbas faces, and he cannot meet it on his
own. Co-operation must come from his own Fatah movement, which sponsors the
al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, from other Palestinian groups, from Israel, and
from the United States and Egypt. If there isn't a ceasefire, binding on
both sides, Abbas's second term in power will be no more successful than his
first, when Arafat made and unmade him as prime minister.
The Palestinians face a second challenge, which is also an opportunity: to
bring about Palestinian national reconciliation on the basis of an agreement
among the main factions. To be successful, this must involve power-sharing
with Hamas and other opposition groups, and it isn't at all clear how this
would work. Fatah has never shared power; and it is impossible to determine
the limits of the ambitions of Hamas, or to know whether the militant groups
will be prepared to renounce violence, even for a fixed period. Yet to be
effective, negotiations will have to take place on the basis of a national
consensus on a halt to violence that is respected and, if necessary,
enforced. What must be avoided at all costs is a continuation of the
situation in which a violent minority is dragging the entire Palestinian
people into confrontation with Israel. And if negotiations with Israel were
to fail, unity between the groups would be all the more important.
For the first time in years, Palestinians have had the opportunity of
deciding between violence and negotiation, of determining what limits to put
on violence, whether violence has achieved anything, what negotiations have
achieved, and what they might be able to achieve. The country is deeply
ambivalent about these questions. The latest polls show that most people
believe the intifada has harmed their cause and want to give negotiations
another chance, but a majority also believes, paradoxically, that the
violence of the second intifada forced Israel to decide to withdraw from the
Gaza Strip. (Polls show that Israelis are similarly ambivalent about their
options in relation to the Palestinians.)
There are those who believe that Israel has suffered more than the
Palestinians from the violence of the past four years. Such illusions are
unhelpful. Given that more than three times as many Palestinians as Israelis
have been killed in that time, it is hard to understand how Palestinian
apostles of violence (as well as partisans of Israel) can make such a claim.
In the past year, after three years of heavy casualties and economic
stagnation, the number of Israelis killed has fallen sharply, and the
Israeli economy has grown at a rate of 3.4 per cent. Conversely, Palestinian
casualties are almost as heavy as they have been at any time since the
intifada began, and the Palestinian economy is in ruins. For nearly two
years now, majorities in both societies have been convinced that they cannot
prevail by violence. Many of the hard men who lead the Israeli military and
the Palestinian armed factions pay no heed to this view.
The decision to end the violence is not just up to the Palestinians: the
initiative is often in Israeli hands, and the desire to deliver the last
blow, to show dominance, to achieve unequivocal victory, dies hard among
military men. But since Arafat's death, the leaders of Palestinian militant
factions have made a series of statements suggesting that they realise it is
time to try a new tack. How capable they are of sticking to it if provoked
by Israel is questionable, however, just as it's questionable whether any
external power is willing to restrain Israel, even in the face of
Palestinian provocation. Meanwhile, in the absence of a ceasefire, and with
intense political jockeying inside the PA, as well as between the PA and its
rivals, violence continues.
It is time for the Palestinians to establish solid democratic institutions.
That they have a powerful desire for democracy was demonstrated in the
recent municipal and presidential elections. But elections, crucial though
they are to opening up the stale ranks of a leadership dominated by
returnees, aren't the only issue. It is essential for the Palestinians to
appeal directly to American and Israeli public opinion on the basis of a
clear programme that is the product of democratic decision-making. They have
never done this before, but they must if they are ever to succeed.
If the PA is to deliver desperately needed social and other services, it
must be overhauled, to root out not just corruption, but also featherbedding
and nepotism. This must be done delicately - jobs for the boys is as sacred
a principle of political life in Ramallah and Gaza as it is in Chicago and
New York. The security services, too, must be reorganised and retrained,
though there is a potential danger here: a unified and competent security
apparatus may prove a ready instrument for the Bonapartist ambitions of some
officer, a pattern all too familiar in the Arab world. The security services
must provide security first and foremost for the Palestinian people,
something they have so far signally failed to do.
Yet even if a binding, mutual ceasefire can be arranged, if a Palestinian
national pact involving power-sharing and a clear agreement on strategy,
including an end to the use of violence, is worked out, if municipal and
legislative elections are held successfully, and if the PA and its security
services are reformed, there will be further challenges. For even if Israel
responds with reciprocal measures, such as withdrawing its troops, removing
roadblocks and checkpoints, releasing prisoners, and co-ordinating its Gaza
Strip pullback with the Palestinians, the question remains whether serious
final status negotiations will take place.
Even if Bush and Sharon do agree to such negotiations, there will be no
resolution if Sharon's plan for Israel to retain permanent control of
between 40 and 60 per cent of the West Bank and East Jerusalem is the bottom
line rather than an opening gambit. Having accepted that 78 per cent of
Mandate Palestine is irrevocably part of Israel, no Palestinian leader could
win majority support for agreeing to cede any of the remaining 22 per cent.
Something that was barely noticed in the Western rejoicing over the
flowering of Palestinian democracy during Abbas's election was his pledge to
submit any final status agreement to a plebiscite of Palestinians inside and
outside their homeland. Will we now be told that too much democracy is a bad
thing? What is certain is that a network of Bantustans linked by tunnels and
bridges, as imagined by some Israeli planners, will never be accepted as
constituting a Palestinian 'state', even temporarily.
It may well be that failure to agree this time round on a solution based on
the 1949-67 armistice lines will mark the end of the two-state approach.
This approach has disadvantages, not least of them that it is unfair that
the Palestinians should be obliged to accept less than a quarter of their
homeland. Another is the difficulty of returning to the 1967 lines after 38
years of settlement building, and the legal and logistical integration of
more than 400,000 settlers into Israel. Not to speak of the vexed issues of
refugees and Jerusalem. But this approach has one distinct advantage:
majorities of both peoples seem to want national states in which they
predominate, and fair or not, this is the only internationally recognised
basis for such a solution.
If there is no agreement along these lines in the near future, and if the
inexorable incorporation of the West Bank, or most of it, into Israel
continues (and even if Israel does evacuate the Gaza Strip), we will all
have to accept the reality of a sovereign Israeli-dominated entity ruling
uneasily over two peoples between the Mediterranean and the Jordan. This
entity would eventually have a Palestinian majority, and would continue to
have millions of discontented Palestinians outside its frontiers. Most
Palestinians (and most Israelis) do not want such an outcome. Should it come
to pass, the Palestinians would have to decide how to achieve their national
aspirations under a single sovereignty dominated for the foreseeable future
by their historic adversary. The difficulty of this task seems to be
apparent to most Palestinians, which may be why they have overcome their
bitter memories of the Oslo era, and grudgingly given Mahmoud Abbas a last
chance. Will the bleak future that otherwise faces everyone concerned,
including the Israelis, impel them to do everything possible to avoid it?
===
Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies in the
department of history and director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia.
Resurrecting Empire appeared last year.
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