A new Palestinian leadership?

It probably seems like a bad time to be discussing this but here's an article by Rashid Khalidi in the latest London Review of Books (subscritpion required) examining the leadership of the Palestinians.

It is time – it has long been time – for a more intelligent form of opposition on the part of the Palestinians, as well as those who understand both the moral cost of the present policies, and the long-term damage they will do not only to the Palestinians but also to America, Europe and Israel. However, for this to happen major changes will be necessary. The leaders of Hamas knew when they took part in the PLC elections that the functioning of the Palestinian Authority was hedged around with conditions and limitations. They knew in particular that the very existence of the PA was predicated on acceptance of the state of Israel and the two-state solution, and on a renunciation of violence. Indeed, this was the reason hardliners in the Hamas political bureau in Damascus – men such as Khalid Mash’al and Maussa Abu Marzouq – were opposed to Hamas’s participation in the elections. They were overruled by the rest of the movement, led by inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

When Hamas unexpectedly won a large majority in the January elections, and with it a measure of executive power derived from its control of the PA premiership and cabinet, its leadership tried to do the impossible. They tried to maintain doctrinal purity – they stuck to their non-recognition of Israel, rejection of a two-state solution, and retention of the option of armed resistance – while, at the same time, expecting continued financial aid from international donors and Arab parties whose precondition for support of the PA is adherence to the opposite positions, which have long since been accepted by Fatah and the PLO.

This conundrum, combined with popular pressure to resolve the crisis caused by the financial blockade, produced an interesting set of developments inside Hamas. Less ideological leaders such as Ismail Haniya began to repeat and expand on ideas put forward in the past by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, Ismail Abu-Shanab and other Hamas leaders whom Israel later assassinated: ideas about a long-term ceasefire and about coexistence between Israel and a Palestinian state within the 1967 boundaries; they even talked about this as a permanent settlement (although there is little hope of Israel reciprocating with a full ceasefire, a halt to the violence of the occupation or a return to the 1967 borders). In so doing they were responding to public opinion. In February polls found that 66 per cent of Palestinians supported holding political negotiations with Israel; 58 per cent favoured a coalition government between Hamas and Fatah.[†] Hardline Hamas leaders such as Mash’al and the PA foreign minister, Mahmoud Zahhar, rejected these concessions, sticking much more closely to Hamas’s traditional position. A stand-off ensued between the apparently internally paralysed Hamas and Fatah, whose leaders appeared neither repentant about its failings nor reconciled to losing power.

Then something forced Hamas and Fatah to reconsider their course. On 11 May, the leader of the Hamas prisoners in Israeli jails, Abdel Khaliq al-Natsheh, signed a joint document with the leader of the Fatah detainees, Marwan Barghouti, and the leaders of other factions, which called for much the same things as Haniya had. The thousands of occupants of Israel’s gulag form well-disciplined and organised groups and have tended to take advantage of their incarceration by learning Hebrew and generally educating themselves. They also manage to maintain excellent communications with the outside world, all with the acquiescence of the Israeli prison authorities (who in this way buy peace with the many long-term Palestinian detainees). The document raised the intriguing possibility of a Hamas government that could accept the Beirut summit resolutions of 2002, which held that Israel would be recognised by the Arab world as a whole if it withdrew from the entirety of the Occupied Territories. It put the hawks inside Hamas on the defensive, and weakened the unrepentant Fatah hardliners, who were intent on co-operating with outside forces to bring down the Hamas government and enable their own return to power.

But progress has required ideologically painful changes, for Hamas in particular. Hamas of course continued to argue, as did the joint document, that as long as the occupation continued, resistance was legitimate in principle (although the document argued that such resistance should be confined to the Occupied Territories, and should ideally not be violent). Hamas also insisted that Israel, which has been killing an average of 20 Palestinians a month for 16 months (according to Israeli figures, 45 Israelis were killed in 2005), must also cease its violence, and commit itself to ending the everyday terrors of the occupation. And of course it maintained that the Palestinians should not be asked to recognise the Israeli state until Israel recognised a Palestinian state within the 1967 frontiers. Far though this was from the Israeli-American position, which basically demands that Hamas turn itself into Fatah, it was infinitely further from the language of the Hamas Charter, which calls apocalyptically for an Islamic Palestine in place of Israel in overtly anti-semitic tones. The prisoners’ document was an implicit rebuke to the tactic pioneered by Hamas, but also used by other Palestinian groups, of carrying out suicide bombings against civilians inside Israel. The change is far more significant than any shift made by the Israelis.

In order for the Palestinians to make progress, Fatah will also have to make some drastic changes. Instead of privately asking foreigners to help bring down an elected government and reinstate Fatah, the party must accept that it needs to undergo radical reform. Although it still controls many of the levers of power in the PA, and fully controls the PLO, it is afflicted by infighting, and is in danger of slipping into irrelevance. If it is once again to become a vehicle for Palestinian national aspirations instead of a career ladder – and a conduit for the designs of foreign powers – it must refashion itself. It must purge its corrupt, discredited and unpopular leadership and put the most egregious offenders on trial. Fatah’s leadership hasn’t changed in years, and has resisted calling a conference that would bring such change about. Many of its top leaders are known to have feathered their nests at the expense of ordinary Palestinians: just look at their gleaming, garish villas in Ramallah and Gaza. Agreeing to share power with Hamas – the prisoners’ document calls for a national unity government – would go some way to restoring its support.

A coalition might also be thought to represent enough of an evolution in the Hamas position for the PA once again to become acceptable to most of the outside world. Rather than move in this direction, however, Abbas proposes to hold a referendum on the prisoners’ document in July unless Hamas approves it. This has met with different reactions from different Hamas leaders: Mash’al and some of those in Damascus oppose the referendum, and others inside Palestine refuse to reject it. If sowing differences was Abbas’s objective, he may well have succeeded, at least in the short term. But even if his referendum goes ahead it is hard to see how he can proceed with negotiations with Israel (assuming that the Olmert government deigns to negotiate seriously) without first coming to some agreement with Hamas.

Escape from the trap in which the Palestinian people currently find themselves requires movement from both camps. This will not happen unless the leaders of Hamas state their willingness to move away from the Sturm und Drang of their charter, thereby making it possible to disarm and divide the international coalition arrayed against the Palestinian people. It will not happen unless Fatah begins to see that the Palestinian national interest means that it has to come to terms with other forces in society. For too many years Fatah has been content to identify the interests of Palestinians with the interests of Fatah. If this doesn’t change, the Palestinians have no chance of confronting the external and internal pressures that threaten to engulf them. Some political and economic gains have been made over the past decade: it would be unfortunate if they were to be lost and a catastrophe if the entire society were to break down.

This article was written before the current Israeli onslaught against Gaza, and now Lebanon, and so it doesn't cover the fact that Israeli actions have repaired the divisiveness that the writer condemns, but it does include some useful historical (and current) information and it also ends on a surprisingly optimistic note:

The Palestinians have shown a resilience beyond the imagination of their antagonists, whether Israeli and American in the present, or British, Zionist and Arab in the past. It would be premature to assume that the current crisis, however grave, will mark the final defeat of Palestinian national aspirations. But Palestinian society needs and deserves better and more coherent leadership than it has had for most of the past century.

Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia, is the author of the forthcoming The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood.