Holy cow! Never mind Kadima. The Palestinians just had their own Big Bang…
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Fatah Splits, With Marwan Barghouti and Younger Leaders Forming New Party
Published by Andrew Schamess December 15, 2005
in Palestinian Politics, Marwan Barghouti, Politics and All Posts.
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Outside the occupied territories, everyone has something to say about the Palestinian elections. The New York Times (”it isn’t news until we say it’s news”) has finally deigned to do a serious story on Marwan Barghouti, the jailed Palestinian activist who just re-entered the presidential race. Reporter Steve Erlanger declares that Barghouti is “widely considered to be among the best of his generation: charming, articulate and intelligent” (gosh, thanks!), and then presents several interesting interviews with Israelis who know him.
Barghouti was Arafat’s designee to lead the Intifada. This has been pretty well known all along. His official position has been that
- he recognizes Israel,
- supports a two-state solution,
- favors negotiations with Israel,
- but has been and is willing to use militant tactics if negotiations fail.
- With regard to targets, he considers settlements in Palestinian territory to be fair game, but opposes attacks inside the Green Line.
- He has also been a strong spokesman against corruption within the Palestinian Authority, and was willing to challenge the leadership on this issue.
Israel has contended that he did, in fact, sponsor attacks inside Israel. The article sketches some of the internal pressures on Barghouti during the Intifada. In addition to fighting the Israeli occupation, he was trying to maintain Fatah’s standing among Palestinians against the growing popularity of Hamas, whose crusade of suicide bombings became the overriding symbol of Palestinian anger. As Ron Pundak (of the Peres Center for Peace) puts it, “he saw the tiger running, and sometimes he rode the tiger and sometimes the tiger rode him.” One result of this is that he has maintained legitimacy among younger Palestinians, have lived their whole lives with the daily dangers, injustices, humiliations and losses of the occupation.
Both Yossi Beilin and Ron Pundak say clearly in the article that Barghouti’s arrest was political. According to The Independent, “Israeli commentators among others have suggested that Mr Barghouti is the one credible figure who could command a just peace settlement because of his street popularity and might be released for just that purpose.”
The Fatah leadership, needless to say, is none too happy about Barghouti’s renewed candidacy. The BBC, in its weekly roundup of Arab-language editorials, has numerous quotes from Palestinian papers along the lines of:
In our opinion, his decision to run in the presidential elections… is cause for concern for Fatah and the Palestinian street’s unity. It will most probably hurt him and his status within Fatah, as well as outside it.
Uri Avnery, an Israeli peace activist who has a good line to senior Palestinian leaders, used his weekly column to make the case for Mahmoud Abbas:
It will not be easy for the wearers of suits to overcome the bearers of Kalashnikovs, who put their lives on the line every day. But the Palestinians will use their intelligence. They may well ask themselves: Abu Mazen wants credit? Let’s give him credit. He believes that he can extract concessions from Bush and Sharon? Why not give him a chance? Let him try to achieve an end to targeted liquidations, verification of killing, demolition of homes, degradation at the checkpoints. Let him try to get meaningful peace negotiations started. Let’s see if Bush offers him more than empty phrases.
The first time, when the Americans pressured the Palestinians into appointing Abu Mazen prime minister, he got nothing. Sharon stuck a knife in his back. Bush ignored him…
If he can really achieve something this time so much the better. If not, the Kalashnikovs will speak again.
The Western press tends to forget that there are eight other candidates running. Lawrence of Cyberia has an excellent profile of the other Barghouti, Mustafa. He is the President of the Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees, and one of the most interesting people in the race. This quote is from the Lawrence profile:
As a doctor, I would kill the patient if I treated only the symptoms of the disease and not the cause. Yet this is precisely what Sharon and his national coalition government are doing. The occupation is a cancer eating away at the lives of both peoples. We can “heal” both peoples by ending the occupation, not by expanding the occupation and killing the occupied people. We need reasonable people on both sides to have the courage to say yes — there is a way to peace, we need to move beyond the horrors of today toward a two-state solution. That can only happen, however, if the occupation is ended fully and unequivocally.
For most of us, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is an abstract. Those of us sympathetic to the Palestinian cause may commiserate, protest, visit, etc. but ultimately we return to lives where we have rights and freedom. However, there is now a generation of Palestinians for whom the opposite is true. Freedom is something they’ve heard about. They’ve lived their entire lives under a military occupation. To grow up at gunpoint, to navigate a landscape of barbed wire and concrete barricades, to be intimidated constantly by soldiers, to know death well, and never justice - these things must create a consciousness, an identity, that is unique.
The question of the moment is: who is going to speak for the generation of Palestinians raised in the occupied territories. Arafat, Abbas, and the current leadership of the PLO all migrated back to the territories after the signing of the Olso Accord in 1993. Prior to that, they had been living in relative comfort as expatriate rebels in Tunisia.
Marwan Barghouti has emerged as a popular leader representing this younger generation within the dominant Fatah party, despite the fact that he is currently imprisoned in Israel for his role in leading the Intifada. Last week, he announced as a candidate for Yassir Arafat’s post of President of the Palestinian Authority. However, he could only run as the Fatah candidate if nominated by the party’s Central Committee. The Committee consists of a small number of “old guard” leaders. Not suprisingly, they nominated Abbas - which was supposed to have ended Barghouti’s candidacy.
On Thursday, Barghouti made a suprise announcement that he would run an independent campaign for President. This threw everybody into a tizzy until he called it off late Thursday night. The best report on this, I thought, was on National Public Radio. The trade-off, it appears, was that Fatah will hold new elections for its ruling Revolutionary Council, for the first time in fifteen years. This will certainly give the younger generation greater power in the organization.
What will this mean for Palestinian policies? Firstly, the younger generation has pressed for more efficient government and an end to patronage and corruption in the Palestinian Authority. Secondly, those raised on armed struggle against an oppressive regime are not likely to lay down their arms and accept whatever compromise suits Israel’s purposes. As Barghouti put it, he stands for resistance and negotiation; Abbas for negotiation without resistance. A third possible consequence, if Barghouti and his constituents are successful, is that a reinvigorated Fatah will regain its credibility among disaffected Palestinians who have gravitated toward Hamas in the past decade.
I say, so far, so good. But Israel and the U.S. may be disappointed if we expect Abbas to lead the Palestinians happily down a path of passive acceptance of whatever sort of “homeland” Israel has in mind for them. It is worth remembering that we created the terrible conditions under which a million or so Palestinians have lived for nearly four decades. They have not struggled for so long to be a pliant element of someone else’s political strategy. Now is the time for us to take Palestinian demands seriously, and to deal with them fairly. It looks to me like they will get their house quickly in order in this much heralded post-Arafat era. The “opportunity” will then be ours to seize or lose.
A couple of days ago, Marwan Barghouti threw his hat into the ring as a candidate for President of the Palestinian Authority in the January 9 elections. According to The Boston Globe,
Many believe the popular Barghouti is the only leader capable of unifying squabbling Palestinian factions, reining in militants, and possibly restarting peace efforts with Israel. But Israel, however, is determined not to free Barghouti, who is serving multiple life terms for his role in the killings of four Israelis and a Greek monk. Barghouti also could represent the best hope for Arafat’s Fatah movement to beat down a challenge by the increasingly popular Islamic militant group Hamas, which is considering running a candidate.
Barghouti is associated with the Fatah party, and is considered to be one of the progenitors of the current Intifada. Sari Nusseibeh, who is currently president of Al-Quds University in East Jerusalem, offered an interesting historical reflection to The New Yorker back in 2002, when he was serving as PLO Commissioner for East Jerusalem. Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount in 2001 triggered a wave of Palestinian violence, which was fanned by radical Islamic groups outside the PLO. Arafat had failed to deliver Palestinian freedom with his two major peace initatives, the Oslo Agreement and th Barak summit.
As the violence accelerated, Arafat recognized that the leaders of Hamas and other Islamic radicals, with their calls for armed insurrection and the elimination of Israel from the map, were growing steadily more popular, while his own team, especially its members who were tied to the Oslo process, was seen as passé. And so Arafat began to encourage some of his younger lieutenants, including Marwan Barghouti and Jibril Rajoub, in the West Bank, and Muhammad Dahlan, in Gaza, to use the weaponry of the Palestinian police and security forces to create, in essence, a civilian army that could compete with Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Arafat’s Fatah organization now sponsored the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, which was soon claiming responsibility for more suicide-bombing attacks in Israel than even Hamas.
In January 2002, Barghouti sketched out his political philosophy in a Washington Post Op Ed. He made it clear that he endorsed a two-state solution:
Let us not forget, we Palestinians have recognized Israel on 78 percent of historic Palestine. It is Israel that refuses to acknowledge Palestine’s right to exist on the remaining 22 percent of land occupied in 1967.
On the issue of terrorist attacks, he stated:
…while I, and the Fatah movement to which I belong, strongly oppose attacks and the targeting of civilians inside Israel, our future neighbor, I reserve the right to protect myself, to resist the Israeli occupation of my country and to fight for my freedom. If Palestinians are expected to negotiate under occupation, then Israel must be expected to negotiate as we resist that occupation.
He ends the piece, rather dramatically, with a statement of his own commitment to peace:
For six years I languished as a political prisoner in an Israeli jail, where I was tortured, where I hung blindfolded as an Israeli beat my genitals with a stick. But since 1994, when I believed Israel was serious about ending its occupation, I have been a tireless advocate of a peace based on fairness and equality. I led delegations of Palestinians in meetings with Israeli parliamentarians to promote mutual understanding and cooperation. I still seek peaceful coexistence between the equal and independent countries of Israel and Palestine based on full withdrawal from Palestinian territories occupied in 1967 and a just resolution to the plight of Palestinian refugees pursuant to U.N. resolutions. I do not seek to destroy Israel but only to end its occupation of my country.
Barghouti was captured and jailed by Israel in April 2002, but this has not in any way diminished his standing among Palestinians. The Israeli right dismisses statements like those above as propaganda, citing (with varying accuracy) Barghouti’s involvement in all kinds of violence associated with the Intifada. But whether you credit his personal commitment or not, his statements are a pretty good representation of the nationalist Palestinian position. And to many Palestinians, I suspect, he seems like a better bet than Mahmoud Abbas to fight for their rights. Unlike Abbas, Barghouti grew up in the territories, and has a history as a fighter. Zachariah Zubeidi, head of al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in Jenin, told the Financial Times yesterday that
…he would accept Mr Abbas as a presidential candidate to head the Palestinian Authority if he were freely elected by Fatah. “But if he subsequently goes back on our unalterable demands - a state on pre-1967 lines, its capital in Jerusalem, the right of return of refugees and the release of prisoners - we will not recognise him.”
In fact, Barghouti will only run for President in a general election if chosen by the Fatah Central Committee - and they are much more likely to select Abbas. But his presence in the political arena highlights the question of what the Palestinians want from Israel, and what leverage they have to get it. Abbas is likely to eschew violence. Barghouti has endorsed it, as a means to an end. So, in practice, has Sharon. We should not villify Barghouti. We should work to create an environment in which the national aims of both peoples can be achieved without the use of force, much less the sort of terrible violence that has marked both sides of the conflict.
I’m trying to make some sense of the Palestinian political scene in Arafat’s wake. Here’s my first pass.
The Palestinian Liberation Organization is an umbrella organization representing Palestinian nationalist sentiment (i.e the goal of an independent Palestinian state). The dominant party within the PLO is al Fatah, which was founded by Yassir Arafat and others. Fatah and the PLO have their roots as seperate guerilla organizations, waging war on Israel. In 1969 the two more or less merged, and Arafat became PLO Chairman.
The current Palestinian governing structure came into being with the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993. The Oslo agreement provided for a transitional Palestinian state in the occupied territories, with an elected governing body, the Palestinian Authority. Arafat was elected President. He held this post while continuing as the Chairman of the PLO and the head of Fatah.
The Daily Star runs down who will be taking over the positions Arafat had occupied. There is also a useful article by Stephanie Nolan in Canada’s Globe and Mail.
Mahmoud Abbas, who helped Arafat to found Fatah, will become head of the PLO. He was a co-founder, with Arafat, of Fatah. Ahmed Qureia will remain the Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority. Abbas and Queria are old-guard leaders who have longstanding back-channel relationships with Israel, and who were involved in designing the Oslo accords. Farouq Qaddoumi will take over as Chairman of Fatah. Also part of the old-guard, he opposed the Oslo agreement, and remained in Tunis after the signing, when Arafat, Abbas and Quereia returned to the territories.
There is a good deal of sentiment in the territories favoring younger leaders, who were born and raised under the occupation. Two names come up frequently. Marwan Barghouti, currently in prison in Israel, has widespread popular support. According to Haaretz,
Prisoners and confidants expressed hope yesterday that Barghouti will be released, perhaps through understandings with Egypt, because only his return to the political arena can thwart the strengthening of Hamas. They believe that Barghouti is the only person who can provide Mahmoud Abbas with the legitimacy of grass-roots support.
Mohammed Dahlan sided with Abbas in his power struggle with Arafat when Abbas was Prime Minister. He has supported democratization of the PA. According to the Star,
…he remains an extremely powerful figure in the Gaza Strip, with many observers predicting that Arafat’s death will see him resume a formal position within the Palestinian Authority. Asked whether he was eyeing any particular political post, he said, “I see myself at the center of this collective work to lead to a transfer of power, in a peaceful, civil and dignifying way for the Palestinian people.”
The Palestinian Authority is supposed to control a unified police force, the Palestinian Security Service. Though reportedly 41,000 strong, the PSS under Arafat’s leadership was splintered, disorganized, and corrupt. Arafat also built up the Tanzim, the military wing of Fatah, as a countervailing force that was under his control, but existed outside the political structure of the PA. The Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, which carried out many of the suicide bombings and attacks of the recent Intifada, were drawn from the Tanzim. Arafat seems to have abetted the Brigades in various ways, but it is not clear how much direct control he had over their activities.
Daoud Kuttab, writing for Tom Paine.com, reports that the local paramilitary units,
…most of which are not controlled by the PNA’s central leadership, are more loyal to grassroots figures than to uniformed PNA officers. Local Fatah leaders like Marwan Barghouti have tremendous power over the nationalist armed units that are loosely organized under the title of the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades
…The power struggle that will ensue in the post-Arafat era will ultimately center on Al Fatah, the backbone of the PLO. A worldwide assembly chooses Fatah’s 100-member revolutionary council, which in turn elects a 20-member central committee, where most of the power struggle will take place. Many young street leaders will insist on an emergency meeting of the revolutionary council, or even holding the sixth general assembly (which would be the first since 1988). Events in recent months show that the Al Asqa Martyrs’ Brigades have forced even Arafat to take their demands into consideration.
In addition to the Palestinian nationalist factions and their militias, the other force to be contended with is the Islamist militant groups. Hamas, whose early growth was fostered by none other than Ariel Sharon (as a counterweight to the PLO), can best be described as a religious and social services agency with a military wing. It grew out of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian pan-Arabist movement that also inspired Al Quaeda. It runs schools and hospitals in the occupied territories. Its widespread presence as a health and welfare organization facilitates spreading Islamist religious ideals and recruiting volunteers for suicide bombings and military operations. Hamas is ideologically opposed to both Israel and the PLO. Its goal is an Islamic state in all of the territory of British Palestine, which includes the West Bank, Gaza and Israel proper. Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas, was said to be a moderate and to favor compromise with Israel, but he was assasinated by Israel this past March. Islamic Jihad is a militant group allied with Hamas, and sharing a similar ideology; but focused more exclusively on terrorist activities.
Whether, and how, the militant groups will enter the political process - and how this will affect relations between the PA and Israel - are open questions. I will be posting a companion piece soon on Israel’s approach to the new Palestinian government.
