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News Analysis
Palestine: New leader, old realities

From Graham Usher in Ramallah

January 19th, 2005 --
We extend our hands to our neighbours. We are ready for peace, peace based on justice. We hope that their response will be positive,” said Mahmud Abbas (Abu Mazen) the day after his election as Palestinian Authority president. The wish was sincere. But the morning after was already colder than the night before.

Exit polls had shown Abbas winning 70% of the vote with a 70% turn-out, shovelling motorcades of his Fatah movement into Ramallah amid fusillades of celebratory gunfire. In fact, Abbas won 62% of the vote with a 50% turn-out — a rate of abstention the Islamist Hamas movement was swift to claim as obedience to its call to boycott the presidential poll (MEI 740).

This, too, was hubris. The low vote was due rather to the common Palestinian view that, without a serious challenger (like, for example, Marwan Barghuthi), Abbas was a shoo-in and the even deeper conviction that the presidential elections meant little and would change even less.

Nor were Abbas’ reformist credentials burnished by the contest. Fearing a low turn-out (and Hamas’ boycott call), Fatah activists — including officers in the security forces — forced the PA’s Central Elections Commission (CEC) to extend voting hours and waive the legal requirement that all voters must be registered on the electoral roll. Instead, thousands of Palestinians (i.e. Fatah activists) were granted the latitude of voting solely on the basis of their ID cards and at any polling station.

The fraud did not affect the outcome (Abbas was over 40 percentage points clear of his nearest challenger, the independent pro-democracy campaigner Mustafa Barghuthi). But it did force the resignation of 46 CEC officials, including the head of the commission, Ammar Duwayk, who said he had been “personally threatened and pressured” by Abbas’ campaign team and that at least one officer from the PA’s General Intelligence Service had fired on his headquarters.

It also underscored how unwilling Fatah still is to move away from a politics of domination to a politics of power-sharing, auguring ill for the PA’s parliamentary elections, now scheduled to take place on 17 July.

Pressure

Palestinian scepticism is not the only challenge Abbas faces. The morning after the election, Hamas resumed its missile attacks on Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip and at Israeli towns (mainly Sederot) on its border. Two days later an Islamic Jihad cell killed a settler in an ambush on Gaza’s Morag settlement. And on 13 January a joint operation by Hamas, the cross-factional Popular Resistance Committees and Fatah’s Aqsa Martyrs Brigades killed six Israelis after storming the Karni commercial crossing point on the Israel-Gaza.

Hamas said the attacks were “a message to the Israeli enemy, definitely not to Abu Mazen”, while a Popular Resistance spokesman said they were “further proof that the enemy will leave Gaza under fire from the strikes of the Palestinians”. But only the blind could not read the subtext: that whatever the mandate Abbas had received in the presidential poll, it did not mean an end to the “armed resistance”.

Nor would it mean any change in Israel’s mindset for dealing with the PA. Following the Karni attack, Ariel Sharon unleashed the same repertoire of sanctions that he had deployed (uselessly) against Yaser Arafat. He froze all contacts with the PA. He sealed off Karni and therefore the rest of Gaza, since its northern Erez crossing has long been off-limits to all but a handful of Palestinians and the southern Rafah crossing has been closed since a Hamas attack on an army outpost on 12 December (leaving some 10,000 Palestinians stranded on the Egyptian side of the border).

Finally, he rolled tanks into Gaza city and Khan Yunis Refugee Camp, killing 16 Palestinians, including a 59-year-old woman and a ten-year-old boy. The resistance fought back, again pitching rockets on to settlements and at Sederot, leaving several Israelis wounded, one of them critically.

The name of this Israeli game is pressure: “pushing Abbas into a corner, to drive him to confront the terror organizations”, in the hope of Israeli analyst, Aluf Benn. Such pressure never worked with Arafat. It has even less chance with Abbas.

Instead, he resorted to Arafat-like ruses: the PLO executive “demanded an end to all military actions that might harm our national goals or give Israel the excuse to obstruct Palestinian stability”, while quietly conditioning the call on Israel ending its military operations. And the PA cabinet ordered its police forces to “prevent attacks”, but with scant sign of prevention actually happening on the ground. The reason is simple, says Palestinian analyst George Giacaman: “Abbas is not Arafat; he is working under severe limits.”

Challenges

Those limits were palpable during his election campaign and framed by two pillars. One was his avowed fealty to the political legacy of his “eternal leader”: in his words, “the task of ending the occupation, establishing the Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, with Jerusalem as its capital, and reaching a just and agreed solution to the refugee problem on the bases of international resolutions, first and foremost UN General Assembly Resolution 194 and the Beirut Arab summit resolution”.

The second was the subtly different means Abbas advocates for reaching the promised land: immediate resumption of negotiations with Israel based on the internationally sponsored road-map plan; further Palestinian reform; and an end to the “militarized” Intifada in favour of more “popular” forms of resistance. All three present obstacles, but the last two hang on the first, says PA cabinet minister Ghassan Khatib:

“The basic condition for progress is for the US to invite the two sides to resume negotiations on implementing the road-map. For us, this means further reform and a 100% effort to reduce Palestinian violence. For the Israelis, it means ending their violence against our people, stopping the expansion of settlements on our land and lifting the sanctions and restrictions that are destroying our economy. Anything less will be insufficient”.

But Israel, backed by the United States, is offering less, even before the latest breakdown in relations. The maximum PA input Sharon is allowing in his disengagement plan from Gaza and a part of the West Bank is “security coordination”, coupled with the right to take over any Palestinian land Israel withdraws from. Moving on in accordance with the road-map will require the PA “collecting illegal weapons, arresting terrorists, dismantling terrorist organizations”, actions Abbas has explicitly stated he will not take. The result is the same snare for the new leader as entangled the old, says Giacaman:

Abu Mazen has to connect the disengagement to the road-map if he is to convince the Palestinians that there is a credible peace process. Otherwise, we have the same contradiction that faced us after the Camp David summit in 2000 — the existence of a Palestinian Authority without a political process for ending the occupation. As we saw then, this is a contradiction that is not sustainable in the long run”.

Will reform get him out of it? Not on its own.

Abbas’ reform strategy is to recentralize the power of the PA as a national authority before diffusing political power through further local, parliamentary and, above all, internal Fatah elections. The key change here remains the consolidation of the PA’s dozen or so security services into three under loyalist (rather than mutinous) commanders, with possible contenders being the former Gaza police chief, Nasser Yusuf, and the former heads of the Preventive Security Force, Jibril Rajub in the West Bank, Muhammad Dahlan in Gaza (the last two now reconciled under their new patron).

With a reformed police force in place — and elections deferred — the hope is that progress in the peace process and a renewed sense of Palestinian personal security will consolidate Abbas’ position within Fatah and public opinion generally. The obvious converse is that no movement on either will probably give rise to a challenge to Abbas’ leadership within Fatah and/or to his policies on the ground. Marwan Barghuthi’s brief foray into the presidential race was a harbinger of the former; the militias’ ongoing resistance and disdain for Abbas’ “political platform” a case of the latter.

Abbas’ approach to the resistance (and especially Hamas) is also two-staged. First he wants to agree an internal cease-fire with the factions that he can then trade for a reciprocal one with Israel. Second, he wants a power-sharing agreement based on the outcome of the parliamentary elections, which he hopes Hamas will contest.

Hamas wants the reverse: an inter-factional “national accord” not just on a cease-fire and participation in the PA elections, but also on inclusion in the PLO, governance and influence over negotiations with Israel. Despite months of talks (and more about to happen in Cairo) this argument has yet to be resolved.

Few doubt that it can be. Despite reservations from the outside leadership, there is a solid constituency in Hamas within the Occupied Territories which wants to participate in the parliamentary elections and so partially integrate with the PA political system. Nor is there much ambiguity about the Islamists’ terms for a truce: “a halt to [Israel’s] incursions and attacks, a halt to assassinations, and the release of prisoners and detainees”, says Hamas’ political leader in Gaza, Ismail Haniya.

But it is also clear that Hamas wants a position in the new Palestinian leadership and administration commensurate with their strength on the ground and sacrifices to the cause. If Fatah and the PA refuse this trade — either for sectarian reasons or under Israel/US pressure — Hamas’ response (joined by the other militias) will be the same as it was after Abbas’ election.

Even if they accept, there are some in Hamas who would prefer that a cease-fire be delayed until the very cusp of Israel’s withdrawal, the better to cast this in the mould of a flight, like in south Lebanon. Sharon has already instructed his army to act “without restrictions” to prevent such a spectacle. There would be many casualties from such a confrontation — including Abbas, who would be perceived then to have been powerless to achieve quiet, let alone governance.

Voting for hope

Negotiations, reform and a truce are enormous pledges Abbas has made to his people. But perhaps his toughest call will be to meet the very modest expectations raised by his campaign. In Hebron, Nablus, East Jerusalem and Ramallah Palestinians who voted for him did so in the belief that he can somehow remove checkpoints, free prisoners, provide jobs, deliver personal security, end settlement construction and pull down the West Bank Wall — in short, that he will end the occupation. We have been here before, warns Giacaman:

“Palestinians voted for hope. And this is dangerous. Because if Abu Mazen fails to deliver on hope, he will fall again and then, truly, the prospects will be dire”.

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