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MEIonline.com
News Analysis
Palestine: the road not taken
From Graham Usher in East Jerusalem
June 10th, 2005 -- On 3 June Mahmud Abbas issued the long expected decree that the elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council, scheduled to take place on 17 July, would be postponed. The announcement came a week after Abbas’ “successful” trip to Washington and less than 24 hours after Ariel Sharon agreed to meet the Palestinian Authority president on 21 June, the two leaders’ first encounter since the Sharm al-Shaykh summit in February.
The timing of all three events could, of course, be coincidental, though one detects the involvement of the long arm of American diplomacy. The US has become increasingly concerned that Israel’s parsimony vis-à-vis the Palestinian leader was weakening him before the new, electoral challenges posed by Hamas. The White House declined comment on the elections’ delay, but the mood — said one insider — ranged “from quiet relief to elation”.
Atmosphere
In terms of atmospherics George Bush’s meeting with Abbas in Washington on 26 May was a success. Proclaiming the Palestinian president a “man of courage”, Bush pledged shoulder-to-shoulder support as “you combat corruption, reform the security services and justice system and revive your economy”.
There were also practical gestures. Bush promised the PA $50m in direct aid, skirting congressional objections that the Palestinian treasury is a black hole. He expanded the remit of his envoy to the region, Gen. William Ward, from “overseer” of Palestinian security reform to “coordinator” between PA and Israeli forces, and dispatched Condoleezza Rice on more than one trip to Jerusalem and Ramallah ahead of the Gaza disengagement in August.
He reiterated American opposition to settlement construction and any other action that “contravenes Israel’s road-map obligations or prejudices final status negotiations with regard to Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem”. A “viable two-state solution”, he continued, “must ensure contiguity of the West Bank… a state of scattered territories will not work. There must also be meaningful linkages between the West Bank and Gaza. This is the position of the US today; it will be the position of the US at the time of the final status negotiations.”
Perhaps most significantly, Bush said that “any final status agreement must be reached between the two parties, and changes to the 1949 armistice lines must be mutually agreed”. According to PA Foreign Minister Nasser al-Qidwa, this to some extent “balances” Bush’s pledge to Sharon in April 2004 that, “in the light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major population centres [i.e. illegal Israeli settlements], it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of the final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949”.
Unlike the April 2004 pledge, however, this one did not come in writing. Nor was there any “balance” to Bush’s other pledge to Sharon: that the Palestinian right of return will be exercised in a Palestinian state, not on their lands, homes and properties in what was Mandate Palestine but is now Israel.
Sharon was anything but pleased. “The Palestinians came out feeling no pressure to fight terror, that they don’t have to take immediate action,” he told a US delegation in West Jerusalem on 30 May. “Questions are being asked; what happened to Bush’s promises? People say the whole disengagement is a bluff. I need calm to carry out the disengagement and this is causing me difficulties.”
In the zero-sum nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, whatever angers Sharon (and nothing quite angers him like a moderate Palestinian leader being welcomed at the White House) is deemed to rebound to Abbas’ benefit. Nor should there be any doubt about the key importance Abbas accords the US role in his strategy to end the Intifada and return to political negotiations on the basis of the road-map.
Very simply, Abbas believes everything hangs on driving a wedge between the Bush Administration and Sharon’s government so as to create a divide in Israeli opinion that will either compel Sharon to negotiate or speed his fall from office. So was the Washington meeting the thin end of the wedge?
Substance
Abbas sought three things from Bush: a credible commitment that the Gaza disengagement would be an integral part of the road-map process rather than a substitute for it or prelude to it; that pressure would be applied on Israel to adhere to its road-map obligations, especially a freeze on all settlement construction and the withdrawal of the Israeli army to positions held prior to the outbreak of the Intifada; and an articulation not just of Bush’s “vision” of a Palestinian state “living side-by-side with Israel in peace and security”, but also of its content, parameters, timeline and mechanism for realization.
Abbas received none of them. While believing disengagement could beat a path “back to the road-map”, Bush made it clear that it remained a unilateral Israeli move, to be “coordinated” with the PA rather than negotiated as part of an overarching political process. PA officials were also informed there would be no real action on settlements this side of the disengagement, save perhaps for emergency interventions to dissuade Israel from making irreparable decisions such as ground-breaking the E1 corridor in occupied East Jerusalem or the destruction of 88 Palestinian homes in Silwan.
Nor did Bush accept Abbas’ proposal to move directly to final status talks. On the contrary, he affirmed that Israel’s preferred sequence was also his: first an end to all forms of armed Palestinian resistance, then negotiations to establish a Palestinian state “with provisional borders” and last — and only last — negotiations on a permanent settlement.
For Abbas this is the longest of hauls. In the worst — but likeliest — case it means a managed impasse lasting not only throughout the disengagement but also up to and beyond the next Israeli elections, scheduled to be held some time next year.
There is an emerging consensus among Israel-watchers that, after the disengagement, Sharon will flaunt all pressure to return to negotiations and swing radically to the right, not only out of ideological preference, but to face down his main electoral adversaries — not the Labour Party or Israeli “peace camp” but Likud rivals like Finance Minister Netanyahu.
It is a vista feared by PA officials. “Sharon will complete disengagement in late 2005,” says one. “He will then call an election in 2006 and by the time he forms his cabinet and the US congressional elections are over it will be 2007. He will procrastinate and procrastinate to avoid any kind of pressure [to negotiate]”.
If this is the future, Abbas may not be part of it — not out of a failure to project his leadership regionally and internationally (the Washington meeting and his recent global tour has secured that goal) but because of the frailty of his policies and constituencies at home, above all among his Fatah movement.
End of spring
For the last month or so Abbas has faced an incipient revolt. It has not come from Hamas or the other Palestinian factions, whatever their anger over the PA’s decision to rerun and then postpone local elections in the three municipalities won by Hamas in Gaza (MEI 751). It has come from Fatah, principally from disgruntled officers in the security forces and Aqsa Martyrs Brigade (AMB) militia in their pay.
In Gaza on 2 June members of the PA’s Military Intelligence (whose chief, Musa Arafat, was “retired” in April) stormed the parliament building and closed roads, abducting one Palestinian ambassador trying to exit via Rafah. Three days later an AMB squad opened fire on the governor’s office in Nablus. The first were protesting their force’s imminent amalgamation into the streamlined National Security Police. The latter were demonstrating over the PA’s failure to grant them jobs and protection commensurate with their status as fighters.
This was the background to Abbas’ decision to defer the parliamentary elections. The ostensible reason was over the failure to resolve a dispute between the president, the factions and Fatah legislators over which type of electoral system should be adopted (MEI 751). But the real cause is that Fatah is in freefall, and not only because of the chaos in Gaza, Ramallah and Nablus. Six weeks before the parliamentary vote Fatah had yet to hold primaries or achieve a consensus on the election law, let alone candidates or a mechanism for choosing them.
Many in the movement welcomed the delay, including “young guard” reformists in the Legislative Council. Their basic argument was that the parliamentary elections should follow (rather than precede) the Fatah General Congress in August, where, it was argued, a new leadership and new policies would be elected, together with a new, reformed organizational structure that, come the parliamentary poll, would be able to hold its own against Hamas. But one deferral led to another.
On 5 June the Fatah Revolutionary Council (FRC) announced that the General Congress had been postponed indefinitely, effectively hoisting the “young guard” on its own petard. One Fatah deputy accused the FRC’s elections preparatory committee of “not doing what it was required to do”. Another said the delay would “generate huge anger in the movement”. And a third warned of a formal split if primaries were not held for both the parliamentary poll and the General Congress.
But the obvious point was made by Palestinian analyst Hani al-Masri: given the depth of the crisis within Fatah, there is absolutely no reason to believe the movement will be any more ready to contest elections — internal or otherwise — in, say, November than it would have been in July.
Old roads
The fear, rather, is that elections deferred will become elections denied. After all, the Palestinian parliament has now endured six years beyond its electoral mandate and the Fatah General Congress has not convened since 1989. For many Palestinians, the frost is already beginning to bite on Palestine’s brief democratic spring.
Few Palestinians doubt that Abbas wanted the elections on their prescribed dates, given the domestic importance he ascribes to democratic reform, as well as the agreements he forged with Hamas on electoral participation in Cairo in March (MEI 747). But faced with the collapse of his movement, he appears to have buckled under the advice of his diplomatic allies, Americans, Arabs and others. This was summarized with unusual frankness by an Egyptian intelligence official:
We advocate postponement of the elections until December 2005. This will allow the PA to benefit from the achievement of the disengagement, manage an orderly disposal of assets in Gaza and put an end to the existing chaos. The public will then support the Authority against Hamas.
Nothing is less likely. On the contrary, a Gaza rescue operation devoid of democratic change will not only pitch the PA and Fatah into a major crisis of legitimacy vis-à-vis Hamas, the factions and large swathes of Palestinian opinion. It will rob Abbas of the political authority he needs to end the disorder, improvisation, corruption and violence that remain the hallmarks of PA rule. It is to follow the road taken by Arafat during the Oslo years. That did not lead to peace, Bush-like pledges notwithstanding. It led to the Second Intifada.
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