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International Socialist Review Issue 40, March–April 2005
The Illusion of Peace
Palestine After Arafat
By TOUFIC HADDAD
AFTER FORTY years as the primary figurehead of the modern Palestinian national movement, Yasser Arafat died on November 11, 2004, in a Parisian hospital bed. His passing leaves enormous questions for the future of the Palestinian national movement, not least for those associated with filling the void in decision-making and authority for which he was so well known.
The extent of his dominance over leadership during his life is demonstrated in the Palestinian joke that circulated long before his death: “When Arafat dies, he ascends to heaven to meet God, who asks him: ‘Who are you and what have you done in your life?’ Arafat quickly responds in an offended manner: ‘Who am I?! I am the head of the PLO, the head of Fateh, the head of the Palestinian National Council, the head of the Palestinian Authority, the head of the Revolutionary Council, the head of the Higher Committee, the head of the Central Committee the head of the Executive Committee, the head of…’ And before Arafat has a chance to finish all of his leadership titles, God—who in Islamic tradition is known to have ‘only’ 99 titles—embarrassingly stands up from his throne and says ‘I guess you should be sitting here.’”
Arafatism
Jokes aside, there is little humor in the state of the national movement Arafat left behind. Though this is certainly not his fault alone, it is difficult to escape the fact that though Arafat’s legacy is marked by some important achievements, he had equally as many if not more failures and shortcomings. In the category of the former, he can be attributed with having played a considerable role in crystallizing a defiant Palestinian identity and national movement from the demoralized and fragmented Palestinian people after the Nakba [“catastrophe” in Arabic—the commonly used term to describe the expulsion of Palestinians from their land] in 1948 and the humiliating Arab defeat to Israel in the 1967 war. With respect to the latter, however, he must also be credited with being cynical and despotic in his ruling, and chaotic in his strategy, causing him to repeatedly commit tactical and costly blunders for the national movement’s interests.
Egyptian commentator Hani Shukrallah attempted to summarize Arafat’s historical style of leadership and the destructive consequences it had:
Not only did he draw strength from the Palestinian people’s almost limitless capacity to rise up and resume the struggle, following each and every defeat, he took it for granted. And rather than mobilize this enormous energy to involve the people in drawing up and pursuing a strategy for liberation, he used it as a trump card, constantly maneuvering, perennially making damaging compromises and concessions, constantly playing both ends against the middle, always speaking out of both sides of his mouth, giving a nod here and a wink there—a style of leadership that may well have helped keep the struggle alive against enormous odds, but only at tremendous cost.1
Perhaps most damaging was his strategic attempt—which began in the early to mid-1970s and continued up until his death—to ingratiate himself and the Palestinian movement with regional and international ruling-classes. This strategy held that Palestinian liberation—or at least “statehood”—could come from marketing itself as beneficial to the interests of “regional stability,” and was therefore not structurally contradictory to Western, capitalist interests. But despite his best efforts, this task was always fraught with tension and impossibility, owing to the fact that the Palestinian national movement itself was forged within a cultural and historical crucible that was based upon and catalyzed by conceptions of Pan-Arabism, anti-colonialism, and anti-Zionism. These ideologies and sentiments were (and remain) antithetical to the architecture of Western domination for the region, which is based upon support for Israel (as a dependent client state), and support for pro-U.S. satellite states in the Arab world (Jordan, Egypt, and the Gulf states), and which respectively shun any genuine Arab nationalist, let alone democratic agendas.
Though it can be said that he died without conceding the main tenets of Palestinian self-determination—most importantly, the right to return for refugees—Arafat was in the end a middle-class pragmatist. In practice he removed the spirit of liberation from the national liberation movement itself, despite keeping its lingo. In its place, he left a wasteland of a national bureaucracy that he dominated for so long, consisting of overlapping, inefficient, undemocratic structures, dependent upon Gulf petrodollars, and with little sense of direction as to how liberation could be achieved.
Now that the “Palestinian God” is dead, no one has any illusions that another can—or even should—be reconstructed. Though at one level, this is a healthy development, the coming period is sure to be formed by the contradictions and intricacies of the domestic and international settings that Arafat oversaw during his lifetime. The nature of the post-Arafat era will thus be defined by developments in three primary arenas, and their respective interactions between one another: Intra-Fateh dynamics; developments between the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the Palestinian opposition; and developments between the entire national movement and the U.S.-Israel alliance. The January 9, 2005, Palestinian presidential elections, and the victory of Mahmoud Abbas (also known as Abu Mazen), has begun to provide indications as to where many of these developments are poised to lead.
Intra-Fateh dynamics
The most immediate and pressing issue that the death of Arafat posed was its implications for the future of the Fateh Party—the party Arafat co-founded, and which he headed uncontested until his death. The future of the PLO, as well as the PA, are also intimately connected to this question, given that both consist of Fateh-dominated bureaucracies.
The background to the crisis within Fateh can be traced to the nature of the organization itself. Since its founding, Fateh has never been bound by a distinct theoretical political ideology. Its ability to recruit and retain members came in part from its distinct lack of an ideology beyond calling for the achievement of the main Palestinian tenets (the right to self-determination, the right to statehood, and the right of return), in addition to its domination over the financial resources of the national movement. The lack of revolutionary theory weaving together its variegated constituencies—composed of different generations of Fateh activists, different strata of social elites, different revolutionary experiences (diasporic/ domestic), and different class interests—had been a hallmark of Arafat’s leadership style over the years.
For Arafat, confining the Palestinian movement to one liberation ideology was limiting and burdensome. He preferred instead to cherry pick ideas from many different movements, both reactionary and progressive, and to see what came of them. Thus, as David Ignatius of the Washington Post writes, Arafat’s historical relationship with the CIA was “a way of playing all possible sides of the game. In the early 1970s, when the covert relationship with the United States began, he was simultaneously in contact with the CIA and the KGB, with the radical Egyptians and the conservative Saudis.”2 His fingers were in all the pies; the national movement was his personal refrigerator.
Now that he is dead, there is no one to negotiate disputes among his followers, nor are his successors left with a clear strategy for how the party should move forward. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that the different streams within Fateh that Arafat presided over can equally claim to represent the continuity of his legacy, even though many of these streams have contradictory worldviews and tactics.
This has been sufficiently demonstrated throughout the course of the current Intifada. Whatever his motivations for doing so, Arafat oversaw simultaneous yet contradictory political currents within his own party. On the one hand, he allowed for the development of an armed resistance wing within Fateh once the Intifada began, and refused (for the most part) to crack down on resistance groupings as demanded of him by Israel, the U.S., and the European Union. On the other hand, Arafat repeatedly sought to return to the Oslo framework (be it in the form of the Zinni proposal, the Tenet Plan, or the Road Map), despite the fact that these frameworks only gave legitimacy to a false “peace process,” were clearly dead ends, and represented the same logic that led to the second Intifada in the first place. The incongruence between the two strategies resulted in Israel being granted great freedom to exploit the contradictions between each current, making great strides in destroying the Palestinian national movement and society, due to the lack of a cohesive Palestinian strategy or discourse.
After his death, the divergence lives on within Fateh, as was clearly seen in the run up to the January 9, 2005, presidential elections. Marwan Barghouti’s candidacy for president typified the current within Fateh of cadre from the West Bank and Gaza Strip who broke from the identity and role carved out for them under the Oslo Accords, which essentially saw them as a subcontracted force to ensure Israeli security. This current quickly joined the Intifada, believing that negotiations were not leading anywhere, and armed resistance was necessary to achieve Palestinian rights. This current is based primarily in what is known as the “third generation” of Fateh. They are distinguished from the “first generation” of “founding fathers” (of which only a handful remain), and the “second generation,” composed of those who control the Fateh-dominated bureaucratic structures, and who are also largely diasporic in derivation. This current was also institutionally marginalized from the main decision-making bodies of Fateh itself (the Central Committee, the Executive Committee, and the Revolutionary Council) once the diasporic Fateh Party returned to erect the Palestinian Authority in 1994.
Barghouti’s decision to nominate himself as an independent candidate for the Palestinian presidency from prison, where he is serving five life sentences, was intended to send a strong message to the other main current within Fateh—the bureaucratic, institutional, and historical Fateh leadership led by Abu Mazen. The latter tends to see itself as the natural inheritors of Arafat’s legacy, considering the long years many of them have been in the Palestinian revolution, and their domination of the main Fateh and PLO bodies—including its financial resources. They have been able to dominate these bodies by avoiding democratic elections in Fateh for almost sixteen years. This has meant that Fateh leaders who might have emerged either in this Intifada or in the previous one, have never been represented in these leadership bodies.
Overall, Abu Mazen and his ilk seek to continue the political trajectory Arafat paved throughout the Oslo process, believing that eventually Israel will be forced to return to negotiations that can yield significant gains for the national movement. It has no strategy to resist the total war that Israel has unleashed against the Palestinian national movement and people over the course of the past four years, and which has been backed by and coordinated with the United States under the cover of the “war on terror.” Instead, Abu Mazen’s politics stress the need to “not provide excuses for this war to be ratcheted up” by ending the military nature of the Intifada. This worldview perceives the death of Arafat as opening up the possibility of a “new era” in which the U.S. might force Israel to come to a settlement.
Though both currents maintained a public appearance of defiance in the run up to the elections, the reality of the situation was that they actually both needed each other more than they cared to admit. Barghouti’s current has been severely weakened throughout the course of the Intifada, with many of its top leaders killed or imprisoned. Many Fateh rank-and-file cadre, were placed in the schizophrenic position of being split between their loyalty to the Fateh Party (whose presidential candidate was Abu Mazen) and their support for Barghouti and his political outlook. The overwhelming majority of these people in the end still receive their paychecks from the PA because they are Fateh activists. Though Barghouti may have been able to win the election had he pressed on, he could not have done so without entirely splintering Fateh in a socio-political environment that his followers would find difficult to regroup within. At the same time, Abu Mazen has always suffered from a credibility crisis within the Palestinian national movement, and within Fateh in particular. Unlike Arafat who even in his illness chose to don military fatigues emphasizing defiance, however symbolic, Abu Mazen is perceived as a soft-spoken technocrat who was never associated with the history of Palestinian armed struggle. Instead, his name was associated with financial and political dealings during the Oslo years, a fact that has tended to sully his image among Palestinians as a corrupt bureaucrat, unduly apt to making political concessions to Israel and the United States.
The public rift within Fateh was eventually resolved with a compromise that has so far held together. Barghouti agreed to pull out of the running for president after receiving guarantees from Abu Mazen that the political mandate of the national movement be revisited through general elections on all levels of its activity; within local municipalities, in the Legislative Council, and particularly within Fateh itself. It appears that Barghouti was able to extract certain promises from Abu Mazen regarding sensitive political matters, while forcing him to publicly disclose that his political platform would not stray from the national tenets upheld by the Fateh grassroots. This includes upholding the national “red lines” of the right of return for Palestinian refugees, a full end to the 1967 occupation, as well as promises that Abu Mazen would fight PA corruption, seek out the protection of militants from all factions, attempt to free political prisoners (including those who were never freed by the Oslo process itself), and improve the democratic functioning of the PA. Abu Mazen was therefore elected with a limited political mandate to oversee the transition into the post-Arafat era, while attempting to improve the internal strength of the national movement, after the serious erosion it underwent in the Oslo era and particularly during the Intifada, where it was deliberately targeted by the Israeli occupation.
Palestinian opposition dynamics
Immediately after winning the presidential election, Abu Mazen set about attempting to come to terms with the Palestinian opposition—primarily the Islamists, and to a much lesser extent, the Left. The outbreak of the Al Aqsa Intifada and its subsequent sinking of the Oslo process represented a vindication of the opposition’s political perspective, which has always claimed that negotiations could only lead to political compromises and retreat for the Palestinian movement. If the misconduct and financial and political corruption demonstrated by Fateh and the PA during the Oslo years added fodder to the opposition’s political capital, the limited success in military resistance waged by groups like Hamas during this Intifada helped further solidify them as a major political bloc that could no longer be marginalized or repressed as had been the case under Arafat.
Already during Arafat’s final hours, Hamas was calling for its political voice to be heard, and for a period of national reconciliation to be reached by carrying out the democratic process. After meeting with then Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei’ (Abu Ala) in Gaza last November, a Hamas spokesperson demanded that “we must set up a joint national leadership to make decisions until elections are held. What was permitted to Yasser Arafat is forbidden to others and we must not let interested parties in the PA and PLO control the Palestinian destiny. Arafat derived his authority from being a symbol, but others don’t have that privilege.”3
Hamas’s main priority in the upcoming period will be to preserve its gains, avoid pretexts that would justify a crackdown against its members, while negotiating to take its place as a legitimate political player in the post-Arafat era. An Islamist paper closely associated with Hamas disclosed the party’s position with regards to the upcoming election process:
We must involve ourselves in all facets of life and participate wherever possible because it is illogical for us to undertake jihadist [resistance] activity against the occupation and to pour into it all of our resources, youth and even leadership and then not to have any place in influencing the direction of political life. Because of this Hamas will raise the banner “partners in blood, partners in deciding.”4
Hamas’s tactical approach is twofold: a boycott of the presidential elections, but a commitment to participate in all other elections. The decision not to vie for the presidency stems from Hamas’s pragmatic understanding that the position of PA presidency in its present form is functionally committed to the political arrangements of the Oslo process with Israel—a position Hamas is politically opposed to. Additionally, the formal structures and bureaucracies of the national movement continue to be Fateh dominated. Even if Hamas were to have competed and won the presidential elections, it would have had little ability to leverage a change in its political direction. Not withstanding its precarious international standing in the U.S. and EU as a “terrorist organization,” Hamas has instead opted to leverage its influence in an incremental manner through the upcoming municipal and legislative council elections. Both will provide the movement the means through which it can strengthen itself locally while “legitimating” its participation in national politics. This is crucial for the Islamists given that both Hamas and Islamic Jihad are relatively new to the Palestinian national political arena and neither are members of the PLO—an isolation that has at times enhanced and at other times weakened their influence.
During the debacle of the Oslo years, the Islamists began showing their electoral strength in student and trade-union elections. But after four years of Intifada, the Islamists are poised to pick up considerable support from sectors disaffected by the Fateh-led PA, particularly if Abu Mazen seriously pushes his efforts to end the Intifada.
Indications of this have already begun to surface in the form of the January 27, 2005, municipal elections in Gaza, where Islamists netted seven of ten districts, with an 80 percent voter turnout. Islamists have faired poorer, but respectably, in similar elections in the West Bank in December 2004, winning eight of twenty-six districts, with thirteen going to Fateh, and the rest to independents. After the Gaza elections, Hamas political leader Mahmoud al-Zahhar defiantly declared, “The clear message [the election results relay] to the Zionist entity is that the program of the resistance led by Hamas...can carry out achievements in other areas,” implying the political sphere.5
During the coming period (at least until May 2005 when the legislative council elections are held) Hamas will work hard to try and deepen these “achievements in other areas” using the elections to consolidate its power base. For this reason, it has no real problems agreeing to observe the ceasefire agreed to between Abu Mazen and Sharon at Sharm-el-Sheikh on February 11, 2005. From a Hamas perspective, the ceasefire will provide time and opportunities to strengthen its influence in local politics through elections, while it attempts to rebuild its networks in the West Bank, which have been severely damaged in the course of the Intifada.
The Palestinian-Israeli/U.S. front
If there is anyone who will find it difficult to observe the ceasefire declared at Sharm-el-Sheikh, it is Israel. From day one of this Intifada, Israel timed its bloody repression to launch a total war against the Palestinian national movement and people in the hopes of achieving wider strategic Zionist aims. Though the results of this campaign from an Israeli perspective have indeed been impressive—including the radical transformation of the reality on the ground by way of massive settlement expansion; extensive wall and by-pass road construction; the sealing off of Palestinian communities; the killing or imprisoning of key experienced cadre from all factions; and the weakening of the national movement overall, while blaming everything on Arafat—the task is by no means complete.
In part due to the resistance waged there by settlers, and in part due to its longer term geostrategic interests, Israel will seek to unilaterally disengage from Gaza before October 2005. Though the corporate media has done much to frame the Gaza disengagement plan as a step towards “ending the occupation,” the intentions of this plan are exactly the opposite. As the Palestinian Member of Knesset Azmi Bishara has described them:
[T]he plan is one package containing the dismantling of settlements in Gaza and four in the northern part of the West Bank, but in exchange for this, the plan: (1) is intended to freeze the peace process and prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza; (2) stipulates the fortification of settlements in the West Bank; (3) includes a plan for annexing settlement blocs and large swaths of land from the West Bank into Israel; (4) secures the siege of the Gaza Strip by land, sea, and air, and preserves Israel’s right to continue invasions and attacks in Gaza; (5) includes the Bush-Sharon correspondence which negates the right of return, certifies that Israel will remain a Jewish state, and acknowledges that settlement blocs will be annexed to Israel.6
This is still Israel’s plan. Sharon’s reasoning for accepting the current ceasefire is based on a calculated decision not to appear “rejectionist” or unreasonable. Shadowing the position of big brother—the U.S.—Israel will use the ceasefire to provide the appearance that a genuine “chance” has been provided to the new Palestinian president. In exchange for superficial Israeli goodwill gestures (including a release of administrative detainees and handing over security operations in certain West Bank towns) Israel and the U.S. will expect Abu Mazen to fulfill the impossible task of “dismantling the terror infrastructure”—a task Israel has failed to carry out after four years of relentless oppression, and which in fact is nothing more than the desire to expunge all forms of Palestinian resistance organizing, politics, and discourse. The current fostering and uplifting of Abu Mazen as “different from Arafat,” is therefore only setting the stage for his inevitable demise—when he becomes unwilling and/or unable to fulfill the task that Israel and the U.S. have allotted to him. As on previous occasions, Israel will break the ceasefire by the assassination of a major figure (perhaps a Hamas leader in Lebanon or Syria, perhaps a popular Fateh militant like Zakariya Zubeidi of the Al Aqsa martyrs in Jenin), in turn provoking a Palestinian response—after which the corporate media will decry the “return to the cycle of violence,” and Israel will resume its plans outlined by Azmi Bishara above, on the grounds that the Palestinian leadership has refused to renounced “terror.”
Sharon will also use the ceasefire to gain important political capital to shore up support for the disengagement from Gaza against his domestic opponents represented in the well-organized settler movement. The latter argue that a retreat from Gaza is antithetical to Zionist ideology, which claims biblical-based loyalty to Eretz Israel (“Greater Israel”). They also argue that withdrawing from Gaza will give the impression that Israel is “retreating under fire”—i.e. retreating under the blows of the tenacious resistance waged from the Gaza Strip. No doubt there is great sensitivity throughout the Israeli political and military establishment to this latter claim, as it recalls the humiliating memories of the Israeli withdrawal from Southern Lebanon in May 2000, after eighteen years of Lebanese resistance. And precisely for this reason, Israel will seek to ensure that the “impression” the unilateral withdrawal leaves in the consciousness of the Palestinian national movement, is one of “tactical disengagement,” rather than retreating due to military weakness.
To this end, Israel is potentially poised to launch a massive assault on the Gaza Strip before it withdraws, to underscore the point. Indeed, throughout the course of the past four years, the toll of death and destruction Israel has inflicted on Gaza has been incrementally raised to unprecedented levels, while at the same time international interest or desire to intervene to mitigate this slaughter has declined to practically nil. This was demonstrated in October 2004, when Israel launched a massive military operation in the north of the Gaza Strip that resulted in almost three times the number of Palestinian casualties than the events of the Jenin refugee camp in April 2002. But unlike the latter campaign (which did arouse international opprobrium), barely an eyebrow was raised from the international community over the bombings of Gaza.
Conclusion
As much as Arafat’s death has been touted as “the birth of a new era,” a more accurate reading of the situation offers no reasons for optimism. The photogenic handshakes at posh Red Sea resorts are deliberately designed to obfuscate the true nature of the assaults that Israel and its imperial backer have consistently launched, and are planning to launch in the future, against the Palestinian national movement. The same cynical script imperialism has followed throughout the Intifada, prepared both by the Oslo process and domestic U.S. anti-Arab/Muslim racism, is set to be resurrected anew. It will have different actors in a different setting, but with much the same, and likely, much more bloodshed. For this reason, activists in solidarity with the Palestinian cause must be savvy about these developments and work to cut against the mystification sure to arise when the media once again advertise Israel’s war crimes as peace efforts. The best way we can do this is to strengthen the anti-imperialist core of progressive activism in the U.S., while working to build capable organizations that can translate broad working-class anger as a result of the domestic and international crimes of U.S. capitalism into genuine struggle. There is no magic alternative to this painstaking task, though it is a task upon which the fate of Palestine, and indeed much of humanity, rests.
Toufic Haddad is a Palestinian-American activist and writer who edited the radical journal Between The Lines (BTL), published from Jerusalem and Ramallah. He is in the midst of coediting a book on the second Intifada with BTL coeditor Tikva Honig-Parnass, to be published by South End Press. He can be reached at [email protected].
1 Hani Shukrallah, “The Phoenix Always Rises,” Al Ahram, November 18–24, 2004 issue no. 717.
2 David Ignatius, “Secret Strategies,” Washington Post, November 12, 2004.
3 “PA Leaders Leave for Paris, Expected to Declare Arafat Dead,” Ha’aretz, November 8, 2004.
4 “Readings in Hamas’ Position Regarding the Presidential Election,” Al Risala, January 19, 2005.
5 “Hamas Wins Overwhelming Victory in Gaza Vote,” Ha’aretz, January 29, 2005.
6 Azmi Bishara, “Questions and Answers about Sharon’s Disengagement Plan,” Aloufok.net, October 27, 2004, available online at http://www.aloufok.net/article.php3?id_article=1663.
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