Crisis of the Palestinian national movement

By TOUFIC HADDAD

THIS YEAR’S fortieth anniversary of the 1967 Six-Day War and Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip coincided with events on the ground in Palestine that were a telling denouement to the repercussions of this great defeat of the Palestinian cause. It was the Naksa—or “grave set back,” as the 1967 War is commonly referred to in Arab discourse—which gave birth to the modern Palestinian national movement. The launching of the fedayeen guerrilla movement, the coalescing of the rudimentary groupings of Palestinian activists of the diaspora within the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) framework under Yasser Arafat’s leadership, and the crystallization of an independent nationalist current distinct from the Nasserist pan-Arab project—these were the Palestinian responses to 1967 that served to palliate the wounds of Arab defeat. But for the Palestinians, the PLO’s launching was seen as an existential necessity. “To be, or not to be” wrote Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish. And because the choice was “to be,” a narrative and a legacy of liberation and phoenix-like regeneration was born, however real or delusional, inspiring generations of Palestinians, Arabs, and revolutionary movements the world over.

The reality of where this movement stands today and the gap between its declared goals and its actual position is a telling tale of the transformations this movement has gone through over the years. Moreover, it is the cumulative weight of its travails and failures that resulted in the June 2007 takeover of the Gaza Strip by the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, an organization that didn’t even come into existence until twenty years after the launching of the PLO. Hamas was able to dislodge a group who claimed to represent the historical mantle of the PLO leadership—the Palestinian Liberation Movement—Fatah.

But the Hamas takeover cannot be taken out of context. The party was the first to acknowledge that the takeover of Gaza was not a victory over Fatah, but over elements in the party that refused to accept the January 2006 elections that resulted in an overwhelming Hamas majority in the Palestinian Legislative Council. Moreover, this current within Fatah was consciously playing a role in the broader American-Israeli plot to turn back the results of the 2006 elections, as formulated in a plan by U.S. “security coordinator” Lieutenant General Keith Dayton. Dayton had been assigned the task of coordinating the financing, training, and arming of Fatah after the elections. Fatah had refused to hand control over the Palestinian security apparatuses and institutions to Hamas, while continually harassing, kidnapping, and sometimes even killing its activists. Their strategy was designed to prevent Hamas from implementing its rule on the ground, thereby scuttling the party’s efforts to reform and realign the national movement as it promised in its election platform. The specific role these Fatah elements played, under the leadership of Mohammed Dahlan and a coterie of his security strongmen, was part of a broader strategy to encourage the Palestinian people to turn away from Hamas and its agenda. They served as the on-ground auxiliaries to the incessant Israeli military operations against the Gaza Strip and West Bank, the crippling economic siege of Gaza, and the U.S.-sponsored and enforced international boycott of the newly elected Hamas government.

In the end, Hamas felt it had to play its hand and forcibly remove the Daytonites before their putsch could be carried any further. But this only came after the party demonstrated sixteen months of patience, while attempting to achieve a national unity government, despite not needing to do so due to its parliamentary majority. Yet once the national unity government agreement worked out between Fatah and Hamas in Mecca in February 2007 fell apart, Hamas decided to act.

The speed with which the U.S.-backed regime in Gaza fell apart is truly remarkable. With 15,000 security members technically at their disposal, the Dayton’s forces were only able to put up spotty resistance, and were quickly surrounded and defeated by the better organized and more motivated Hamas units. In fact, most security facilities in Gaza were voluntarily handed over to Hamas, with only those associated with the Presidential Guard and the Preventative Security Services putting up much of a fight. In the power vacuum created by the four days of fighting there were acts of vigilantism against the property and persons of the Gaza elites who rose to power during the Oslo years, in many cases reflecting strong class anger toward the wealth and privilege they had accumulated. In the end, 350 of these elites fled to the West Bank under Israeli protection, seeking to reestablish their seat of power in Ramallah.

Fatah’s quick defeat in Gaza can only be explained by the extent to which substantial sections of it felt alienated from the U.S.-Israeli agenda and the party elites who had commandeered the party. In a telling interview with the Al Jazeera Arabic satellite station, Hani El Hassan—one of Fatah’s most senior leaders and a pivotal figure in the struggle over the movement’s political identity after Arafat—described the events of Gaza as follows: “What really collapsed was the Dayton Plan, and the small group that was working with him and who believed in the U.S. as the frame of reference. Fatah did not collapse in Gaza, because 95 percent of Fatah had nothing to do with this plan and did not participate in it.”

This is not to say that Hassan was jubilant about what took place in Gaza. He expected Hamas to coordinate directly with his tendency within Fatah—which Hamas clearly did not—and he had strong reservations about individual acts Hamas engaged in during the fighting. (Hamas politburo head Khaled Mishal later acknowledged mistakes the organization made during the takeover.) Nonetheless, Hassan was unequivocal that what the situation called for was “dialogue” and “unity” in order to face the brewing “hurricane” the region confronts in the wake of an impending U.S.-Israeli strike against Iran and possibly Syria.

Hassan’s position contrasted strongly with that of the other current within Fatah, led by Palestinian Authority (PA) president Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen). In the wake of the events of Gaza, Abu Mazen frantically began steering his movement in an even more pro-U.S. direction in an effort to bolster his weakened position. After describing Hamas as “killers and terrorists” who he associated with al-Qaeda, Abu Mazen was quick to fire the elected Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniyeh, and establish an emergency government led by former World Bank economist Salam Fayyad. Abu Mazen’s subsequent refusal to dialogue with Hamas and his orders to have their institutions and newspapers in the West Bank shut down, won gleeful approval from U.S. and Israeli authorities, who quickly recognized the opportunity to deepen colonial divisions. The subsequent release of 250 Palestinian prisoners (85 percent of whom were from Fatah, none of whom were from Hamas), the granting of amnesty to 180 Fatah activists on Israel’s “most wanted” list, and the releasing of $600 million in taxes Israel has been withholding from Palestinian coffers, were all part of a process of trying to bolster Abu Mazen and his regime, and to prevent events in Gaza from replicating themselves in the West Bank.

It is not clear to what extent such a scenario is possible, given the different geographical, experiential, and military realities that divide Gaza and the West Bank. What is known however is that it wasn’t just Gaza that voted for Hamas in January 2006—so did the majority of West Bank towns and cities, as did its trade unions and student bodies. And though many Palestinians might have had reservations about the particular use of force by Hamas during the takeover (viewing it as alien to the historical political culture within the national movement), or other elements of the party’s political or social agenda, the more delegitimized party is clearly the distinctly pro-U.S. tendency within Fatah. Its political future is in question, especially now that it cannot claim to even represent geographically all of the Occupied Territories.

Nonetheless, it will take time before things are allowed to play themselves out, with the internal divisions surely to be costly for winning international sympathy to the Palestinian cause. Much will depend upon how the “95 percent of Fatah” that did not support the Daytonites play their cards, though their primary weakness is articulating a unique political platform that is neither a reincarnation of the dead Oslo formula nor a substitute for Hamas’s appealing reformist/resistance oriented approach. So far this current has not really shown the political acumen to meet this challenge, and the more it fails to pose itself in this manner, the more it will cede ground and strength to Hamas.

Here the momentum clearly lies with the Islamists who are keen to show their capacity to govern Gaza, despite the enormous challenges they face. Immediately upon taking power, Hamas worked to bring about the release of BBC reporter Alan Johnson, kidnapped by rogue Fatah elements in the form of the Army of Islam. In addition, they declared a boycott of Israeli agricultural products in the Gaza Strip, announced a no-tolerance policy for weapons not intended for resistance against Israel, and cracked down on the rising crime and drug networks. They also promised to disclose the archive of material confiscated from the PA security compounds, which include large amounts of evidence of intelligence collusion with Israel as well as political and financial corruption. To give a hint at what this entailed, senior Hamas member Mahmoud El Zahhar held a press conference on July 25 revealing documents showing how PA leaders associated with Fatah had financial holdings exceeding $30 billion held in foreign bank accounts, and a further $2 billion in local accounts. This is at a time when the entire annual budget of the PA is only $1.3 billion.

Needless to say, this is a period of deep transition for the Palestinian cause—at a time when Israel continues its consolidation of the West Bank and Gaza ghettos and its meddling in the internal divisions among Palestinians to weaken them. A new political map, however, is emerging within the Palestinian sphere as the institutions and figures of the old revolution are being replaced by a new breed of activists born in the crucible of the 1967 Occupied Territories, and not in the post-1948 era. This transition brings with it grave threats to the integrity of the Palestinian cause, both geographically and politically. Israel and the U.S. are working at every turn to scuttle, abort, and destroy the emergence of a new, more competent, functional, and united national project. Without this attempt at realignment and reform, the Palestinian movement born in the post-1967 era seemed destined to disintegrate beneath the machinations of U.S imperial and Zionist designs for the region.

Toufic Haddad is the editor, with Tikva Honig-Parnass, of Between the Lines: Readings on Israel, the Palestinians,
and the U.S. “War on Terror” (Haymarket Books, 2007).