DAR AL ISLAM - EGYPT: "...THE FUTURE CAN COMPRISE LITTLE BEYOND INTERNECINE CONFLICT"

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The article being quoted is from Al Ahram, the most widely circulated daily Egyptian newspaper...

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A restructured PLO
by Azmi Bishara

Without an organisation capable of representing all Palestinians, both in the occupied territories and the diaspora, the future can comprise little beyond internecine conflict.


The US and its Western followers revealed what democratisation of the Arab world actually means to them when they rejected the results of the Palestinian legislative elections and instead began an economic boycott. The result was escalating internecine violence fuelled by the lure of money.

The Mecca Agreement between Fatah and Hamas to form a unity government opened the horizon for a unified Palestinian strategy that would include the restructuring of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) and that would compel Arab governments to face their obligations to press for an end to the blockade against the Palestinian people and for the implementation of The Hague ruling on the separating wall. Some pro-settlement Palestinians believed that the Mecca Agreement was aimed at containing Hamas and that since Hamas had agreed in principle then all that remained was to name Hamas's price. They thought a haggling process would drag on as the new Fatah-Hamas partnership stumbled from one crisis to the next while at the same time negotiations and communications would be conducted through diplomatic channels aimed at a permanent solution and these would require discussions between members of the unity government. There was, therefore, room for political action.

But the US and Israel were dead set against the Mecca Agreement. They saw it as a defeat for the forces within the Palestinian Authority (PA) in which they had invested such high hopes, one being that they would turn against Arafat. These forces, it is now apparent, accepted the agreement not because they liked it but because others in the PA felt that they could not take on Hamas in Gaza. The Mecca Agreement, then, was a way to put off the inevitable confrontation against Hamas. In the interval the PA would have to be funded through its executive branch while the presidency, the security agencies and the relationship between the two would have to be strengthened in preparation for the next elections or the next showdown. The US, meanwhile, knowing that to boycott the president of the unity government would drive Fatah closer towards embracing that government, came up with the notion of holding "theoretical talks", as Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert termed them, over a permanent solution so that people would get used to hearing certain ideas -- the "hypothetical" relinquishment of the right to return and the "hypothetical" renunciation of Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state. As long as everything was couched hypothetically it would be possible to keep a unity government intact with people in it advocating such ideas until they became perfectly normal.

In spite of the Mecca accord, on the very day of the 59th commemoration of the nakba -- the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 and the consequent dispossession of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians -- a Palestinian shot another Palestinian in Gaza. But this was nothing compared to what happened next. In the course of Hamas's attempts to pre-empt any possible action by forces opposed to the Mecca Agreement undermining the unity government and delivering a debilitating blow to Hamas, the movement's field operators indulged themselves in a spate of retaliatory violence that surpassed in bloodthirstiness anything their leadership could possibly justify.

Call Hamas's actions a coup, if you like. The decrees that followed, however, were nothing less than a complete overthrow of the elections that had brought Hamas into power in the first place. Worse yet, the forces that broke with Hamas after these decrees were issued pushed for escalation. These are the forces that vanish in times of unity and thrive in times of strife, and they want to see a tighter economic stranglehold on Gaza and an easing of conditions in the West Bank so that people will draw the comparison between the "successful" recipient of outside financial aid and provider of public services and the boycotted "failure" in Gaza, paying the price for its refusal to accept Israel's conditions. For some reason former US special envoy to the Middle East, Dennis Ross, after having heard this scenario from second-rank Fatah officials and from sources in west Jerusalem, felt it would inevitably play out. He wrote about it in the Washington Post of 5 June. But even the thoroughly pro-Israeli and anti-Arafat and anti-Syrian Ross had reservations.

Apart from voiding the Palestinian cause of any substance beyond the rivalry between two entities, one of which will have the screws of the vice tightened because it needs to learn its lesson, the other having the good fortune to take part in delivering this lesson, the strategy leads to other nightmare scenarios: the starvation of people in Gaza while PA offices in the West Bank drown in money; the loss of a single agency representing all the Palestinian people and a rise in attacks against Israel following the principle of "as long as the roof's caving in, I'll make sure it crashes down on the heads of my enemies too".

What does the right of return and Jerusalem have to do with all of this?

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Pertinent Links:

1) A restructured PLO