July 17, 2007
Who would have imagined that secular Palestinian nationalism would
degenerate into this: Abbas vehemently refusing to meet with
democratically-elected Hamas as he continues to meet with his own
military occupiers, courting their approval and support. The result is
the same old since Oslo: not one roadblock removed, inch of Wall
stopped, settlement expansion halted (let alone reversed), or
Palestinian life saved. Worse: Palestine's largest electoral party
(Hamas) has been banished into the political wilderness, and the
occupied West Bank and Gaza are now ruled by two separate and
antagonistic authorities. Under occupation, dual power now reigns
supreme. One elected, boycotted, and dissolved government led by
Haniyeh is besieged in Gaza, while the other, appointed,
unconstitutional, and Western-supported led by Fayyad is now speaking
Americanese. Just take the following recent examples of intensifying
national decay: Abbas:
falsely accuses Hamas of facilitating and nurturing the rise of
al-Qaeda in Gaza (rather than blaming this on Israel's and the West's
brutal and despair-inducing siege); he liquidates any remaining
semblance of an independent judiciary and replaces civil with military
courts, while NGOs in Palestine accuse him of creating a military
dictatorship. Fayyad:
calls for 'intense and active cooperation' with Israel, criminalizes
the resistance and dubs it 'catastrophic', and states that it (not
Israel) has 'destroyed our national project completely' (CNN, 28 June).
Fayyad represses civil society, with Hamas' NGOs threatened with
license revocation and mosques curtailed by political repression; and
he also refuses to pay all staff of the Palestinian Authority appointed
since December 2005, i.e. those appointed since Hamas' electoral
victory in January 2006, thus severely diminishing the livelihood of
20,000 Palestinian families in one stroke of the pen. Israel:
looks on in glee as its policy of divide and annex has borne its
poisonous fruits; Sharon's dream, as Akiva Eldar put it in Haaretz
(30 June), has come to pass: Gaza is a disengaged Hamastan, severed
from the West Bank, which is cantonized, crisscrossed by settlements,
Jewish-only bypass roads, and walls, with no access to 40 % of its own
lands and no outlet to the outside world; Olmert throws a bone: 250
Fatah prisoners to be released (out of 10,000 Palestinian prisoners
altogether), and $120 million of Palestinian tax money is returned (out
of $700 million held), conditional on Abbas' continued boycott and
suffocation of Hamas. How
did the Palestinians come to a situation where even the Saudi king,
head of the most authoritarian and reactionary Arab regime in the
Middle East, sounds more progressive than their own President?[1] How
can Saudis sponsor unity and dialogue between Hamas and Fatah, while
Abbas effectively declares a civil war against the largest Palestinian
faction in occupied Palestine, calling Hamas' takeover of Gaza a
'crime' and Gaza an 'emirate of darkness', and demanding that Hamas
reverse its military action, dissolve the new interior ministry's
executive force, and apologize to the Palestinian people? There
no question that the roots of the current crisis in Palestinian
politics lie with Fatah's American-sponsored refusal to accept Hamas'
victory and to allow it to practice democratic government, having done
everything since January 2006 to undermine and marginalize it. Danny
Rubenstein has described this process accurately when he said: 'The
primary reason for the break-up is the fact that Fatah, headed by
Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, has refused to fully
share the PA's mechanism of power with its rival Hamas -- in spite of
Hamas' decisive victory in the January 2006 general elections' (Haaretz, 13 June). There
is also no question that Hamas' military takeover was a 'preventive
coup'.[2] Hamas was clearly worried that Mohammed Dahlan's
American-supported security apparatus would become powerful enough to
fulfill Dahlan's declared wish to 'decimate Hamas'.[3] He had also
actively wrecked the unity government by refusing to coordinate
security matters with the independent minister of interior Hani
Kawasmeh, forcing him to resign. Dahlan was clearly acting according to
American and Israeli policy, which sought to destroy Abbas' and Hamas'
power-sharing unity deal in Mecca. There
is, finally, no question that Hamas' military takeover only sought to
target Dahlan's putschist stream within Fatah and not all of Fatah
(though Hamas admitted that undesirable excesses were committed), and
that Hamas had the implicit support of grassroots nationalists within
Fatah who were equally disgruntled by Dahlan's security collaboration
with Israel and his sponsorship of lawlessness and 'chaos of arms' in
Gaza. It
was thus evident to all that Abbas' unaccountable and authoritarian
preventive security apparatus was, as constituted, a stumbling block to
unity and to democratic government. Why then did all Palestinian
factions, including Islamic Jihad, come out against Hamas' action,
deeming it illegitimate and a strategic blunder? It's certainly not out
of loyalty to Abbas, or out of lack of sympathy or support for Hamas.[4] Take,
for example, Islamic Jihad, a small group of military-oriented
fundamentalists, well known for its attacks both against the Israeli
military occupation and against civilians inside Israel, and
persistently critical of the Oslo framework. Jihad argued that Hamas'
military takeover was a 'painful and tragic development', which is
divisive to Palestinian unity: it therefore cannot be 'justified or
defended'. As their exiled leader Ramadan Shallah stated in numerous
interviews given to the Arab press on 24 June (al-Hayat, al-Quds al-Arabi, and al-Sharq al-Awsat):
'Mistakes were committed by both sides, and both did not have mercy
upon each other or upon the Palestinian people'. Shallah also accused
Abbas of exploiting Hamas' mistakes and closing all doors for dialogue
and power-sharing, busying himself instead with allying with Israel
against his own people's needs and interests. While advocating
continued resistance against Israel's occupation, Islamic Jihad
resoundingly concluded that force should have no place in Palestinian
politics. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
had a similar position. In a statement made on 20 June to the same PNC
meeting at which Abbas demonized Hamas, the PFLP denounced Hamas'
recourse to military force and stated that it should be reversed. The
PFLP argued that Hamas' use of force deepened rather than resolved the
internal Palestinian crisis and distracted Palestinians from their main
struggle against the Israeli occupation and for statehood and return.
The PFLP called for an immediate resumption of national dialogue and an
end to infighting. It also recommended that Palestinian democracy be
reactivated and a new democratically-elected PLO be formed in order to
safeguard independent Palestinian decision-making and political unity.
On 10 July, the PFLP also joined forces with Moustafa Barghouti's Mubadara and advocated a joint program of National Salvation.
The new political initiative reiterated the PFLP's earlier positions
and called for the dissolution of Fayyad's emergency government and a
return to the Prisoners' National Conciliation Document of 2006 as a
basis for resolving the new Palestinian crisis. The Prisoners'
Document, which received widespread Palestinian support when it was
issued in April 2006, calls for unity, democracy, resistance, and a
safeguarding of all Palestinian national rights. It was officially
amended and ratified by both Hamas and Fatah in June 2006. What
all such voices and initiatives express is a real concern about the
current state of Palestinian politics and society. They warn that
without immediate and drastic Palestinian action the Palestinian
national struggle is doomed to fail for a generation to come, leading
to more destructive factionalism, degeneration, and despair. There are
already significant worries, for example, that al-Qaeda type nihilism
is taking hold in Gaza and that Hamas' failure to end Israel's siege
can only encourage its growth.[5] Though Hamas' recent freeing of Alan
Johnson is a positive sign that lawlessness and 'chaos of arms' has
come to an end in Gaza, and that internal calm has been restored,
besieging and punishing Gaza and cutting it off from the rest of the
world can only lead to further pessimism and despair. The tragic
stranding of 6,000 Palestinians on the border with Egypt may thus only
be the tip of the iceberg (23 deaths have already been reported in al-Hayat). Poverty
levels in occupied Palestine are now between 70% and 80%, with extreme
and unprecedented levels of unemployment and rising dependency on food
aid. As Patrick Cockburn put it nearly a year ago: 'Gaza is dying. The
Israeli siege of the Palestinian enclave is so tight that its people
are on the edge of starvation. Here on the shores of the Mediterranean
a great tragedy is taking place that is being ignored because the
world's attention has been diverted by wars in Lebanon and Iraq'. (The Independent, 8 September 2006). How much longer can a people suffer under what UN special rapporteur for Human Rights John Dugard called 'possibly the
most rigorous form of international sanctions imposed in modern times'
(29 January 2007) before exploding in self-destructive anger and rage? Recent polls clearly indicate that occupied Palestinians are fed up with continued siege and factional strife. As
the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research reported, 75% of
Palestinians now want new elections, with 59% saying that 'both Hamas
and Fatah are equally to blame for the bitter factional fighting that
led to the Hamas takeover of Gaza' (Haaretz, 21 June).
What this means is that Palestinians have come to recognize that
neither secular Palestinian nationalism nor Islamic fundamentalism have
been capable of ending their occupation and misery. A new Palestinian
political agent is now needed in order to organize and mobilize such
growing discontent. It
is worth repeating that the closest Palestinians ever came to
decolonizing the West Bank and Gaza was in the first Intifada. A whole
nation struggled together then in what Edward Said called 'one of the
most extraordinary anti-colonial and unarmed mass insurrections in the
whole history of the modern period'. It is clear that conditions are
now much more difficult than they were in the 1980s. Palestinians are
cut off, fragmented, politically divided, and made dispensable by
Israel's closure policy, which has diminished their political leverage
and capacity to force Israeli society to pay the price of its brutal
occupation. Palestinian bantustans are clearly Oslo's doing, leaving
most Palestinians stranded and demobilized. Only 5% of Palestinians
actively participated in resistance against the occupation from the
beginning of the second Intifada in 2000 to 2005, a measure of severe
crisis and political disengagement if ever there was one.[6] This is
why it has long been imperative to rebuild Palestinian self-capacity
for collective resistance and mass mobilization. Struggles against the
Wall have testified to the political efficacy of popular mobilization,
as Palestinians invited and led both international solidarity and
support from Israel's meager yet important anti-occupation groups, like
Tayyush and Anarchists Against the Wall. Grassroots
organizing is Palestine's best answer to the occupation, and can only
help an oppressed nation regain its lost political momentum. Both Fatah
and Hamas are responsible for militarizing Palestinian politics and for
undermining their people's capacity to self-organize and become active
agents in their own struggle for liberation. This is clearly not the
time for political confusion or for blind defense of one Palestinian
faction or another. The objective of progressives is to democratize
anti-colonialism and regain Palestine's lost collective will. It is not
to trap Palestinians in uncritical or regressive formulas. Without the
direct participation of Palestinian women, workers, marginalized,
unemployed, and diasporas there is no future for Palestine. Palestine
awaits its new radicals. Notes 1. The Saudi monarch was clearly motivated by fears of Iranian sponsorship of Hamas. 2.
The mainstream press has been full of argument and evidence to this
effect: See, for example, Peter Beaumont, 'Those who Denied Poll Result
Were the Real Coup Plotters', The Observer, 17 June 2007; and Jonathan Steele, 'Hamas acted on a very real fear of a US-sponsored coup', The Guardian, 22 June 2007. 3. Khaled Amayreh, 'Dahlan Vows to Decimate Hamas', Al-Ahram Weekly Online, 8-14 June 2006. 4. Even the Syrian Foreign Minister declared that Hamas had fallen into a trap, as al-Hayat reported that week. 5. See, for example, Gideon Rachman, 'Missed Opportunities, Gaza and the Spread of Jihadism', Financial Times, 18 June 2007. 6. See Nigel Parsons, The Politics of the Palestinian Authority: From Oslo to al-Aqsa, London: Routledge, 2005, p. 265. Bashir
Abu-Manneh teaches English at Barnard College, New York, and is
spending a sabbatical year in London. His 'Israel's Colonial Siege and
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