| Posted By Nicola Nasser June
2, 2008
Firing home-made primitive rockets at Israeli targets
from the Gaza Strip, the mass sweeping through the
Palestinian – Egyptian border crossing of Rafah in January
and the series of ongoing peaceful demonstrations at Gaza’s
crossing points with Israel are not an aggressive
demonstration of self-confidence, but more a show of
defensive despair and weakness against the tight Israeli
military siege, as much as Palestinian President Mahmoud
Abbas’ threats to resign are passive defensive reaction to
the political siege imposed on him by the United States and
Israel, who so far fail to deliver on their promises to
bring about an agreement to create a Palestinian state by
the end of 2008.
Given the corruption investigations, which have already
heralded either a premiership change or early elections that
would lead to a government change in Israel , Prime Minister
Ehud Olmert is likely nearing the end of his term to join
Abbas and US President George W. Bush, whose terms will come
to their end next January, as outgoing leaders whom all
their protagonists are counting down time until their
departure, before they could deliver on their promised
vision of a two-state solution for the Palestinian – Israeli
conflict.
Their failure is trapping the Palestinian national movement
at a historical crossroads by a peace option that could not
deliver, with no other alternatives, and a peace process
that is meant for itself as a crisis management tactic,
while a multi-layer internal division is paralyzing its
central decision-making to render it incapable of being up
to the challenge of breaking through the impasse.
The Palestinian national movement finds itself in a
deteriorating state of paralysis. “There's almost no
Palestinian leadership,” Kadoura Fares, a former Palestinian
Cabinet minister and a leading member of President Abbas'
Fatah party, told the Washington Times on May 15.
This state of affairs is old enough. On May 31 2007, former
Palestinian negotiator and senior associate member of St.
Antony's College, Oxford , Ahmad Samih Khalidi, wrote in The
Guardian: “What was once a dedicated and vibrant Palestinian
national movement is today almost bereft of effective
leadership.”
The emergence of Fatah al-Islam in Palestinian refugee camps
in Lebanon, “the infestation of al-Qaida-type salafism,”
which has already reached Gaza Strip, according to Khalidi,
and the wide-spreading attraction of the one-state or
bi-national state option among the Palestinians, as an
alternative for the two-state solution for the Palestinian
Israeli conflict, are manifestations of the deteriorating
influence of the national movement led by both the Palestine
Liberation Organization (PLO) and “Hamas.”
Several interrelated and interdependent factors are
sustaining the status quo:
First, the US-sponsored political process launched with much
fanfare in Annapolis , Maryland on November 17 last year has
almost lost steam, leaving the two-state solution doomed and
the PLO disillusioned, but in a loss of what the next step
should be.
The PLO is now aware that they were used by the US-Israeli
allies to appease the Arab “moderates” into being tricked in
their turn into closing their eyes to the US free hand in
Iraq and vis-à-vis Iran and Syria . The Quartet of the
Middle East peace mediators, comprising the US , UN, EU and
Russia , subscribes to the same policy.
Second, Peace alternatives, like the one-state solution,
have slim chances to find Israeli subscribers and are
already ruled out by the US-Israeli determination to impose
the recognition of Israel as a “Jewish state” on
Palestinians as a precondition for making peace.
Third, Both Amman and Cairo as well as a Palestinian
semi-consensus decisively rule out an old Israeli
alternative to annex the West Bank to Jordan (the so-called
Jordanian option) and Gaza Strip to Egypt . “Jordanians
consider the mere talk on this … a conspiracy against them,”
former minister of information and member of the upper house
of parliament, Saleh Qallab, wrote in Asharq al-Awsat on
January 31, adding that Egypt “knows” that restoring Gaza to
its pre-1967 status would be an Egyptian “time bomb.”
Forth, the peace “contacts” via Turkey between Syria and
Israel is further proof of the impasse on the Palestinian –
Israeli track. Marc Perelman, in The Jewish Daily Forward on
May 22, quoted Aaron David Miller, who was part of American
peace negotiation teams in the region for three decades, as
saying: “Leaving one track and going for the other is a way
for Israel to get some leverage on the Palestinian track
that seems stuck.”
Fifth, the multi-layer internal division (between Hamas and
Fatah, within Fatah itself, the presidency and Hamas, which
dominates the Palestinian legislative Council (PLC), the
governments of Ramallah and Gaza ) is paralyzing Palestinian
central decision-making. "Neither the peace process, nor the
(upcoming) sixth Fatah conference can succeed without
national reconciliation,” senior Fatah leader and former
national security adviser, Jibril al-Rjoub, told Al-Arabiyya
satellite television on February 17. However, national
reconciliation remains hostage to US-Israeli veto and anti-Hamas
preconditions.
Sixth, the crossroads is not only visible because the US
sponsor of the peace process is already preoccupied with the
electoral campaign that will bring about a new
administration next January, but it is more visible by the
internal Palestinian division.
National institutional terms of reference have almost been
obsolete for years now. The last Fatah conference was held
in 1989. The PLO has been practically overtaken and
marginalized by the Palestinian Authority (PA) and its
marginalization doomed its leading role among the
Palestinian Diaspora and refugees in exile, leaving a vacuum
that was filled by Hamas and the Islamic Jihad.
Moreover the PA institutional references are either in no
better legitimacy or their legitimacy will expire by the end
of the 2008. President Abbas’ term expires next January; the
PLC, whose term will expire in January 2009, is paralyzed by
Israeli detention of more than fifty of its lawmakers.
Palestinian Central Election Commission is already bracing
for local elections be the year end.
Convening the Fatah sixth conference, reviving the PLO back
to its leading role, inclusion by the PLO of Hamas, Islamic
Jihad and other emerging non-PLO political parties, are
overdue prerequisites for a “legitimate” national unity,
while renewal of the PA institutional references is already
on the agenda.
If the national institutional references are not revived for
whatever reason, be it the US-Israeli veto or other, and the
renewal of the PA institutions is adversely affected by the
national division and not properly done according to the
Basic Law, the ensuing inaction would not only exacerbate
the divide but it would render the Palestinian people
leaderless, deprive Israel of a credible Palestinian peace
partner and rule out peace and any credible peace process
for a long time to come; in the end this could be the real
undeclared US-Israeli strategy!
* Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab Journalist based in Bir
Zeit of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian West Bank. |
