The shadow falling on Israel-Palestinian peace

The shadow falling on Israel-Palestinian peace

I’ve written on several occasions that Mahmoud Abbas and Fatah can’t be expected to make a peace agreement acceptable to Israel or to deliver on one if it were signed. Today Barry Rubin explains exactly why this is true.
Fatah’s Politics Make Peace Impolitic
By Barry Rubin
T.S. Elliot wrote memorably in “The Hollow Men”: Between the idea/And the reality/Between the motion/And the act/Falls the Shadow
In the case of the peace process and all the great ideas for fixing everything in Arab-Israel relations, the Shadow has been Palestinian leaders’ unwillingness–and now also inability–to make a compromise agreement ending the conflict.
Close examination of the movement’s ideology, organization, and structure shows why this is true. Exactly forty years ago, in 1968, Yasir Arafat and Fatah took over. That same year he laid down two principles dominating the movement ever since.
First, in July 1968, he changed the PLO Charter from emphasizing the group was no longer a follower of Arab states but both independent and the struggle’s leader. But at the same time he stated, “We are an extension of the hundred million Arabs.”
It proved hard to have it both ways, though Arafat usually managed the tension adequately. Today, the Arab world’s real support for Fatah–and for the Palestinians generally–is minimal, though many in the West still don’t notice that. Palestinian Authority (PA) leader Mahmoud Abbas recently said, “Our Arab relations are at their best. We do not have any problems with any Arab country.”
Well, not exactly. The remaining backing does not include financial aid (the West pays the bills), direct military involvement, or strenuous diplomatic effort. Instead, it mostly revolves around demanding that the United States solve the problem while the regimes focus on their own real priorities.
Second, back in 1968, Arafat mandated the goal as total victory bringing Israel’s disappearance. Thus, armed struggle was the main tactic intended to “maintain an atmosphere of strain and anxiety that will force the Zionists to realize that it is impossible for them to live in Israel.” Since then, Israel has prospered, the Palestinians have suffered, and Hamas has seized that slogan. But it also remains a central plank for Fatah.
Abbas puts the main emphasis on diplomacy today. But most of his colleagues and constituents are still focused on glorifying violence and insisting on ultimate, total victory. What he can do, or even say, is quite limited.

On January 13, for example, Abbas briefed the PLO Central Council in Ramallah about President George Bush’s visit and relations with Hamas. It was not a demagogic speech aimed at scoring points against Israel or attacking the United States–some things have changed–but rather a soberly presented, albeit steeped in wishful thinking, presentation.
Quite notable, however, is that Abbas said not a word showing readiness to compromise or preaching the virtues of peace with Israel. Nor has he changed anything in the schools or the PA-controlled mosques and media, whose virulence and enthusiasm for violence is unchanged. Fatah’s symbol, displayed next to Abbas, still shows all of Israel as Palestine. Abbas dares not challenge his constituents’ fervent beliefs.
He merely insists that the PLO is still “the Palestinian people’s sole legitimate representative,” despite the fact that Hamas is not in it. To conciliate Hamas he offers it a large minority share in the PLO, which Hamas rejected even when it was weaker. In addition, the PA will spend 58 percent of aid money on salaries for its employees in the Gaza Strip thus subsidizing Hamas’s bureaucracy. Ironically, money given by Western donors to strengthen Fatah and weaken Hamas will help the latter, and no one will complain about this reversal of their intentions.
Abbas discusses the Annapolis conference and Bush’s visit only in terms of Palestinian demands without mention of Palestinian obligations. Without telling his people that violence is outmoded, coexistence with Israel necessary, terrorists attacking Israel must be punished, and refugees need be resettled in a Palestinian state, he cannot build popular support for doing these things. On the contrary, such concepts are still seen as treason to the cause. He knows this and as a result takes none of the steps needed to achieve peace.
Abbas does present a softer line, up to a point. He opposes shooting rockets from the Gaza Strip at Israel as well as Israeli retaliatory raids. Abbas even recounts that when Israel offered to let people leave the Gaza Strip freely for study, work, or medical treatment abroad, Hamas refused and even fired “on any crossing that was opened [in order] to close it.”
But his treatment of Hamas’s “coup” in the Gaza Strip seeks to evade the problem. Israel, he complains, holds him responsible for what happens in Gaza, claiming this is an excuse. And he shows nationalist solidarity with Hamas against Israel, in effect giving the Islamists veto power over any strategy or solution.
Yet how can Abbas, Fatah, and the PA claim to be sole representative when they don’t control over half the land and people supposedly represented? How can Abbas do anything when most of Fatah is closer to Hamas than to his more moderate impulses?
His regime, then, simply cannot deliver an agreement ending the conflict. Not only cannot Fatah regain control of the Gaza Strip, it will be lucky to hold onto the West Bank.
“Fatah is now convalescing,” Abbas assures colleagues, “and, God willing, you will witness that it will fare very well” in future. Yet nothing has changed in Fatah. The Arafat crowd, veteran leaders from decades of PLO intransigence, still rule. Whatever Abbas’s personal views, there are few moderates among them, nor would they back their supposed leader if he actually tried to stop cross-border attacks, punish terrorism, end incitement, clamp down on internal anarchy, or make a deal with Israel.
This leadership is being challenged by the “young guard” which decries the “old guard’s” corruption and suggests it has become too soft. The new generation is by no means more moderate. Its reference point is not the 1990s’ peace process but the 1980s’ intifada.
Many or most of the young guard prefer a deal with Hamas, rather than one with Israel, and a return to systematic armed struggle. At best, they believe a peace treaty can only come after Israel is expelled from the West Bank, a task that would take decades and if ever fulfilled would whet their ambitions for total victory.
Abbas is trapped. He can neither defeat nor make peace with Israel; neither defeat nor make a deal with Hamas in which the latter would accept Fatah’s leadership. Nor can he control his own organization, end the chaos in the West Bank, or implement an economic development program. That’s his Shadow. His only asset–though a considerable one–is that both the West and Israel will ignore all these problems and pretend otherwise.
It is important, as well as amazing to note that since I wrote a column on Fatah politics in November 2004 (click here to read it) literally nothing has changed, During more than three years of crisis, during which Fatah lost power to Hamas in the Gaza Strip, not one detail of Fatah leadership, organization, structure, discipline, ideology, or effort to control corruption has improved. This is the group that is now going to get $7 billion in aid without any conditionality.
Here is some additional, more detailed, evidence for that assertion.
The PLO and the PA are governed by Fatah. There are 20 members of the Fatah Central Committee, that organization’s highest body. No new members have been added since 1995. None of these people lived in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip between 1967 and 1994 and most of them were in exile from 1948 to 1994. This means that in many ways they do not represent the actual people they are governing.
On this committee, there are only three people who could be called relative moderates: Mahmoud Abbas, Nabil Shaath, and Ahmad Khuri (Abu Ala). Abbas and Khuri have a very bad relationship so the Palestinian Authority leader can only really count on three votes: his own, Shaath, and his national security advisor Nasir Yusuf.
At least six members are very hardline, openly hostile even to the 1990s peace process. These are all very important people:

• Farouq Quddumi, the head of Fatah.
• Sakhr Habash (Abu Nizar), chief of the Fatah Revolutionary Committee which is the group immediately below the Central Committee.
• Salim al-Zaanun, head of the Palestine National Council (PNC), the legislative wing of the PLO.
• Muhammad Ghana’im (Abu Mahir), Fatah’s veteran representative to Kuwait.
• Abd al-Hamid Ha ‎ ‘yil, who led one of the main terrorist organizations in Fatah.
• General Muhammad Jihad, former Palestine Liberation Army officer.

The remaining ten members are all Arafat-era bureaucrats who have never expressed any view that could be considered moderate. I could easily put many or most of them into the hardline group listed above.
Thus, the Fatah leadership can be said to be:

• Institutionally hostile to Hamas, viewing Fatah as the only acceptable leadership for the Palestinians.
• Opposed to any changes including real anti-corruption drives, an end to incitement for anti-Israel terrorism, a real effort to use aid money to raise living standards for the general population, or shifts in ideology toward greater moderation.
• Hostile to bringing in new leadership and unwilling to add the voice of the younger generation.

If Abbas were ever to propose a realistic peace agreement with Israel he would be lucky to carry one-fifth of the Central Committee. Knowing this, he will never try.

Now is not the time for a Palestinian state

It’s become conventional wisdom that the path to peace between Israel and the Palestinians is a new partition agreement. Israel will leave some or all of the territory conquered in 1967, with or without land swaps; Jerusalem will in some way be divided so that part of it can be the capital of Israel and part of Palestine; the refugees will go somewhere; and a peaceful state of Palestine will be created with or without territorial contiguity. It’s just a matter of working out the details and preventing the ‘extremists’ from wrecking it.
Virtually every ‘moderate’ voice in the world, starting with the Bush Administration — even some Arab states — officially supports some kind of Oslo-like solution along these lines. Only outlaws like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hamas, and Hezbollah oppose it. Public opinion in the West is massively in favor.
Yet it can’t possibly be implemented, at least not for a generation, and anybody who has paid attention to the actions and words of the Palestinian leadership, particularly since the signing of the Oslo accord and its failure, should be able to see this.
Former Israeli Chief of Staff, Lt. Gen. (res.) Moshe Ya’alon spoke this week at the Herzliya Conference in Israel, and his words should be required reading for everyone concerned, particularly the diplomats in the US State Department and Foreign Offices around the world.
Some of Ya’alon’s points:

In the [Oslo] accord Israel recognized the right of the Palestinian people to have self determination and recognized the PLO as the sole representative of the Palestinian people. The Palestinians, on the other side, did not recognize Zionism as a national Jewish movement and did not recognize the rights of the Jews to a national Jewish country, an independent Jewish state. The Palestinians delayed Israel’s efforts to insist on the Palestinian recognizing Israel as a Jewish state.

Indeed, in spite of massive pressure from President Clinton, the PLO covenant which defined Israel as illegitimate and called for its ‘liberation by armed struggle’ was never changed. And today’s ‘moderate’ Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayed refuse to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

This lack of recognition shows that the Palestinians are striving for the disappearance of Israel as an independent Jewish state, or in other words: the Palestinians’ goal is not an Israeli state within the 1967 borders (Gaza, Judea and Samaria) but a Palestinian state on Israel’s ruins. It is important to remember that the Palestinian unification did not come after the six day war, but with the foundation of Zionism. In my opinion, Arafat started a war in September 2000 to escape from the “two state solution” and the de-facto recognition of Israel as an independent Jewish state.

In addition we can see a pattern in Arafat’s war of terror that is very similar to the reaction of Palestinians in previous attempts to divide the land: in 1937 the [Peel] Committee and the “Arab Rebellion”; in 1947 the UN partition plan and the War of Independence afterwards…

…since the beginning of Zionism there was no Palestinian leadership that was willing to acknowledge the right of the Jewish people to an independent Jewish state. In addition, since the beginning of Zionism there was no Palestinian leadership that was willing to accept a Jewish state within the 1967 borders as a final agreement. Under these circumstances there is no way to establish a secure situation with a “two state solution”.

But is it possible that Abbas and Fayed are different? In a word, no. Barry Rubin discusses this in detail in the previous post, “The shadow falling on Israel-Palestinian peace“, but some of the symptoms are 1) their inability to compromise on recognition of Israel as a Jewish state or on a right of return, 2) their inability to confront Hamas or even the terrorists in their own Fatah organization, and 3) their continued tolerance of the campaign of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic incitement coming from every media and educational outlet in the Palestinian Authority.

If Fatah is bad, Hamas and the other jihadist elements in the Palestinian movement are far worse.. Ya’alon writes,

The disengagement from the Gaza strip in 2005 was an opportunity for the Palestinians to show themselves and the world that the end of Israeli occupation in Gaza will bring change in every aspect: in the field of security the cessation of terrorism, internal law and order, economic growth and political stability. Hamas taking control of Gaza by force, the internal conduct and the ongoing rocket fire on Israeli settlements show that the Israeli “occupation” (the territories that were conquered in the 1967 war), as the west calls it, is not the same definition that the Palestinians use, referring to all of Israel; from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean sea.

The Islamic jihad’s seizure of control in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict makes the discussion over the territorial commitment irrelevant because:

• According to the Islamists the have no authority to discuss the land of Israel (because it is sacred - Waqf).
• Israel’s attempts to comply with their demands to withdraw from Lebanon in 2000 and from Gaza in 2005 only strengthened the Islamic jihad.

If a Palestinian state were to be created despite this — that is, if Israel and the West delude themselves into thinking that the Palestinians intend the state as something other than a stepping-stone to their ultimate goal — Ya’alon thinks a positive outcome highly unlikely:

Considering Palestinian leaderships throughout time, the question “is it possible to trust any Palestinian leadership in existence of responsible national entity?” comes to mind.

1. Palestinian leaderships brought destruction to every country they were able to settle down in (Jordan Lebanon, Israel)
2. Palestinian leaderships did not keep their commitments and agreements.
3. Palestinian leaderships have not shown any interest in economic growth (the financial aid was not used to build an economic foundation, they have disabled their own industrial zones and corruption scared off investors)

Therefore I do not see the possibility of an economically independent Palestinian entity. The economic gap between Palestine and Israel is the recipe for instability. In addition, I do not see the possibility of the existence of a Palestinian entity that will bring stability and security. Nevertheless the possibility of a hostile entity is huge.

So if an Oslo-type solution is impossible, what is?

In order to enable a new way of thinking we have to eliminate the failing one. One of the most important failed ways of thinking is the “need to find a solution now”. In my opinion we need to look at the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in terms of conflict management not conflict resolution.

The movement toward a Palestinian state needs to be put on hold until the Palestinians make some real reforms:

1. Educational reform; there is no way of getting a stable agreement as long as the Palestinian educational system keeps educating the children not to recognize the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish independent state and treats Zionism as colonialist organization… an end to incitement in the public political discourse, in the media and in the mosques.
2. A reform in law and order… A strong system of law enforcement that will not allow the creation of armed gangs and organizations.
3. Security reform; it is PA’s responsibility to implement what they have previously committed to; a unification of all the security elements and extensive counter-terrorism measures…
4. Economic reform…The transfer of millions of dollars to the Palestinians failed because of corruption… a leadership that prefers terrorism over economic growth and terror organizations which prefer poverty and distress over economic gains in order to recruit the masses in the war against Israel…
5. Political reform …a change from dictatorship to democracy…

Is this even possible? Certainly not today. But it will certainly not come about while all the ‘moderate’ forces in the world are bent on pushing Israel into accepting the establishment of a state when the Palestinians are neither desirous of a peaceful one or capable of a viable one. The pressure, rather, should be on the Palestinians to take real steps toward reform.