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| Israel-Palestine-Jordan |
| Hamas on the rise in Palestinian territories |
| 2005-12-18 |
| The success of the militant Islamic group Hamas in the latest round of Palestinian local elections is just the latest indication of the deterioration of the main Palestinian faction, Fatah, after the death of Yasir Arafat last year. To some degree, the decline has been accelerated by the policy choices and the distant, uninspiring personality of Mr. Arafat's successor, Mahmoud Abbas. Without the binding charisma of Mr. Arafat, and without the ability or will to use his aggressive tactics, Mr. Abbas is struggling to manage a renewed struggle between his secular Fatah faction and the Islamists that Mr. Arafat repressed and delayed. "The success of Hamas," said Khaled Duzdar, a Palestinian who is an analyst at the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information, "is only due to Fatah's failures." Those failures long precede the death of Mr. Arafat. He relished the role of revolutionary, but he was no administrator, and his Palestinian Authority was criticized for corruption, indolence and a failure to care about ordinary Palestinians. And Mr. Arafat's decision to recognize Israel and negotiate with it over the 1993 Oslo accords, which allowed him to return from exile, did not produce a Palestinian state. All that was ripe ground for Hamas, with its reputation for piety, its social-welfare network and its military wing, which carried out attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians. But Mr. Arafat was also revered by Palestinians as the founder of their nascent nation, the man who turned Palestinian from an adjective that included anyone who lived in the British Mandate for Palestine to a specific appellation for a people. In Leon Uris's 1958 novel of the founding of the state of Israel, "Exodus," the Jewish hero, Ari Ben Canaan, is invariably referred to as "the Palestinian." It reads oddly today, largely because of Mr. Arafat, who took a scattered people and gave them a new identity. Mr. Arafat was also willing to exercise a strong hand. He kept Hamas - created in 1987 as the fighting arm of the religious Muslim Brotherhood - in line and out of power. In negotiations in the early 1990's, he rejected proposals that Hamas join the secular Palestine Liberation Organization with up to 40 percent of seats, and he refused to give Hamas a share of power in the Palestinian Authority, which the P.L.O., dominated by Fatah, controlled. Mr. Arafat always insisted that the P.L.O. was "the sole and legitimate representative of the Palestinian people" - specifically excluding Hamas and the other Islamists, like Islamic Jihad. And he cracked down intermittently on them. His successor, Mr. Abbas, is entirely different, lacking the charisma of Mr. Arafat, a natural politician. A negotiator and man of logic, who opposes terrorism and the war against Israel as counterproductive, Mr. Abbas, at 70, carries all the weight of Mr. Arafat's failures without any credit for his successes. Mr. Abbas has told intimates he feels lonely, with few real allies, in a Palestinian polity that sees little movement from Israel, that resents its powerlessness and despises its corrupt leadership. He has described himself as transitional, opening the gates to his rivals. Yet he has refused to jettison the old guard or to crack down and provide law and order in the streets. The municipalities battle is only a forerunner to the battle for parliament in an election set for Jan. 25. And the battle for parliament is really a battle for the P.L.O., to which the Palestinian Authority is subordinate. Still, Mr. Abbas believes that the politicization of Hamas is a great accomplishment, the only way to moderate the group, and that democratic politics are the only path to genuine national unity. Many in Fatah, let alone in Israel, are unconvinced. Faced with the Hamas challenge, Fatah itself is splitting, with another long-repressed conflict coming into the open - the generational struggle between those who were Arafat cronies and went into exile with him and those in their 40's who grew up at home after the 1967 war, under Israeli occupation, learning Hebrew in Israeli jails and feeling excluded from power. Led by Marwan Barghouti, who is serving five consecutive life sentences plus 40 years in an Israeli prison, the younger generation has its own slate in the January elections, a direct challenge to Mr. Abbas that he is trying to forestall. On Saturday, negotiations were going on between representatives of Mr. Abbas and Mr. Barghouti about how to rally Fatah around a slate that gives the younger, indigenous generation more power and retires some of the old guard. Shaken by the Hamas surge, Fatah is finally seeing the value of unity. Despite the threat, polls still show Fatah with an edge. So what would define success for Hamas in January? Forty percent of the vote could be seen as a huge accomplishment, even if Palestinian and Israeli analysts are talking excitedly about a possible Hamas majority. In any case, Hamas will have a much broader influence on Palestinian politics. That already has Israeli politicians who are engaged in their own campaigns making broad statements about how a Hamas victory will mean the end of negotiations and the troubled peace plan known as the road map. On Saturday, Silvan Shalom, the foreign minister who is trying to win the leadership of battle to lead the Likud Party that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has abandoned, warned that a Hamas victory could "put us back 50 years." Mr. Shalom praised a resolution of Friday evening from the United States House of Representatives warning that the Palestinian Authority risks losing American aid if Hamas participates in an election that is only six weeks away. Hamas, after all, has carried out many attacks against Israelis, and it has been designated a terrorist group by Israel, Europe and the United States. But the Palestinian election is also bound to be clarifying, a relatively realistic measure of Palestinian sentiment a year after Mr. Arafat's death. The election will also signify the reintegration of a significant minority of Palestinian opinion into politics and perhaps government. In any case, a successful Hamas will have to adapt to a new role of responsibility, while accepting the previous commitment of the P.L.O. and the Palestinian Authority to a negotiated, two-state solution with Israel, even if it insists that Israel will be gone in the fullness of time. Hamas, which believes, like Hezbollah in Lebanon, that politics and armed resistance must go hand in hand, may never give up its "right to resist" or its weapons, but it may find itself forced politically not to use them, or not very often. Haim Malka, a permanent fellow with the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, argued in The Washington Quarterly of autumn 2005 that Hamas had already won a historic victory. He wrote that the group's agreement to participate in electoral politics on a national level was "nothing less than an earthquake in Palestinian politics, signaling the clear end of one-party rule." A more representative Palestinian government is much more likely to stabilize Palestinian society, Mr. Malka said, and he maintained that it would also "ultimately strengthen any future agreement between Israel and the Palestinians." |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #1 a Hamas victory could "put us back 50 years." OTOH it could bring the end game forward by a few years. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2005-12-18 05:21 |