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| Israel-Palestine-Jordan | |||
| Fatah confab: Once again choosing to miss the opportunity | |||
| 2009-08-17 | |||
THERE IS no question that the meeting was a success for the Fatah establishment and for the PLO, and PA leader Mahmoud Abbas in particular. But like many such successes, it will be paid for by an inability to move toward peace as well as Palestinian suffering. Yet despite the fact that rejecting peace will hurt their people more than those of Israel, on every issue where it had to choose between peace-oriented flexibility and intransigence, the Fatah leadership chose the latter. For example, Fatah has now officially adopted the al-Aqsa Brigades as its armed wing.
Once Mahmoud Abbas appoints four more officials to form a Fatah central committee of 22 people, at least two-thirds will be old-style Fatah bureaucrats, with almost all the rest members of the younger guard. Of the 18 elected, at least five are hard-liners who don't even accept the peace process and the Oslo Accords and the rest are Abbas's allies or lieutenants. The latter are not extremists by Palestinian standards; they are happy to negotiate with Israel and don't want to go to war, for now at least. But they will insist on having all Palestinian refugees who wish to do live in Israel, adherence to the 1967 borders, no recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, and perhaps they won't support a formal ending of the conflict and will give very little, if anything, on security arrangements.
And only one of the 18 men elected has been an important critic of the establishment: Marwan Barghouti, who is currently serving time in an Israeli prison. Call him a practically-minded radical who believes Israel must be driven out of the West Bank by force.
Fatah has apparently chosen as its next leader a man who rejects the 1993 Israel-PLO (Oslo) agreement and the ensuing peace process. Muhammad Ghaneim was so passionately opposed even to negotiating with Israel that he refused to go to the Gaza Strip and West Bank with Arafat in 1994. He also refused to participate in the PA as long as it was involved in the peace process. So can Ghaneim participate now because he has changed his mind, or rather - as seems more likely - that Fatah no longer takes the peace process seriously? This situation is equivalent to Russia picking a hard-line Stalinist as its next leader. Why did two-thirds of the delegates vote for him? Ghaneim got 33 percent more votes than Barghouti, who not only has a personal base of support but the chic of being a prisoner. Ghaneim is not that personally popular. I speculate that he's the chosen candidate of hard-line Fatah chief Farouk Kaddoumi, a man close to Syria's radical dictatorship, who is popular but too old to run himself. The key reason is that Abbas and his colleagues told delegates to vote for Ghaneim. Why? Part of the answer might be that he has a good personal relationship with Ghaneim. In addition, Ghaneim seems able to bridge the two groups which make up the Fatah leadership: radicals who thought Arafat too moderate, and hardliners who supported Arafat and now back Abbas. Finally, the West Bank warlords and political barons find it hard, as so often happens in politics, to give up their own ambitions and accept one of their rivals as chief. It's easier to accept an outsider who hasn't been in the West Bank at all and with whom one hasn't personally quarreled or competed. Abbas may well retire in the next year, and Ghaneim would then become leader of the PA, PLO and Fatah, too. This is incredibly important, far more so than the minor changes which are monopolizing debate over the meeting. | |||
| Posted by:trailing wife |