World Affairs
Palestine - Hamas takes the high road
Published 12 July 2004
Factions - Over the past decade, as hopes of peace faded and the burden of Israeli occupation grew, Islamists have outstripped more pragmatic, secular groups in popularity
The Palestinian national movement (of which, as explained on pages 18-20, the Palestine Liberation Organisation, or PLO, is the main political expression) is split into parties or "factions" that often fail to defer to their commander-in-chief. In May, for instance, Yasser Arafat said that he was ready to co-operate with Ariel Sharon's proposed withdrawal from Gaza on condition that "whatever happens in Gaza must also happen in the West Bank". But a month later, the Palestinian factions - including Arafat's own Fatah movement - called the disengagement plan "a deception and a fraud". For the Israeli government, this dissonance was yet one more case of Arafat saying one thing to the world and another to his own people. For Palestinians, however, it underscores a reality that has always held true: the Palestinian leader is one thing, the Palestinian movement something else altogether.
Fatah. Few would deny that Arafat is the movement's founding father. In 1959, with a small band of Palestinian exiles in Kuwait, he created Fatah, historically the largest of the Palestinian factions. Its message, then and in the years that followed, was inspiring: to pursue an armed struggle to liberate all of Palestine, and to do so while remaining independent of Arab governments.
It proved a hugely popular slogan, tapping into deep sentiments among Palestinians. It called on them not only to take up arms, but also to free themselves from an Arab tutelage which, they believed, had lost most of Palestine to Israel in the 1948 war and the rest in the 1967 war. Fatah's insistence on the "independence of Palestinian decision" has lent it the seal of nationalist legitimacy in the conflict with Israel. It has also, on occasion, sparked conflict with those Arab regimes that have tried to suborn or co-opt the Palestinian cause. The most bloody of these confrontations was with Syria during Lebanon's 16-year civil war.
However, there are other reasons for Fatah's appeal. By espousing nationalism and secularism as the "only" creed, Fatah provides a home for every Palestinian: rich, poor, resident, refugee, Muslim or Christian. Moreover, Fatah is pragmatic. Arafat, at least in the past, was adept at using events to steer the course of his people gently in the direction he sought, while appearing to keep within the "national consensus".
Yet these efforts to remain within the national consensus also led to savage contradictions, exposing the party's lack of good leadership. This is revealed in the tension caused by Fatah's two core demands: first, for statehood and, second, for the refugees' right of return. Politically, the choice has long been one or the other: Israel will not permit a Palestinian state unless the right of return is abandoned. But as every attempt at a peace agreement has proved, Fatah has never been able to resolve whether it is a movement fighting for statehood or for the right of return. It knows that if it did decide between the two, its resident and refugee constituencies would tear it apart.
Lack of clear leadership is one failing; another is authoritarianism. Always latent, this became pronounced after the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993. Alone among the main Palestinian parties, Fatah supported the agreement. Unlike the PLO (which represents the worldwide community of Palestinians) with its multiple factions, the Palestinian Authority is a one-party "state". Fatah dominates most of the ministries and all of its police forces, with all the unaccountability, corruption and lawlessness that such dominance entails.
Fatah's (and Arafat's) leadership is challenged by two groups within the PLO: the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Democratic Front. Nationalist and nominally Marxist movements, they have, in their time, produced some of Palestine's finest political minds. Both groups believed that the liberation of Palestine required first the liberation of the Arab world from pro-American and "reactionary" regimes. It was a belief put into practice when, together with a reluctant Fatah, they tried to overthrow Jordan's King Hussein in 1970. Since the upheavals of the late 1970s, the two have been in irreversible decline, now commanding barely 6 per cent support in the occupied territories.
Hamas. A resurgent Palestinian Islamism from outside the PLO has taken the place of the two Fronts in challenging Fatah's leadership. Its main parties are Hamas (the Islamic Resistance Movement) and the smaller Islamic Jihad. Polls show that, taken together, their support in the occupied territories now outstrips Fatah's.
Doctrinally opposed to any peace treaty with Israel, both parties view all of Palestine, and Jerusalem in particular, as a holy trust granted to Muslims by God. Hamas, however, does accept a kind of interim solution, in which an armistice, or hudna, could be observed in return for Israel's withdrawal from the territories it occupied in the 1967 war. Until then, both movements see armed struggle as the "only way" to liberate any or all of Palestine.
Islamic Jihad emerged in a blaze of guns just before the first intifada; Hamas was formed just after it started. Both groups, but particularly Hamas, have been on a rising curve ever since.
There are three main reasons for the rise of political Islam in Palestine, aside from frustration at the collapse of peace. One is the general support for the new groups' strategy of armed resistance, including suicide operations inside Israel. Most Palestinians see these actions, deplored by most of the world, as a just response to the huge imbalance of military power that Israel wields over them.
A second is Hamas's deserved reputation for organisational discipline, financial probity and social conscience. Its impressive array of welfare and charitable services (financed historically by the Arab Gulf states, but also by other Arab and Muslim states and communities) stands in stark contrast to the inefficiency, collapse and corruption of the Palestinian Authority ministries.
Third, in the heat of the current uprising, Hamas and Islamic Jihad have forged a tactical unity with younger Fatah leaders. These Fatah men, feeling themselves betrayed by the failure of Oslo and the PA to bring peace, have became radicalised by the collective, and sometimes lethal, punishments that Israel has routinely used to quell the Palestinian revolt.
The new unity is revealed in such bodies as the National and Islamic Forces, an umbrella group under which all Palestinian factions come together to debate policy. And it is practised in the military co-ordination shown by the Islamist militias and Fatah offshoots, such as the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. It may well become more important should Hamas stake a place in Palestinian government when, or if, Israel withdraws from Gaza.
Israel insists on a policy of ostracising Arafat, arguing that "pressure" on the PA will bring forth a more moderate Palestinian leadership. Current trends in Palestinian society suggest the opposite. The more the prospect of a genuine two-states solution recedes, the more the Palestinian national movement appears to be reverting to its older slogans of return and liberation. Once these were couched in terms of a democratic, secular Palestine; today they are imbued with a fiercer Islamist content.
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