The continual firing of primitive homemade rockets at Israeli targets from the Gaza Strip, the exodus of refugees through the Palestine-Egypt border crossing of Rafah in January and the series of ongoing peaceful demonstrations at Gaza's crossing points into Israel are not an aggressive demonstration of self-confidence, but more a show of defensive despair and weakness against the tight Israeli military siege.
Much as Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' threats to resign are a passive defensive reaction to the political siege imposed on him by the United States and Israel, who have so far failed to deliver on their promises to bring about an agreement to create a Palestinian state by the end of 2008.
Dogged by allegations of corruption, which could herald either a premiership change or early elections that would lead to a change in administration, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is likely to join Abbas and U.S. President George W. Bush, whose terms will run out next January, as outgoing leaders whose respective departures are much-awaited by many of their constituents.
Their collective failure to deliver on the two-state solution has stranded the Palestinian national movement at a historical crossroads -- with a peace option that cannot be delivered, no viable alternatives and a peace process that functions purely as a crisis management mechanism. All this while multi-layer internal divisions paralyze the Palestinian central decision-making body and render it incapable of finding a way through the impasse.
"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 not a new event. 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-Qaeda-type salafism," which Khalidi says has already reached the Gaza Strip, and the growing attraction of the one-state or bi-national state option among Palestinians, as an alternative for the two-state solution for the 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 fueling the status quo:
First, the U.S.-sponsored political process launched with much fanfare in Annapolis, Maryland, on Nov. 17 last year has lost steam, leaving the two-state solution doomed and the PLO disillusioned and at a loss as to what the next step should be.
The PLO is now aware they were used by the U.S.-Israeli alliance to get Arab "moderates" to turn a blind eye to the U.S.'s machinations in Iraq and, to a lesser extent, Iran and Syria. The quartet of Middle East peace mediators -- the U.S., UN, EU and Russia -- all subscribe to the same policy.
Second, peace alternatives like the one-state solution are highly unpopular among Israelis and have already been ruled out by the U.S. and Israel's determination to impose the recognition of Israel as a "Jewish state" on Palestinians as a prerequisite to peace.
Third, both Jordan and Egypt (as well as the majority of Palestinians) decisively rule out an Israeli alternative to grant the West Bank to Jordan (the so-called Jordanian option) and Gaza Strip to Egypt.
"Jordanians consider the mere talk of 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 Jan. 31, adding that Egypt "knows" restoring Gaza to its pre-1967 status would be an Egyptian "time bomb".
Fourth, the peace "contacts" via Turkey between Syria and Israel is further proof of the impasse facing the Palestine-Israel question. Marc Perelman, in The Jewish Daily Forward on May 22, quoted Aaron David Miller, a 30-year veteran of America's peace negotiation team in the region, 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 divisions -- between Hamas and Fatah, within Fatah itself, between the president and Hamas, which dominates the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), and between the Ramallah and Gaza administrations -- 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 Feb. 17.
However, national reconciliation remains hostage to U.S.-Israeli veto and anti-Hamas prerequisites.
Sixth, the crossroads is not only visible because the U.S. -- sponsor of the peace process -- is already preoccupied with an electoral campaign that will usher in a new administration next January, but is also made more apparent by the internal Palestinian divisions.
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 this marginalization effectively doomed its leading role among the Palestinian diaspora in exile, leaving a vacuum that was filled by Hamas and the Islamic Jihad.
To make matters worse, the PA institutional references are considered no more legitimate, and will expire by the end of the year. President Abbas' term expires next January and the PLC, whose term will expire at the same time, is paralyzed by the detention by Israel of more than 50 of its lawmakers. The Palestinian central election commission is already bracing for local elections at the end of the year.
Convening the Fatah conference, restoring the PLO's role as a leader, inclusion by the PLO of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other emerging non-PLO political parties, are long-overdue prerequisites for a legitimate national unity, while renewal of PA institutional references is already on the agenda.
If the national institutional references are not revived, be it because of the U.S.-Israeli veto or some other reason, and the renewal of the PA institutions is adversely affected by the national division and not properly carried out, the ensuing inaction would not only exacerbate the divide but 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 U.S.-Israeli strategy!
The writer is a veteran Arab journalist based in Bir Zeit in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian West Bank.
| 
|
|
|
|
|
|
|