Amal Jamal - The Palestinian National Movement: Politics of Contention, 1967-2005

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Politics of Contention, 19672005

AMAL JAMAL

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
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2005 by Amal Jamal

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jamal, Amal.
The Palestinian national movement : politics of contention, 19672005 / [Amal Jamal].
p. cm. (Indiana series in Middle East studies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-253-34590-1 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 0-253-21773-3 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Palestinian ArabsPolitics and government20th century. 2. Munazzamat al-Tahrir al-Filastiniyah. I. Title. II. Series.
DS113.7J36 2005
320.956940899274dc22

2004027628

1 2 3 4 5 10 09 08 07 06 05

Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history. But no fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical. It became historical post-humously, as it were, through events that maybe separated from it by thousands of years. A historian that takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one. Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the time of the now which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.

Walter Benjamin (1933)

The election of Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) on January 9, 2005, as the head of the Palestinian Authority by a majority of 62 percent marked a very important shift in the Palestinian national movement in general and in the PA in particular. The elections were the culmination of a process that started with the death in November 2004 of Yasir Arafat, who dominated Palestinian politics for more than forty years. The elections resulted in the smooth shift of power to Abu Mazen, who won legitimacy by vote of a majority of the Palestinian people in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. They marked the institutionalization of Palestinian democracy, although the Palestinians were still not sovereign and continued to live under Israeli occupation. Moreover, the election of Abu Mazen was an important catalyst in shifting the political atmosphere in the region and in raising the chances that the peace negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis might be resumed in the near future.

The elections also caused some changes in the internal Palestinian political scene. First, a majority of Palestinians now seemed to believe that negotiations were a better strategy for achieving national goals after a long period of time in which a great majority considered the use of violence against Israeli civilians as a good and legitimate strategy of struggle. Second, the majority support that placed Abu Mazen at the head of the PA put new limits on the maneuvering space of the national and Islamist opposition in the PA. Following the elections, oppositionary factions in the PA, especially Hamas and Islamic Jihad, began to change their political tone and expressed their willingness to respect a cease-fire agreement (Hudna) between the PA and Israel, if the latter abandoned its violent policies in the occupied territories. Third, the Palestinian elections institutionalized the domination of the national political elite that crystallized after the return of the Fatah/PLO leadership to the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1994 and the establishment of coalitions between external and internal leaders in a new matrix of power under the auspices of Yasir Arafat.

These changes in the Palestinian political scene followed a long period of bloody intifada, in which the channels of constructive dialogue between Palestinians and Israelis that were established after the start of the Oslo process in 1992 were eliminated. The outbreak of the second intifada in September 2000 ended several years of political negotiations, in which Palestinians and Israelis sought a mutually accepted solution to the Palestinian problem. During the second intifada, the Israeli government under the prime ministership of Ariel Sharon adopted ironfisted policies that targeted leaders, institutions, infrastructures, and resources in a strategy that has been termed politicide by the well-known Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling. It aimed at weakening not only the PA and its Islamic opposition, but the whole Palestinian national movement. Sharons strategy has been to reduce the ability of the Palestinian people to oppose Israeli dictates regarding a peaceful settlement that fulfills most if not all Israeli demands with full Palestinian consent. This policy line was initiated by Sharon himself during the Lebanon war in 1982, when he besieged Arafat and tried to impose a political deal that would eliminate the role of the PLO in any political agreement aimed at resolving the Palestinian problem politically.

In early 2005, implementing Sharons dictatorial policies, Israel continued to build its separation wall, which enabled Israel to confiscate thousands of acres of Palestinian land and imprison thousands of families in small ghettos, and continued to take unilateral measures to withdraw from the Gaza Strip. The Sharon government sought to pave a way to unilaterally disconnect from Gaza without having to pay the price of a peaceful settlement, most often invoking the slogan no partner on the other side. Pursuing this strategy, Sharon had imprisoned Arafat in his presidential complex for almost three years, until his death in November 2004, and had assassinated the top leaders of the Hamas movement, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin and Abed al-Aziz rantissi.

Sharons policies brought about the near paralysis of Palestinian politics. The national elite, which initiated and led the peace process with Israel in the early 1990s and embarked on the building of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, was marginalized by its partner in peace negotiations, Israel. Its power basethe institutions of the Palestinian Authority (PA) established after 1994was subject to systematic destruction by the Israeli army. The Palestinian Legislative Council, which was elected in early 1996, was unable to convene on a regular basis in order to enact laws and confirm governmental policies. The government that was put in place in mid-2003 as a result of an imposed Israeli-American plan to reform the PA proved to be ineffective. The opposition movements, mainly Hamas and Islamic Jihad, were targeted daily by Israel, which sought to physically eliminate their leadership. The Israeli army continued to infiltrate Palestinian cities and towns, targeting leaders of all ranks from all political factions. Israeli policies thus put all political factions on the defensive.