GAZA, 26 July 2004 — The Palestinian Authority and its president, Yasser Arafat, have undoubtedly failed in their supposed mission of leading the Palestinian people toward freedom and independence.
Nothing less than a complete reshuffling of the Palestinian political reality seems capable of resetting the course.
When hundreds of Palestinian security forces, once stationed in other Arab countries, flooded the Gaza Strip in 1993, as a part of the Oslo peace accords between Israel and Arafat, every man, woman and child waited at the Strip’s highway to greet them.
Even those who snubbed Arafat and his personal initiative were overwhelmed with tears of joy once the buses crossed the border into Gaza, filled with crying men flashing victory signs.
Those returnees were to be the future police force that would ensure the success of the transition period leading from a slow-paced implementation of a peace deal to the full-fledged sovereignty of Palestinian statehood.
But ten years later, the situation has changed so dramatically that those who vowed to safeguard the Palestinian people’s aspirations were the ones who so harshly desecrated them.
Thanks to the Palestinian Authority, corruption and nepotism are now ingrained in the occupied territories. The PA, the bare bones of a governing body that rules with no political legitimacy but that granted by Israel, only safeguards its own interests, the interests of its VIP cardholders and business contractors.
It was the blatant symptoms of that corrupt body that drove me a few weeks ago to write an article, warning of almost certain anarchy in Gaza.
My article seemed like the antithesis of so victorious a mood among many Palestinians that Israel has finally accepted the fact that the ever-defiant Gaza Strip cannot be subdued.
The feeling of triumph and back patting, however, came to an abrupt end as Gaza has in fact fallen into chaos and anarchy; several kidnappings were staged by militants in various parts of the Strip, reaching foreigners and even the chief of security forces himself.
It was easy for many Palestinian officials to respond by shielding themselves behind empty slogans: “Those criminal hands stand at odds with the living conscience of the Palestinian people”, one of them said on television. But the harsh reality that must be confronted is that long ignored grievances and untold despair can lead to what is even worse than a few bloodless kidnappings, which is a scream for attention rather than a criminal undertaking.
Israeli occupation and corruption among the Palestinian elite are forcing many Palestinians to take on desperate measures. Without dutifully and immediately relieving the causes of this desperation, Gaza will most certainly sink even deeper into anarchy.
There is little doubt that that the occupation and PA corruption are correlated. This is not to discount the responsibility that falls on the shoulders of Arafat and his men. Palestinians can no longer afford deferring all of their problems to a postoccupation reality that requires many years to be attained. Arafat is in fact capable of cleansing his house of the old guard profiteers who only associate Palestine and its cause with contracts and moneymaking.
For years, and despite recurring demands made by numerous human and civil rights groups, Arafat failed to expand the authority to fairly represent all segments of the population, often pressured by Israel not to include “anti-peace” elements in an authority that was originally incepted to fight Israel’s enemies. As a result, the great majority of Palestinians living in the occupied territories became permanently marginalized.
Add to this the fact that the PA had no accountability whatsoever. The judicial institutions lacked independence and were often overridden by Arafat’s decrees and sidelined by his above-the-law security apparatus. The PA was only held accountable to Israel with its limitless demands for security, demands that necessitated the arrest, beating and torture of Palestinians whom Israel accused of constituting a threat.
As most Palestinians watched in dismay the unabashed misconduct of their leadership, coupled with a suffocating Israeli siege and other often-violent draconian measures, they had no choice but to still seek the path of the PA when finding jobs or requesting travel permits.
In Gaza, unemployment has reached staggering rates, as over half of the population has no steady income. Nepotism thrived as a result: $1,000 was the price tag for getting a job with the Authority, while a VIP card was much more costly. And while the refugee camps of Gaza remained intact, skyscrapers were erected to cater to the needs of the corrupt elites who were so quick to abandon the battlefield when poor Palestinians stood fighting.
True, the ongoing intifada was a cry for freedom and a denunciation of colonization and military occupation. However, it was directed at the PA as well, since, in the mind of ordinary Palestinians, the PA was the illegitimate outcome of an illegitimate (secret) peace agreement that spawned nothing but corruption and pseudo-sovereignty.
The Palestinian people have shown a remarkable level of tolerance and patience. In order to maintain their unity in the face of so harsh a military machine, they deferred their battle against corruption. Many feel that the time of that battle is now. Regrettably, corruption is as embedded as the determination of the people to see it abolished. There are many groups and factions that are benefiting from the status quo. Concurrently, Israel, whose killings throughout the occupied territories never came to a halt, is already using the crisis in Gaza to retroactively justify its construction of the Apartheid Wall of the West Bank.
The situation in Gaza is engulfed in uncertainty and cannot be redeemed with Arafat’s cosmetic touches — replacing a corrupt police chief with a more corrupt cousin of his.
The scene in Gaza of Palestinians reuniting with their families in 1993 was unforgettable. I know, because I too stood there. But I also know that it was not the sins of those who waited or those who returned that turned that promise into a fraud. It was the sins of those who had the power to side with the aspirations of their people, yet chose to serve as Israel’s body guard. These are the same individuals who smuggled cement into Israel to build its illegal wall. These people must all go. The PA must be overhauled to represent the Palestinian people wholly, not the self-seeking elites. Anything less than that is a victory for Israel, and will further demonstrate to the world that Palestinians are incapable of governing themselves, and thus a prolonged Israeli occupation is inevitable.
The Palestinian quest for freedom is not a battle for chairs, positions or between individuals, no matter how overly symbolic they claim to be. Those who choose to chase titles and business contracts have no place among the determined freedom seekers and should expect the worst of all fates.
(Ramzy Baroud is a Palestinian-American journalist, head of research at Aljazeera.net English and editor-in-chief of the Palestine Chronicle.)
