It was not a story that rated much notice as news, and where it did, it was accorded a short paragraph at the bottom of a reporter’s dispatch, tagged there as an afterthought: More than 300 young members of Fatah, the bulwark of the Palestinian national movement, submitted their resignation from the group last week, accusing it of corruption, ineptitude and bumbling in handling the Palestine conflict.
This news may not have made headlines, but these folks were nevertheless making a significant statement not only about the discontent that the overwhelming majority of Palestinians feel these days with their leaders’ dismal performance, but also about how never before since its arrival in the territories in 1994 has the Palestinian Authority seemed so irrelevant. This alienation by Palestinians from their leadership is supported by a recent poll conducted by the Jerusalem Media and Communication Center, which shows that 54 percent of the people in the West Bank and Gaza “did not feel” the PA’s presence, while more than 60 percent judged its performance as “bad” or “very bad.”
As if to suggest that the PA is not an organization they would trust with the car keys, much less their future, well over 30 percent of respondents actually said scrapping the organization would be in the national interest, presumably opting to live under occupation where the occupying power would meet its obligations under international law than give the false impression that there is a functioning authority out there, with its head above the parapet, negotiating on their behalf and looking out for their interests.
Why has it come to this? Clearly, the obstacles that Israel put in the way of the PA are legion: the targeted killings, the uprooting of trees and blowing up of homes, the murderous incursions into Palestinian towns, the road blocks, the land-grabbing, the curfews, the collective punishment imposed on entire communities, and the rest of it. And certainly the building of that wall of hate, with concertina wire encircling large chunks of farmland, has not only enraged Palestinians against Israel but highlighted the PA’s role as an impotent bystander.
True. But leaders of the Palestinian Authority are, at least in part, authors of their own current misfortune. The erosion of trust between the Palestinian public and its leaders began at the outset, when Yasser Arafat arrived in Gaza almost eight years ago with a group of men carrying not shovels but guns, and promptly went about creating seven intelligence services and a police force of well over 30,000 men. Within two years, 12 Palestinian detainees had died under torture. That’s called repression.
The PA’s woeful disregard for the human rights of its own people extended to shutting down newspapers and shutting up editors, jailing recalcitrant labor unionists, threatening innovative intellectuals, and harassing those others who represented, through their literary effusions, the adversarial current in the community — individuals whose necessary role in social life is to seek an articulation for the fragile plurality of human nature and conduct. This included, it will be recalled, the banning of the late Edward Said’s books from distribution in the territories. That’s called assaulting figures regarded by any civilized society as central to the health of the body politic. Then there were the villas, built in the midst of unspeakable poverty, for the comfort of unrestrained officials living high on the hog. That’s called corruption.
Hence, the results of the recent JMCC poll should come as no surprise.
The long and short of it is that those roughly 300 young Fatah stalwarts who resigned last week are in effect saying that to have a meaningful future Palestinians require leaders with political instincts and a moral compass they can trust.
“What we are seeing today is a sign of chaos, instability and paralysis,” said Zaid Abu Amer, an official in the Cabinet of the former prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas. “The system isn’t working and people feel the PA isn’t doing its job.”
Needed: a leadership nearer the mainstream of Palestinian feeling, imaginative enough to come up with new ideas. Not too much to ask, is it?
