The Palestinian national movement is at a historical crossroads, trapped by a peace option that could not deliver.
The movement finds itself in a deteriorating state of paralysis. “There’s almost no Palestinian leadership,” Kadoura Fares, a former Palestinian Cabinet minister and a leading member of President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party, told the Washington Times on May 15.
The emergence of Fatah Al-Islam in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, “the infestation of Al-Qaeda-type salafism,” which has already reached Gaza Strip, according to Khalidi, and the widespread attraction of the one-state or binational state option among the Palestinians as an alternative to the two-state solution are manifestations of the declining influence of the national movement led by both the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Hamas.
Several interrelated and interdependent factors are sustaining the status quo:
First, the US-sponsored political process launched with much fanfare in Annapolis, Maryland on Nov. 17 last year has almost lost steam, leaving the two-state solution doomed and the PLO disillusioned, with no idea of what the next step should be.
The PLO is now aware that they were used by the US-Israeli allies to appease the Arab “moderates” so they would close their eyes to what the US was doing in Iraq and vis-à-vis Iran and Syria.
The Quartet of the Middle East peace mediators, comprising the US, UN, EU and Russia, subscribes to the same policy.
Second, peace alternatives, like the one-state solution, have little or no chances of being accepted by Israelis and are already ruled out by the US-Israeli determination to retain Israel as a “Jewish state”.
Third, Both Amman and Cairo as well as Palestinians rule out an old Israeli alternative to annex the West Bank to Jordan (the so-called “Jordanian option”) and Gaza Strip to Egypt. “Jordanians consider the mere talk on 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” that restoring Gaza to its pre-1967 status would be an Egyptian “time bomb.”
Forth, the peace “contacts” via Turkey between Syria and Israel is further proof of the impasse on the Palestinian-Israeli track. Marc Perelman, in The Jewish Daily Forward on May 22, quoted Aaron David Miller, who was part of American peace negotiation teams in the region for three decades, 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 multilayer internal division (between Hamas and Fatah, within Fatah itself, the presidency and Hamas, which dominates the Palestinian legislative Council (PLC), the governments of Ramallah and Gaza) is paralyzing Palestinian central decision-making. “Neither the peace process, nor the (upcoming) sixth Fatah conference can succeed without national reconciliation,” senior Fatah leader Jibril Al-Rjoub told Al-Arabiyya satellite television on Feb. 17. However, national reconciliation remains hostage to US-Israeli veto and anti-Hamas preconditions.
The last Fatah conference was held in 1989. The PLO has been practically overtaken and marginalized by the Palestinian Authority (PA) and its marginalization doomed its leading role among the Palestinian diaspora and refugees in exile, leaving a vacuum that was filled by Hamas and the Islamic Jihad.
President Abbas’ term expires next January; the PLC, whose term will expire in January 2009, is paralyzed by Israeli detention of more than fifty of its lawmakers.
Palestinian Central Election Commission is already bracing for local elections by the yearend.
Restoring the PLO back to its leading role, acceptance by the PLO of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other emerging non-PLO political parties, are crucial for Palestinian national unity.
The present state of affair, if allowed to continue, would render the Palestinian people leaderless and, 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 US-Israeli strategy!
— Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab Journalist based in Bir Zeit, West Bank, Palestine.
