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Al-Ahram Weekly 2 - 8 September 1999 Issue No. 445 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 2 - 8 September 1999 Issue No. 445
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Focus Culture Features Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Outside the walls of national unity
By Graham UsherOn 31 August, the eight Palestinian factions represented on the PLO's executive committee met "under one umbrella" in Ramallah, the first fruit of Yassir Arafat's recent rapprochement in Cairo with the leaderships of the PLO's Popular and Democratic Front factions (PFLP & DFLP). The aim of the parley was to prepare for "a wider conference of Palestinian groups and personalities to build a national consensus on the Palestinian cause and the final status negotiations," said DFLP spokesperson in the Occupied Territories, Daoud Talhumi.
All would have appeared to be sweetness and light in the Palestinian house were it not for the absence in Ramallah of the main Palestinian opposition force in the West Bank and Gaza, the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas. Despite PLO claims to the contrary, Hamas spokesman in Gaza, Mahmoud Zahar, denied that Hamas had been invited to the meeting "as a movement" and that anyway "the atmosphere" in the Occupied Territories "is not one of dialogue". This is something of an understatement.
In the last week, Palestinian Authority intelligence agencies have arrested upwards of 50 Hamas activists in the Bethlehem and Gaza areas, some of them known political cadres and all of them without charge or trial. The spur for the crackdown appears to be the capture of a Hamas cell near Bethlehem on 22 August, which the PA says was planning to abduct an Israeli soldier as ransom for the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.
Maybe so. Yet the scale and timing of the sweep suggests that an ulterior motive for the PA may have been to impress Madeleine Albright ahead of her trip to the region this week, in the hope that this will entice her to persuade Ehud Barak to be a little more generous on the matters of land transfers and prisoner releases in the current Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.
Time was when such active complicity by the PA in the US and Israel's security agenda would have scuttled any "national dialogue" between Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement and its erstwhile PLO opponents. But times change. "Of course, we condemn all political arrests," says Talhumi. "But the release of political prisoners from PA jails can no longer be a precondition for the national unity talks. The question of these prisoners is secondary. The primary issue is the final status negotiations."
It is a view shared by representatives of the PLO opposition even in areas supposedly beyond the reach of the long arm of the PA's security forces. Thus the only forces opposed to Fatah's recent "take-over" of the Ain Helweh refugee camp in Sidon were the Sunni Islamist groups active there (an opposition that has yet to be quelled if the attack on a Fatah office in the camp on 29 August is anything to go by). But while the PLO opposition would prefer disagreements between Palestinians "not to be resolved by force", it also clear whose side it is now on. "One the positive consequences of Fatah's show of strength in Ain Helweh is the decline of the Islamist groups," says one PFLP leader from the camp. A similar diplomatic silence by the PLO factions has so far greeted the raid on Hamas offices in Amman on 30 August, a crackdown that enjoyed the support not only of Israel but also the PA.
These moves suggest that the main fault-line in Palestinian politics now is no longer the Oslo Accords. The divide is rather between those factions within the PLO which accept some form of a two-state solution, and those Palestinian and Arab forces outside the PLO which are opposed to any recognition of Israel. And it may be that Arafat's motive for building bridges to his PLO opponents now is not only to forge a national consensus for the final status issues, but also to unite Palestinian ranks against this "rejectionist" opposition; above all, against Hamas.
Prior to the raid on his office in Amman, head of Hamas' political bureau, Khaled Mishaal, told Jordan's Al-Arab Al-Yawm newspaper that his movement was not interested in dialogue with Arafat, not because it was against national unity. It was opposed to the talks because, "after the failure of Oslo, Arafat wants to commence a dialogue that will drag all the factions into that agreement's morass and use the resulting mayhem as a cover for the serious compromises he is going to make [in the final status negotiations]."
In the short term, the national unity discussions are likely to improve Arafat's popularity in Palestinian public opinion, especially if it results in the release of PFLP and DFLP prisoners from Israeli jails as well as Fatah ones. But if -- in the longer term and as Mishaal alleges -- the purpose of PLO national consensus on the final status issues is less to stand firm on the crucial issues of Jerusalem and the right of return than to "spread the blame" when the compromises start to come, then the PLO opposition may find itself with Arafat but without whatever is left of its constituency. For that will have moved to those who declare themselves to be the true legatees of Palestinians' national rights and aspirations -- the Islamist movements within the Occupied Territories and beyond.
