Second thoughts
The increasingly jittery Palestinian Authority is powerless to affect the electoral prospects of either Ariel Sharon or Avram Mitzna, writes Graham Usher from Ramallah
On 28 November Fatah's Al-Aqsa Brigades killed six Israelis and wounded scores in an armed attack outside a Likud Party polling station in the northern Israeli town of Beit Shean -- revenge, said the Brigades, for the almost certainly Israeli engineered assassination of Fatah and Hamas militia leaders in Jenin two days before.
Coming within hours of the dual attack on Israeli targets in Mombassa Kenya, Israeli government spokesmen used the Beit Shean hit to once more press the Palestinian struggle into the mould of the global "war against terrorism". Ariel Sharon used it to pull the voters behind him in his contest against Binyamin Netanyahu for Likud Party leadership. And the army used it to tighten Israel's grip on the West Bank, launching curfews, arrest sweeps and killings in seven of the eight main Palestinian cities it now re-occupies.
The Palestinian Authority denounced the Beit Shean operations, together with earlier ones against Israeli military targets in the Gaza Strip.
"These attacks do not serve the just cause of the Palestinian people but cause great damage on every level and strengthen the warmongers and settlements of Israel," it said. Moreover, "we are now reaping unexpected fruits because we allowed things to get out of control."
It was the PA's leaders frankest acknowledgement yet that the laissez-faire violence of the "armed Intifada" had not only "exhausted its purpose" but was now posing a mortal threat to the very existence of the Authority and their own leadership positions within it. Nor was this the only acknowledgement.
A few days before the PLO's general- secretary, Mahmoud Abbass (Abu Mazen), had made the most blistering critique of the "militarisation" of the Intifada by any senior Palestinian official since the uprising erupted in September 2000.
Addressing a meeting of Fatah cadres in Gaza he said the Palestinian factions' resort to arms had allowed Sharon to "drag us to an arena in which he excels and outshines not only the Palestinians, but also the entire Arab world: that of military power and the force of arms". The consequence is "the total destruction of all we have built and all that had been built before that".
In its stead Abbass called for a "total halt to all military operations" and a return to negotiations "to expose Sharon". The Palestinians should "force Sharon to present his political programme, a programme he has already proposed to us more than once. We would not be the only ones to reject it. A major part of the Israeli people would also reject it because it in no way shows the man wants peace".
Abbass's address and the PA statement are "letters to the Israeli people", says a PA source. They were issued in the realisation that Sharon is now firmly on course to win a second term as prime minister in the Israeli general elections on 28 January.
But they have been made urgent by the wall-to-wall consensus within Israel's present political and military leadership that all diplomatic progress now hinges on an end to Palestinian "terrorism" and "the disappearance of the current Palestinian leadership from the stage of history", in the words of defence minister, Shaul Mofaz.
The PA's only light on this dark road is the election of Avram Mitzna as Labour Party leader, particularly "his programme for immediately ending the occupation in the Gaza Strip and then in most of the West Bank", says PA planning minister, Nabil Shaath.
But he and others in the PA leadership know that nothing will strengthen Mitzna's claim to government than an end to the armed Intifada, if not in the occupied territories, then at least against civilians inside Israel.
This is the subtext to the ongoing talks between Fatah and Hamas in Cairo, nurtured by Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the European Union and due to resume after the Eid Al-Fitr holiday.
Publicly Hamas has said it won't be bound by any agreement that limits their "martyrdom operations". Less publicly, Hamas leaders have said they would abide by a moratorium on attacks on Israeli civilians if Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the EU exert "pressure" on Israel to end the assassinations of its fighters and other acts of aggression.
But it is not only Hamas that PA leaders have to convince. Many in Fatah see the PA's sudden critiques of the "armed Intifada" as less an intervention in Israel's domestic politics than an intervention in their own, particularly in the leadership challenge posed by the younger "Intifada" guard against the older "Oslo" guard represented by Abbass.
In an interview with AP from his prison cell on Tuesday Fatah's West Bank general secretary, Marwan Barghouti, defended the militarisation of the Intifada as the only means Palestinians had to defend themselves against Israel's resort to "heavy weapons, like helicopters and fighter planes". Nor did he have much time for the "negotiations-only" approach advocated by Abbass.
"Resistance is a holy right for the Palestinian people to face the Israeli occupation," he told AP. "Nobody should forget the Palestinians negotiated for 10 years and accepted difficult and humiliating conditions and in the end didn't get anything except authority over the people, but no authority or sovereignty over the land."
There is only one issue on which Barghouti and Abbass agree: the need to hold new Palestinian elections "as soon as possible".
Abbass believes that through elections "a new [Palestinian] government can specify the road we should take, announce it openly and convince our people that this road will lead to our desired goals". Barghouti believes elections are the "democratic and legal way" to force "many of the Palestinian leaders and officials to leave their positions after failing in their roles and responsibilities in this decisive battle."
