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Hamas and
Fatah Must Transform to Speak on Behalf of
Palestinians
By Ramzy
Baroud
October 25,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
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The
reconciliation agreement
signed between rival Palestinian parties, Hamas and
Fatah, in Cairo on October 12 was not a national
unity accord -- at least, not yet. For the latter to
be achieved, the agreement would have to make the
interests of the Palestinian people a priority,
above factional agendas.
The leadership
crisis in Palestine is not new. It precedes Fatah
and Hamas by decades.
Since the
destruction of Palestine and the creation of Israel
in 1948 – and even further back – Palestinians found
themselves beholden to international and regional
power play, beyond their ability to control or even
influence.
The greatest
achievement of Yasser Arafat, the late and iconic
leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization
(PLO) was his ability to foster an independent
Palestinian political identity and a national
movement that, although receiving Arab support, was
not entirely appropriated by any particular Arab
country.
The Oslo
Accords, however, was the demise of that movement.
Historians may quarrel on whether Arafat, the PLO
and its largest political party, Fatah, had any
other option but to engage in the so-called ‘peace
process’. However, in retrospect, we can surely
argue that Oslo was the abrupt cancelation of every
Palestinian political achievement, at least since
the war of 1967.
Despite the
resounding defeat of Arab countries by Israel and
its powerful western allies in that war, hope for a
new beginning was born. Israel reclaimed East
Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, but, unwittingly
unified Palestinians as one nation, although one
that is oppressed and occupied.
Moreover, the
deep wounds suffered by Arab countries as a result
of the disastrous war, gave Arafat and Fatah the
opportunity to utilize the new margins that opened
up as a result of the Arab retreat.
The PLO, which
was originally managed by the late Egyptian
President, Jamal Abdul Nasser, became an exclusively
Palestinian platform. Fatah, which was established a
few years prior to the war, was the party in charge.
When Israel
occupied Lebanon in 1982, its aim was the
annihilation of the Palestinian national movement,
especially since Arafat was opening up new channels
of dialogue, not only with Arab and Muslim
countries, but internationally as well. The United
Nations, among other global institutions, began
recognizing Palestinians, not as hapless refugees
needing handouts, but as a serious national movement
deserving to be heard and respected.
At the time,
Israel was obsessed with preventing Arafat from
rebranding the PLO into a budding government. In the
short term, Israel achieved its main objective:
Arafat was driven to Tunisia with his party’s
leadership, and the rest of the PLO’s fighters were
scattered across the Middle East, once more falling
hostage to Arab whims and priorities.
Between 1982
and the signing of Oslo in 1993, Arafat fought for
relevance. The PLO’s exile became particularly
evident as Palestinians launched their First
Intifada (the uprising of 1987). A whole new
generation of Palestinian leaders began to emerge; a
different identity that was incepted in Israeli
prisons and nurtured in the streets of Gaza and
Nablus was sculpted. The greater the sacrifices and
the higher the Palestinian death toll rose, the more
heightened that sense of collective identity grew.
The PLO’s
attempt to hijack the Intifada was one of the main
reasons why the uprising eventually faltered. The
Madrid talks in 1991 was the first time that true
representatives of the Palestinian people in the
Occupied Territories would take on an international
platform to speak on behalf of Palestinians at home.
That endeavor
was short-lived. Eventually, Arafat and Mahmoud
Abbas (today’s head of the Palestinian Authority -
PA) negotiated an alternative agreement secretly in
Oslo. The agreement, largely sidelined the United
Nations and allowed the United States to claim its
position as a self-proclaimed ‘honest broker’ in a
US-sponsored ‘peace process.’
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While Arafat and his Tunisian faction were allowed
back to rule over occupied Palestinians with a
limited mandate provided by the Israeli government
and military, Palestinian society fell into one of
its most painful dilemmas in many years.
With the PLO,
which represented all Palestinians, cast aside to
make room for the PA - which merely represented the
interests of a branch within Fatah in a limited
autonomous region - Palestinians became divided into
groups.
In fact, 1994,
which witnessed the official formation of the PA,
was the year in which the current Palestinian strife
was actually born. The PA, under pressure from
Israel and the US, cracked down on Palestinians who
opposed Oslo and justifiably rejected the ‘peace
process.’
The crackdowns
reached many Palestinians who took leadership
positions during the First Intifada. The Israeli
gambit worked to perfection: The Palestinian
leadership in exile was brought back to crackdown on
the leadership of the Intifada, while Israel stood
aside and watched the sad spectacle.
Hamas, which
itself was an early outcome of the First Intifada,
found itself in direct confrontation with Arafat and
his authority. For years, Hamas positioned itself as
a leader of the opposition that rejected
normalization with the Israeli occupation. That won
Hamas massive popularity among Palestinians,
especially as it became clear that Oslo was a ruse
and that the ‘peace process’ was moving towards a
dead-end.
When Arafat
died, after spending years under Israeli army siege
in Ramallah, Abbas took over. Considering that Abbas
was the brain behind Oslo, and the man’s lack of
charisma and leadership skills, Hamas took the first
step in a political maneuver that proved costly: it
ran for the PA’s legislative elections in 2006.
Worse, it won.
By emerging as
the top political party in an election that was
itself an outcome of a political process that Hamas
had vehemently rejected for years, Hamas became a
victim of its own success.
Expectedly,
Israel moved to punish Palestinians. As a result of
US urgings and pressures, Europe followed suit. The
Hamas government was boycotted, Gaza came under
constant Israeli bombardment and Palestinian coffers
began drying up.
A Hamas-Fatah
brief civil-war ensued in the summer of 2007,
resulting in hundreds of deaths and the political
and administrative split of Gaza from the West Bank.
Officially,
Palestinians had two governments, but no state. It
was a mockery, that a promising national liberation
project abandoned liberation and focused mostly on
settling factional scores, while millions of
Palestinians suffered siege and military occupation,
and millions more suffered the anguish and
humiliation of ‘shattat’ – the exile of the refugees
abroad.
Many attempts
were made, and failed to reconcile between the two
groups in the last 10 years. They failed mostly
because, once more, the Palestinian leaderships
leased their decision-making to regional and
international powers. The golden age of the PLO was
replaced with the dark ages of factional divisions.
However, the
recent reconciliation agreement in Cairo is not an
outcome of a new commitment to a Palestinian
national project. Both Hamas and Fatah are out of
options. Their regional politicking was a failure,
and their political program ceased to impress
Palestinians who are feeling orphaned and abandoned.
For the
Hamas-Fatah unity to become a true national unity,
priorities would have to change entirely, where the
interest of the Palestinian people - all of them,
everywhere - would, once more, become paramount,
above the interests of a faction or two, seeking
limited legitimacy, fake sovereignty and American
handouts.
Ramzy Baroud
is an
internationally syndicated columnist, author, and
the founder of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest
book is My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's
Untold Story
This
article was originally published by
MA'AN News
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