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January 22, 2009

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Out of the rubble

01.23.2009 | The National (UAE)
By Mouin Rabbani

The war on Gaza has brought Palestinian politics to a breaking point. Mouin Rabbani wonders if a new national movement can emerge.

Speaking to his people on January 18, hours after Hamas responded to Israel’s
unilateral suspension of hostilities with a conditional ceasefire of its own, the

deposed Palestinian Authority prime minister Ismail Haniyeh devoted several passages

of his prepared text to the subject of Palestinian national reconciliation. For

perhaps the first time since Hamas’s June 2007 seizure of power in the Gaza Strip, an

Islamist leader broached the topic of healing the Palestinian divide without

mentioning Mahmoud Abbas by name.

At a press conference the following day convened by Abu Ubaida, the spokesperson of

the Martyr Izz al Din al Qassam Brigades, the Hamas military wing, the movement went

one step further. “The Resistance”, Abu Ubaida intoned, “is the legitimate

representative of the Palestinian people”.

What these statements make clear is that Hamas will no longer engage with Abbas, and

is even less inclined to throw him a lifeline in the form of a national unity

government he would appoint. These statements are not so much a direct challenge to

his leadership as a confirmation that his legitimacy has been fatally damaged by the

Gaza war. Even his hand-picked prime minister, Salam Fayyad, told journalists that the

PA in Ramallah has been “marginalised”.

Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip has produced a transformational moment in Palestinian

politics. It is a moment all too reminiscent of the period succeeding the 1967 War

when the credibility of the prevailing Arab order collapsed and – deriving their

legitimacy from the barrel of a gun – Yasser Arafat and a coalition of Palestinian

guerrilla organisations seized control of the Palestine Liberation Organisation

(PLO).

With the peace process reduced from a means to an end, and statehood transformed into

a formula to perpetuate Israeli rule and Palestinian fragmentation, the struggle for

Palestinian self-determination appears to be again emerging front and centre.

Palestinians no longer seem inclined to choose their leaders on the basis of heroism

around the negotiating table, frequency of meetings with world leaders, nor even

necessarily electoral performance. The devastation in Gaza has made the inclination to

challenge Israel and its occupation and the will to defy international pressure the

central criteria for Palestinians. But Abbas will not be a party to this process:

instead his ejection from the body politic has become its non-negotiable precondition.

Because if there is one message it is “no more business as usual.”

How this process will develop remains to be seen. Hamas may or may not have the will

and capacity to replace Fatah’s hegemony with its own, and may or may not have the

foresight and wisdom to work with rather than against other Palestinian organisations.

It is a process that is certain to see the formal renunciation of the catastrophic

Oslo agreements, and perhaps the abolition of the PA as well.

The reasons for Abbas’s demise are few, and they predate the Israeli attack on Gaza:

he long ago placed all of his eggs in the Israeli-American basket. Acting as if his

chickens had already hatched, his inability to deliver any tangible achievement has

instead meant they came home to roost with a vengeance.

Key to this is Abbas’s relationship to his people: simply put, it never existed.

Arafat saw the Palestinians as the ace in the deck to be played when all else failed,

and understood that his leverage with outside actors derived from their conviction

that he represented the Palestinian people. If he consistently failed or refused to

properly mobilise this primary resource, he at least always held it in reserve.

Abbas has by contrast been an inveterate elitist, who seems to have regarded the

Palestinian population as an obstacle to be overcome so that the game of nations could

proceed – there are after all only so many seats at the table where great statesmen

like Abbas, George Bush and Ehud Olmert together create the contours of a new Middle

East. For Abbas, legitimacy meant the leverage you have with your voters by convincing

them you represent others.

Cursed with exceptional self-regard, Abbas has always shown disinterest in the

opinions of others. From the moment he convinced himself of the sincerity of Bush’s

visions, which put the onus on the Palestinians to prove they qualify for membership

in the human race and are worthy of being spoken to by Tsipi Livni and Condoleezza

Rice, there was no turning back. Henceforth the Palestinian security forces would

point their weapons exclusively at their own people, and only Saeb Erakat would be

aimed at Israel. At the United Nations, once a primary arena for the Palestinian

struggle, Abbas’s emissary Riad Mansour was too busy drafting a resolution declaring

Hamas a terrorist entity to deal with more trivial Palestinian concerns. It was simply

impossible to steer Abbas towards a change of course, let alone a national dialogue

that could produce a genuine strategy.

By the expiration of his presidency on January 9, his constitutional status had become

the least of his problems. Each and every one of his policies had failed. In the West

Bank, settlement expansion was proceeding at an unprecedented pace while the Wall

neared final completion, rendering talk of a two-state settlement all but moot.

After Hamas triumphed in the 2006 parliamentary elections, Abbas’s ceaseless scheming

to remove the Islamists from office and overturn the election’s results –

characteristically in active partnership with outside forces rather than the

Palestinian electorate – was a veritable carnival of folly and incompetence. When

Hamas acted first in 2007, it took the Islamists only several days to dispose of those

few forces still prepared to fight for Mohammed Dahlan.

While many are arguing that Abbas is now paying the price for his passivity while

Israel slaughtered Palestinians in Gaza, this is only one part of the story. At least

as important is the manner in which he has conducted himself since December 27 –

comprehensively out of touch with his own people, as if deliberately so, and dealing

with the Gaza Strip as if it is a foreign country he has never heard of.

In his initial response Abbas laid responsibility for the conflict at Hamas’s

doorstep, in one stroke reducing his role to that of a factional leader

opportunistically siding with his cousin against his brother. More to the point, he

unleashed the full power of his security forces against his own people. Not to prevent

a Hamas coup in the West Bank, or even attacks against Israel, but to suppress

pro-Palestinian demonstrations of the kind permitted even within Israel.

He responded to Israel’s launching of a land offensive on January 3 by announcing that

he was delaying for one day his visit to the UN Security Council. Not to lead his

people, but rather to meet Nicolas Sarkozy. Since then he has barely visited

Palestine; on his last sojourn he stayed only long enough to inform the Qataris that

he could not attend their emergency meeting to discuss the war.

That last was the mother of all miscalculations. Where Arafat would either have

skipped all summits, or alternatively insisted on attending precisely because of

pressure to stay away, Abbas produced one lame excuse after another: that the Doha

meeting lacked a quorum and was therefore not a formal Arab League meeting (as if

anything less is undeserving of his presence); that he couldn’t obtain an Israeli

permit; and that he was under too much pressure to attend.

Rebuffing Qatari assurances that no other Palestinians would be invited, he didn’t

seem to realise that even an empty Palestinian chair would be a major scandal at home.

As it happened, he cleared the way for Hamas leader Khalid Meshaal to speak to the

world on behalf of the Palestinian people. If Meshaal has yet to succeed in wearing

the cloak of Palestinian national leadership, he has at least irrevocably wrested it

from the shoulders of Mahmoud Abbas.

There is no longer anything Abbas can say or do to remain in power. The only relevant

question is if he will jump before he is pushed – with the coup de grace almost

certain to come from within the Fatah movement or the ranks of the public rather than

Islamist circles.

No less importantly, there is now also nothing his sponsors and allies can do to save

his skin. Utterly cynical initiatives like that by the Europeans promising aid to a

national unity government – which, when formed in 2007, served as a pretext for them

to continue to boycott the PA – will achieve nothing. Bribes, threats, even wars or

peace conferences can no longer prevent the emergence of a new Palestinian national

movement. We do not yet know its shape, nor how it will emerge. At this point the only

certainty is that unless it can more authentically represent the will and aspirations

of its people – by challenging rather than accommodating the status quo – and thereby

make more effective progress toward basic objectives, it will not last long.

Mouin Rabbani is a contributing editor at Middle East Report.