Arafat's death, Sharon's 'transformation'
Towards the end of 2004, dramatic events transformed the Israeli –Palestinian struggle in the space of little over a month. The first was the death of Yasser Arafat in Paris on 11 November. He had been transferred to a French military hospital on 29 October after showing symptoms that were consistent with leukaemia, but which were never diagnosed as such. He died in a coma, amid a tempest of innuendo – spread by his wife Suha, among others – that he had been poisoned to make way for his political rivals. Although these rumours were fuelled for a short while by the inexplicable refusal of the French government to disclose the results of Arafat’s post-mortem, they soon subsided. The fact was that while the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and president of the Palestinian Authority was admired, even revered, by many Palestinians, his departure was a relief to his own people. There was no desire to inquire deeply into the circumstances of his death; the impulse, rather, was to look to the future. Arafat had been both impetus and impediment to Palestinian independence.
American re-engagement
For the Bush administration and Israel, Arafat’s demise must have seemed like the seal on the triumph of the president’s re-election in November. From Washington’s perspective, the US now had regained some of the room for manoeuvre that it had lost with its repudiation of Arafat and insistence on democratisation as the precondition for Palestinian statehood. Both of these principles had been set forth in Bush’s Rose Garden speech of 24 June 2002. Yet the unwillingness of Arafat’s Tunis elite to jettison him, especially given their own lack of popularity or stable constituencies, undercut any American hope that Bush’s stratagem might work. And the fate of Palestine’s initial flirtation with a more genuinely parliamentary form of government – in which security responsibilities, inter alia, were to be devolved to a prime minister and ministerial bureaucracy – was brutally curtailed by Hamas on the one side and a wily Arafat on the other.
In that episode, the then prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, had been attempting publicly to pry his de jure authority over the so-called security services from Arafat’s de facto grasp, just as Hamas launched a devastating terrorist attack against a bus in Jerusalem on 19 August. Unable to wrest this control in the midst of the ensuing crisis, Abbas’s already threadbare credibility with Ariel Sharon, his Israeli counterpart, was soon beyond any hope of salvage. In the meantime, Arafat’s barely veiled characterisation of his prime minister’s quest for authority as the behaviour of an American stooge undermined Abbas’ standing among a deeply weary and sceptical Palestinian public. Manipulated and humiliated, he resigned. Thus ended Palestine’s experiment with the democratic process that Washington had declared essential to American support for Palestinian statehood.
Arafat’s death removed the two barriers to American re-engagement that Washington had stipulated in the Rose Garden speech. The US could once again deal directly with the Palestinian leadership, while broad Palestinian interest in democratisation would be unshackled from Arafat’s 35-year burlesque of violence-prone author-itarianism. Bush signalled his intention to press for progress in a 12 November meeting at the White House with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, for whom American intervention in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict was both a moral imperative and a political necessity. In that meeting, Bush stated that ‘it is fair to say that I believe we’ve got a great chance to establish a Palestinian state […] and I intend to use the next four years to spend the capital of the United States on such a state.’ He went on to commit the US to the ‘Roadmap’ developed by the Quartet, and aver that Palestinian statehood could become a reality in 2009. This timetable evidently captured the administration’s safest guess regarding the lead time the Palestinians and Israelis would need to stabilise their respective domestic political arrangements and negotiate a final status accord that would establish an international border, resolve problems related to repatriation of Palestinian refugees, adjudicate rival claims to Jerusalem and determine the future of Jewish settlements in territory to fall under Palestinian jurisdiction.
Replacing Arafat
The immediate effect of these developments on Palestinian politics was galvanising. Mahmoud Abbas, the elderly nationalist politician who had served Arafat and the PLO since the mid-1960s, emerged from a brooding part-time exile to run for the chairmanship of Fatah, the biggest party within the PLO, and the presidency. Abbas scored well in November’s public opinion polls, despite his uncharismatic presence and his association with the Old Guard (that is, the Fatah militants exiled from Beirut to Tunis in 1982 after their disastrous involvement in Lebanon’s civil war and subsequent repatriation en masse to Gaza after the signing of the Oslo Accord in 1993). Not only did Abu Mazen, as Abbas is generally called, garner a 40% approval rating, but his party, Fatah, also did exceptionally well. Fatah’s robust ratings, however, owed more to Hamas’s declaration that it would boycott the upcoming elections, than to any perception that Fatah had miraculously transcended its history of corruption and fecklessness and would henceforth advance Palestinian interests with courage, integrity and intelligence. Suddenly, there simply seemed to be no alternative.
This was not entirely true. Waiting in the wings was Marwan Barghouti, the 45- year-old former head of the Tanzim, Fatah’s paramilitary outfit. The ‘wings’ in this case were those of an Israeli prison in Beersheba, where he is serving five consecutive life terms for murders he is alleged to have ordered in the course of the al-Aqsa intifada. Barghouti is the darling of the ‘young guard’, the Palestinian generation raised under occupation and which came of age during the first intifada, after 1987. They have been the champions of grass-roots democratisation, as they chafed under Old Guard domination and watched Israeli settlement activity continue even as the Old Guard – spectators in Tunis while Barghouti and his peers served time in Israeli jails – did nothing. Indeed, Barghouti himself had served a six-year sentence before being deported in 1987.
On 1 December, Barghouti announced that he would challenge Abu Mazen for the presidency. Despite supporters’ cries of ‘with our blood and souls, we will redeem you, Marwan’, his wife’s competent media presence and Barghouti’s own popularity among his generation – enhanced by his skilful handling of the press – his candidacy failed to acquire traction. His standing in the polls was respectable, but his 40% approval rating merely matched Abu Mazen’s – a curious development, given the low esteem in which the Old Guard has customarily been held by most Palestinians. Moreover, approval ratings are not the same as votes. Discouraged, Barghouti withdrew his candidacy a few days later, only to reassert it and then withdraw for good on 13 December.
Several factors account for Barghouti’s aborted launch. The opposition of the Fatah party stalwarts was crucial. None saw his leadership as plausible, in large part because it would have perpetuated a situation wherein the Palestinians’ elected leader was a pariah to his most vital interlocutors, the president of the United States and prime minister of Israel. Even his prison comrades failed to support him, judging that Abu Mazen was more likely than Barghouti to extricate them from Israeli custody. The Israelis, for their part, made it clear that Barghouti’s inauguration as president would not lead to an amnesty or parole arrangement, or, indeed, any change in his confinement conditions. At root, there was a widespread perception that Arafat’s death had created opportunities that would be lost through a symbolic gesture of resistance in the form of Barghouti’s election. Palestinians wanted a leader who could gain American backing and strike a deal with Israel.
Abu Mazen appeared better to fit this bill. In particular, he had conspicuously avoided catering to the craving for violent catharsis. In a 14 December interview in Arabic with the London-based al-Sharq al-Awsat newspaper, he said he believed in ‘a legitimate right of the people to express their rejection of the occupation by popular and social means’, but continued ‘the use of arms has been damaging and should end’. Abu Mazen had said this at least twice before, privately, to leaders of Palestinian militant groups, and, in English, to Western audiences. This time there could be no misunderstanding or prevarication. The man running for the presidency of Palestine has publicly declared his long-held view that the violent uprising was a catastrophic mistake. Despite the countervailing view of a plurality of Palestinian opinion poll respondents that the intifada had achieved gains in the struggle with Israel, Abu Mazen is likely to be elected on 9 January 2005 by an overwhelming margin. At this point, his only plausible rival is Mustafa Barghouti, the leader of a grassroots movement whose poll ratings hover at about 10%, and six other candidates, none of whom poll more than 1%.
Sharon sets out his stall
The second dramatic development affecting the dynamics of the conflict is the apparent transformation of Ariel Sharon. Since his accession to the premiership, Sharon has given the keynote address at a major policy conference held annually in December in the Tel Aviv suburb of Herzliya. It was there that Sharon first announced his plan for unilateral disengagement from Gaza, using, ironically, the Hebrew equivalent of the term King Hussein applied in 1988 when he declared that Jordan had renounced its legal and administrative claims to the West Bank. His speech on 16 December followed a year of political turmoil set in motion by his proposal to abandon all the settlements in Gaza and four settlements in the northern West Bank. It was preceded two months ago by his statement that Israel does not want ‘to rule over millions of Palestinians forever’ and that ‘Israel, which wants to be a model democracy, cannot sustain the occupation for a length of time’.
This theme, which could well have been authored by Yossi Beilin, the renowned spokesman of Israeli doves, was developed further in the Herzliya speech. Sharon acknowledged that a situation ‘where one [nation] rules over another would be a horrible disaster for both peoples’. ‘Disengagement’, he conceded, ‘recognizes the demographic reality on the ground specifically, bravely and honestly. Of course it is clear to everyone that we will not be in Gaza in the final agreement. This recognition, that we will not be in Gaza, and that, even now, we have no reason to be there, does not divide the people and is not tearing us apart … disengagement from Gaza is uniting the people’. By invoking the demographic dilemma – namely, that an Israeli state that disenfranchises an entire class of people cannot be a democracy, while an Israel that enfranchises Palestinians will cease to be Jewish – the architect of the settler movement endorsed the central claim of the left and denied the viability of Israeli occupation not just of Gaza, but of the West Bank. The speech was therefore a pivotal moment.
The rhetorical drama was underscored by practical steps Sharon had already taken. He had discarded his right-wing cabinet, sought a unity coalition with the Labour Party and requested changes in the Basic Law to allow the appointment of Shimon Peres as second deputy prime minister with responsibility for the peace process. Within the Likud party, Sharon repeatedly engaged in brinkmanship to prod his party toward support for disengagement, a policy regarded by many stalwarts as emotionally unpalatable and politically hazardous. In the legislative and bureaucratic domains, the government took the administrative and legal measures that would be required for disengagement to work, by drafting, for example, a compensation law for evacuees, creating a disengagement administration, and working with NGOs and the Egyptian government to provide humanitarian services and security in Gaza in the wake of Israel’s withdrawal. More importantly, Sharon announced that he would proceed in coordination with the Palestinian leadership, rather than unilaterally.
Whether the stark changes heralded by Arafat’s death, Sharon’s apparent conversion and Bush’s commitment to use American influence to achieve a final status accord effloresce or evaporate is unknowable. But change is in the air.
