Yasser Arafat - under pressure from the 'young guards'.Ian Boyne, Contributor
"We in Hamas consider suicide bombing attacks inside the I948 borders to be the card that Palestinians can play to resist the occupation. We do not own Apache helicopters ourselves, so we use our own methods. Given the methods used by he Israelis, we consider the door to hell is open"
- Sayeed Siyam, quoted in the New York Times Magazine, February 3 edition.
The first fact that you need to bear in mind in analysing the complex, dynamic and frightening Middle East crisis is that the support for suicide bombings is not relegated to a fringe element.
If Hamas, Hizbullah, Islamic Jihad and Al'Aqsa are defined as terrorists, then a substantial proportion of the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza support terrorism.
This support has grown sharply since the breakdown of peace talks between the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the Israelis in September 2000, over the status of Jerusalem.
As Hamas spokesperson Sayeed Siyam told the New York Times, "The Palestinian people do not consider us terrorists; they consider us their liberators".
And they have become disillusioned with Yasser Arafat and his Palestinian Authority and Fatah Movement who have failed to bring peace or liberation to them.
While the Israelis and the American officials continue to hold Arafat responsible for the wave of suicide bombings, and continually urge him to urge his people to renounce terrorism, the fact is that Arafat is marginalised among his own people and do not have the authority he once had.
This is a key point that must be borne in mind despite the high-level United States propaganda to the contrary.
SPIRIT OF OSLO
Let the statistics speak for themselves. When the Oslo Agreement came into being in September 1993, two-thirds of the Palestinian people supported it.
Oslo recognised the right of Israel to exist and made significant concessions to Palestinian demands. The status of Jerusalem and the issue of Palestinian refugees was put off for future discussions.
But Oslo was supposed to end the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Expectations among the Palestinians ran very high and the accords were greeted with much enthusiasm among the masses, though was decried by the radicals and so-called extremists as a sell-out.
In 1996, three years after Oslo, Arafat's personal popularity among the Palestinians zoomed to 65 per cent.
Support for all the opposition groups dropped to just 20 per cent. Seventy-five per cent of the eligible voters participated in the Palestinian elections, despite the calls for a boycott by opposition groups.
Arafat received more than 70 per cent of the votes and Fatah won 77 per cent of the seats in the new Palestinian Legislative Council.
Between 1993 and 2001, Palestinian support for the Oslo Agreement never dropped below 60 per cent.
But after the election of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in mid-1996 and the continued building of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, contrary to the spirit of Oslo, Palestinian expectations of the peace process began to fade.
With the election of hawkish Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2001, Palestinians abandoned hope in the peace process and and braced themselves for a state of war.
Only 11 per cent of the Palestinian people, according to polls, clung to any hope in the peace process at that time.
Polls taken last year revealed that a staggering 86 per cent of the Palestinian people approved of the use of violence to end the Israeli occupation.
Israel has been in defiance of United Nations resolution 242 since 1967.
The failure of the Clinton-summoned Camp David talks in 2000 significantly dampened not only Palestinian hopes for a peaceful settlement of their dispute but the failure dampened Arafat's support and credibility among his own people.
His support plummeted to 29 per cent by mid-2001.
At first the radical Islamists, stirred by religious ideology, did not benefit from Arafat's fallout.
RELIGIOUS PASSIONS
But, as the people have become frustrated with the dead-end of political, negotiated processes, they have fallen back on religious ideological passions to bolster their motivation for the struggle.
By last year, support for the Islamists and the nationalist opposition forces surpassed support for Arafat's Fatah Movement for the first time.
Thus, the insistent calls on Arafat to call off the suicide bombings and to renounce terrorism must be interpreted as hallow and merely a pretext for Israeli expansionism and aggression.
There is a 'young guard' more radical, more belligerent than Arafat and who has greater sway over the people.
The suicide bombers are motivated largely by religious ideology. They draw inspiration from Islamic forces outside of Israel and have primary commitment to their goal of religious and national liberation, not to any Palestinian Authority presided over by Arafat and the 'old guard'.
Besides, the Palestinian Authority is known to be corrupt, inept and authoritarian.
Its governance of territories under their control has been an economic and political disaster. They have no credibility to call off anything.
Getting rid of Arafat will not produce a more moderate, reasoned leader. The Israelis must know this.
But then when it is clear that the post-Arafat successor is a radical Islamist, that will provide the war-monger Sharon with the justification to reoccupy the territories under Palestinian control.
It was no less a paper than the prestigious and influential Los Angeles Times which said on Tuesday that "destroying Palestinian security forces also gives Sharon a rationale for a more long-term re-occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. If there is no functioning police force, then only the Israeli army can enforce security. The operation in the West Bank is a very long story, the essence of which is the return of Israeli rule to the territories."
Prime Minister Sharon has come under serious attack from respected newspapers and commentators all over the world, primarily in Europe.
In a scorching editorial in Tuesday's oft-quoted Guardian newspaper, titled "The World Must Stand Up to Sharon", the paper said that "Israel has crossed a line no democratic Government should cross".
The paper said : "When civilians are killed and wounded in their hundreds, when a generation of children is traumatized, when the feeble structures of nascent Palestinian statehood are systematically destroyed; when a whole people is corralled, penned in, humiliated and denied basic human rights; when even the holiest of religious shrines is transformed into a battlefield; when hatred and revenge, individual and collective, replaces reason and democracy, and when hope is daily blindfolded, placed before a wall and coldly executed, what other word is there than terror?"
The Guardian says that the Israelis by "their ill-considered, indiscriminately brutal tactics betray their duties ad responsibilities of democratic leadership--they forfeit much of their claim to moral justification and weaken and undermine the legitimacy of Israel's historic case. Mr. Powell, chief envoy of a nation solemnly dedicated to eradicating terror wherever it lurks, must tell Mr. Sharon himself to eschew the paths of terrorism and return to his senses -- or stand aside".
ARAFAT'S FAILURE
The truth is that the truth is not only one side. A large part of the failure of the Middle East peace process is with Arafat himself.
Things have spun way out of his control, and they are irretrievably pass him now, but when he had the opportunity to make a difference, he squandered it.
He has failed to build trust with the Israelis or the Americans.
While my credentials as an indefatigable critic of U.S. foreign policy and a supporter of the rights of the Palestinian people are well-known, the principle of fairness and rationality compel me to remind of some facts which the pro-Palestinian forces conveniently gloss over.
The combination of the presidencies of Ehud Barak and Bill Clinton provided Yasser Arafat with the greatest opportunity ever to forge peace with Israel post-Oslo and, to his eternal discredit, Arafat walked away.
Between July 2000 and January 2001, Arafat was offered an independent Palestinian state; Israeli withdrawal from 97 per cent of the West Bank and the Gaza; dismantlement of approximately 25 Jewish settlements; consolidation of the area under Palestinian control on the West Bank into a contiguous territory; power-sharing of the Temple Mount area; limited return of refugees and even the division of Jerusalem so that the Arab areas would be under Palestinian control.
No prime Minister of Israel is likely ever to offer more than that.
Of course, there are those who seek a "comprehensive solution" and who believe that the Palestinians wouldn't have to "negotiate away their non-negotiable rights" or make any concessions.
Many still believe that Israel has no right to the area and that conceding to them is comparable to the Americans annexing Jamaica and asking us to make a deal with them as to how we will share the territory and the power.
But that kind of all-or-nothing attitude cannot bring about peace. The existence of the State of Israel is a fact of life.
That the Palestinians are there is a fact that the Israeli extremists who still talk of a Greater Israel will have to live with.
Arafat has not demonstrated the leadership he ought to and is more propelled by internal dissent in his own structures and infiltration by the 'young guard'.
In a highly enlightening article in the January/February issue of Foreign Affairs ("Palestinians Divided"), Associate Professor of Political Science, Khalil Shikaki, shows that the 'young guard's' tactic is to penetrate Arafat's organisation and subvert it from within.
Hence some of the charges the Israelis have been making about Arafat's organisational and state machinery's support for terrorism is true.
But Arafat and the 'old guard' are under pressure and are making increasing concessions to the 'young guard' for political expedience and survival.
"At first the Palestinian Authority welcomed the new initfada because it thought the increased pressure on Israel would strengthen its hand in the negotiating table. The Young Guard, however, saw the uprising as a means to disrupt the negotiations rather than pursue them. The failure to achieve a breakthrough at Camp David affirmed these younger leaders' belief that the Palestinians could end the occupation on their own terms only through popular armed confrontation", says Shikaki in his well-argued Foreign Affairs piece.
The Israeli response to the suicide bombing has widened and deepened support for the Palestinians, consolidated Arab support and brought out world progressive opinion against Israel.
The 'young guard' is happy. The strategy is working, and, meanwhile, the radical Muslims in their relentless crusade against "the Great Satan" is gleeful at the opportunity to shove the United States on the side of the oppressors of the world.
The intifada is hurting the Palestinians - almost half of them gets by on less than US$2 a day - double the poverty rate before the intifada.
The Palestinian economy lost more than US$3.2 billion by the end of September 2001- a year after the intifada began.
But the Palestinians are not afraid to suffer and die for their nationalist pride and dignity.
They will sacrifice their lives for the struggle, a concept the materialistic, hedonistic West can never understand.
"The failure of Camp David is not a mere diplomatic blip: It vanishes - at least for the foreseeable future - the hope for a historic compromise as envisaged in the 1993 Oslo accords, which were initially supported by 70 per cent of the Israelis", says the respected Foreign Policy magazine in its March/ April issue, summing up very well the conundrum in the Middle East.
