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Elections reveal polarization among Palestinians
by Gerry Foley
Political polarization among the Palestinian forces is being
accelerated by the pressures of the local government elections that started
on Dec. 23 and the
elections for the president of the Palestinian Authority (PA) scheduled
for Jan. 9. The basic issue is hardly the ordinary rivalry among
politicians. It
is the Intifada itself.
Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), the candidate of the main historic
Palestinian resistance organization, Al Fatah, has declared openly that the
armed Intifada was a mistake. He has been making more and more gestures of
reconciliation with Israel. The recent Israeli release of 159 Palestinian
prisoners was generally interpreted as a move to strengthen Abu Mazen’s
hand.
What the Zionist rulers want from their protege is help in
suppressing the armed Palestinian militants.
They have made it absolutely clear for a long time that they will
not deal with any Palestinian Authority that does not aid them in that job.
This is also the
demand of their imperialist big brother, the United States.
In his brief term as premier of the Palestinian Authority, Abu Mazen
moved as close as he dared to meeting this ultimatum, but he could not get
very far.
His government fell.
Now Abu Mazen is virtually certain to be elected president of the
PA, since the main rivals of Fatah—the Islamist groups, Hamas and Islamic
Jihad—are
boycotting the vote, and the Fatah bureaucracy has closed ranks around the former PA
premier.
The only serious rival to Abu Mazen, Marwan Barghouti, a jailed
Fatah leader, was forced to withdraw his candidacy or face expulsion from
Fatah. If Barghouti had been allowed to run, he would have been an alternative
for supporters of militant resistance. His candidacy seriously ruffled the
dovecotes of the Fatah bureaucracy, whose basic interest is enjoying the benefits
of having a ministate of their own. That is why they were determined not to
let him run.
The results of the Dec. 23 local elections are an indication of the
strength of the militants. In fact, in the wake of these elections, Abu
Mazen has tried to
assure a more militant image.
In these elections, the first in the West Bank and Gaza since 1976,
Hamas participated and scored a political breakthrough. The precise results
in the
race for about 300 local council seats remain unclear, since a lot
of the candidates were not publicly labeled.
Both Fatah and Hamas are claiming that they won a majority of the
seats up for election, according to the Lebanese French-language daily
L’Orient Le Jour of Dec. 27. But all major press, from the liberal Zionist Haaretz
to Le Monde concur that Hamas showed unexpected strength, which shocked Al
Fatah.
The Christian Science Monitor of Dec. 27 quoted Al Fatah’s campaign
manager in the West Bank town of Obadeah, where Hamas won the mayoralty, as
follows: “‘I’m trying to wake up from this shock,’ he says.
‘The Imams in the mosques must have persuaded people to sympathize
with the Islamists.’”
However, it is obvious that most of the people who voted for Hamas
did so because they see it as self-sacrificing and intransigent against the
Zionist
state. In contrast, the Fatah leadership has been losing credibility
as defenders of the rights of the Palestinian people and is seen more and
more as a group of corrupt parasites feeding on the foreign aid that goes
to the Palestinian Authority.
Of course, Fatah and the resistance organizations loosely affiliated
to it have been suffering cruel losses from the Zionist repression, like
Hamas. (One
of the leaders of the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, nominally under the
umbrella of Fatah, Abu Kamil, was deliberately buried alive on Dec. 25 by
an Israeli
bulldozer under the ruins of a building in which he was hiding in
the West Bank town of Jenin. His brother was killed by Israeli troops a
week before, and his
house was destroyed.)
But there is also obvious discontent among fighters in the orbit of
Fatah against the higher echelons of the movement and against PA officials
whom they suspect of selling them out. It is not unlikely that a lot of Fatah
supporters voted for the Hamas candidates as an alternative to the
conciliationism of their top leaders.
The Christian Science Monitor correspondent quoted a Fatah official
who tried to put a positive face on the Hamas breakthrough by saying that
the Islamist
organization would now have to come to grips with the problems of
actually governing. He certainly knows that the Islamists have no answer to
the problems of the Palestinian people and that their campaign of
suicide bombings has no future.
But Al Fatah does not have any answers either. And until the
Palestinian people can find a leadership that does really represent them
and does have answers to their problems, they will at least show their determination
to continue the struggle by supporting what appears to be the more
intransigent party.
The two historic left factions in the Palestinian Liberation
Organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the
Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, are not supporting Abu
Mazen. The first has announced its support for Mustafa Barghouti, an
independent human rights activist with the same family name as Marwan Barghouti.
He is expected to come in second in the race and may gather a significant
protest vote. The
DFLP is running its own candidate, who polls indicate will get 7
percent.
It remains to be seen whether Abu Mazen can achieve conciliation
with Israel any more effectively as PA president than he could as PA
premier. The results of the Palestinian local elections indicate that his ability
to give the Israelis what they want is still very limited.
In the past, moreover, the Zionist rulers were not prepared to make
the slightest concessions to the Palestinians. Now, under U.S. pressure,
they may give more, but are highly unlikely to give much. They did not even
keep the commitment they made in the 1992 Oslo Agreements to cut back the
Jewish settlements on the West Bank.
It is only with great difficulty that the Sharon government has
agreed to withdraw the settlements from the Gaza Strip, where a million
Palestinians are
crowded into a desolate strip of land that has no serious value for
Israel. And Sharon has made it clear that he is only removing the Gaza
settlements to
strengthen the Zionist hold on the parts of the West Bank that do
have value for Israel.
Thus, it is unlikely that the Palestinian Authority elections will
lead to any important changes in the relations between the Palestinians and
the Zionists.
The greatest hope for the future, though it is impossible now to
measure, is that the political struggle over the elections will promote
political debate among the Palestinians that can open the way for the
emergence of a new and more effective kind of leadership.
This new leadership would be based directly on the mobilized people
and could effectively focus all of the militancy of the Palestinians, and the
vast
sympathy that exists for them in the region and throughout the
world, against the racist and reactionary Zionist state.
*This
article first appeared in the January 2005 issue of Socialist Action
newspaper.
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