[wvns] Let Hamas govern
Fatah must concede defeat and learn to become an effective democractic
opposition.
Let Hamas govern
Samir El-youssef
June 18, 2007
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/samir_elyoussef/2007/06/hamas_is_the_act
ual_power.html
Hamas is the actual power in Gaza now. The Palestinian president's
response, dissolving the government of unity, declaring a state of
emergency and then appointing a new government from which Hamas is
totally excluded is hopeless and it would lead to nothing but
destroying Palestinian democracy and farther bloodshed.
Hamas won the Palestinian parliamentary elections of 2006 and it's
about time that Abbas and the Fatah leadership admit defeat and hand
over power - government as much as foreign policy, security forces and
civil services - to the elected party. It was originally their failure
to do so which has led to the current situation. Instead of dragging
Palestinian society into protracted civil war, Abbas must leave office
and most urgently work to re-create Fatah as a national opposition
party and an alternative governing body to the inexperienced and
unsure Hamas.
When the National Liberation Palestinian Movement, otherwise known as
Fatah, emerged in the mid 1960s, it was meant as a resistance
organization against Israeli military occupation. But it was also a
young Palestinian opposition to traditional Palestinian leadership and
Arab regimes' attempts to subordinate Palestinian cause and grievances
to their own uses. For nearly three decades, against all odds and in
spite of frequent defeats and shortcomings, Fatah succeeded to be the
leading party of the national Palestinian movement ultimately
delivering universal recognition of Palestinian right for
self-determination and sovereign statehood.
Fatah's staggering failure, however, came after the Oslo accord.
Instead of transforming itself into a proper party of state and
government it remained a broad and chaotic movement with no clear
vision or political program, united by no other than clannish and
cronies' loyalties and the, now demised, charismatic leadership of
Yasser Arafat. It failed to establish independent state and government
institutions thus turning the increasingly impoverished and insecure
Palestinian society into a discontented dependent of a corrupt and
chaotic system. Most of all its peace negotiations and treaties with
Israel failed to put an end not only to the Israeli military
occupation - which what Palestinians hoped to see - but even the
expansion of Jewish settlements.
Though this is largely the responsibility of Israel, it was Fatah's
leadership that was seen as too weak to stand up to the Israelis.
Hamas won the last year elections not because it presented voters with
a coherent and hopeful set of policies - the current confusion of its
leaders attest to that. But because after more than a decade of
Fatah's rule, social and political conditions in the West Bank and
Gaza have deteriorated back to what they were under military Israeli
rule.
Reporters of current events have been warning of the risk of Hamas
establishing in Gaza a mini Islamic state or even a Taliban enclave.
This is a danger which cannot be overlooked. But nor can it be
confronted by further fighting and bloodshed. Fatah and its secular
siblings in the PLO must act honestly and prudently; Hamas must be
given its lawful right to govern, while Fatah and the other secular
Palestinian factions must reunite behind a strong, honest and,
preferably, new leadership. They must expel the corrupt and the
lawless and work on a political vision and agenda that would allow
them to regain the lost trust of traditional and new voters. Fatah
still has the experience, the resources and the connections to rebuild
itself as a strong national opposition, an alternative party of
Palestinian state and government, to the confused and immature Hamas.
Rather than wasting their time calling for international intervention
or making another Mecca agreement, such as the one which has brought
the doomed government of unity, regional and international supporters
of peace must help Fatah to become an effective democratic opposition.
===
The people of Palestine must finally be allowed to determine their own
fate
The drivers of violence in Gaza are clearly external. When all
Palestinians can vote for sovereign rule, peace will be within reach
Karma Nabulsi
Monday June 18, 2007
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2105288,00.html
There is nothing uglier and more brutal to the human spirit, nothing
more lethal to that universal hope for freedom, than to see a people
struggling for liberty for such a long time begin to kill each other.
How and why did we get here? Above all: how do we get out of here?
These are the questions everyone watching events unfold in Gaza and
the West Bank are asking themselves. But before answering them, it is
essential to understand just what we are witnessing.
This is not at its heart a civil war, nor is it an example of the
upsurge of regional Islamism. It is not reducible to an atavistic clan
or fratricidal blood-letting, nor to a power struggle between warring
factions. This violence cannot be characterised as a battle between
secular moderates who seek a negotiated settlement and religious
terrorist groups. And this is not, above all, a miserable situation
that has simply slipped unnoticed into disaster.
The many complex steps that led us here today were largely the outcome
of the deliberate policies of a belligerent occupying power backed by
the US. As the UN envoy for the Middle East peace process, Alvaro de
Soto, remarked in his confidential report leaked last week in this
paper: "The US clearly pushed for a confrontation between Fatah and
Hamas, so much so that, a week before Mecca, the US envoy declared
twice in an envoys meeting in Washington how much 'I like this
violence', referring to the near-civil war that was erupting in Gaza
in which civilians were being regularly killed and injured."
How did we get here? The institutions created in occupied Palestine in
the 1990s were shaped to bring us to this very point of collapse. The
Palestinian Authority, created through negotiations between Israel and
the Palestine Liberation Organisation in 1993, was not meant to last
more than five years - just until the institutions of an independent
state were built. Instead, its capacities were frozen and it was
co-opted into performing the role of a security agency for the
Israelis, who were still occupying Palestine by military force, and
serving as a disbursement agency for the US and EU's funding of that
occupation. The PA had not attained a single one of the freedoms it
was meant to provide, including the most important one, the political
liberty of a self-determining sovereign body.
Why did we get here? Once the exact nature of its purpose emerged, the
Palestinians began to resist this form of external control. Israel
then invaded the West Bank cities again and put President Yasser
Arafat's compound under a two-year siege, which ended with his death.
Under those conditions of siege the international "reform" process
created a new institution of a prime minister's office and attempted
to unify the security apparatus under it, rather than that of the
president, whom they could no longer control. Mahmoud Abbas was the
first prime minister, and the Israeli- and US-backed Fatah strongman,
Mohammed Dahlan, was appointed head of security. After the death of
Arafat, Abbas was nominated to the leadership of the PLO, and directly
elected as the president of the PA.
Arafat had followed the strategy of all successful liberation
movements: a combination of resistance and negotiation until the
conclusion of a comprehensive peace treaty. Abbas's strategy was of an
entirely different order: no resistance in any form and a complete
reliance on the good faith of the Israelis. After a year of achieving
nothing - indeed Ariel Sharon refused to negotiate with him and
Israeli colonisation was intensified - the Palestinian people's
support for this humiliating policy of submission wore thin. Hamas,
polling about 20% in previous years, suddenly won 43% of the vote in 2006.
This popular reaction was a response to the failure of Abbas's
strategy as much as the failure of Fatah to present any plausible
national programme whatsoever. The Palestinians thus sought
representation that would at least reflect their condition of
occupation and dispossession. Although the elections were recognised
as free and fair, the US and Britain immediately took the lead in
applying sanctions against the Hamas government, denying aid - which
was only needed in the first place because the occupation had
destroyed the economy - and refusing to deal with it until it accepted
what had become, under these new circumstances, impossible "conditions".
The US administration continued to treat Fatah as if it had won the
election rather than lost it - funding, arming, and directly
encouraging agents within it to reverse the outcome of that democratic
election by force. The Palestinian president brought pressure to bear
on Hamas to change its position on recognition of Israel. Palestinians
refused to participate in this externally driven coup - indeed, the
vast majority of Fatah cadres rejected outright an enterprise so
clearly directed at destroying the Palestinian body politic. Both the
prisoners' document and the Mecca agreement signed in Saudi Arabia
creating a national unity government took place because Palestinian
society insisted on a national framework. Yet a small group has
brought us to this point. The outcome is what we have before us today,
similar to what the Americans were seeking to create in Iraq: the
total exclusion of democratic practices and principles, the attempt to
impose an oligarchy on a fragmented political society, a weakened and
terrorised people, a foreign rule through warlords and strongmen.
How do we get out of here? For the west, the path is both obvious and
simple. It needs to allow the Palestinians their own representation.
It can look to the terms of the Mecca agreement to see the shape that
would take, and to the 2006 prisoners' document for the political
platform the Palestinians hold. It needs to urgently convene a real
international peace conference, which no one has attempted since 1991,
as recommended in the Baker commission's report on the Iraq war, de
Soto's end of mission report, and as championed by President Jimmy
Carter. And it needs only to look to the Beirut Arab peace initiative
to find everything it has been seeking, if indeed it is seeking peace.
For the Palestinians, the path is also clear: we have come to the end
of the challenging experiment of self-rule under military occupation.
We now need to dissolve the PA, mobilise to convene direct elections
to our only national parliament, the Palestine National Council, in
order to enfranchise the entire political spectrum of Palestinians,
and thereby recapture the PLO, transforming it into the popular and
democratic institution it once had a chance of becoming. This is
already a popular demand of all Palestinians. Palestinians in exile
must take their turn again in lifting the siege inside Palestine, as
the inside did for the outside after the almost total destruction of
the PLO in 1982 in Lebanon and the siege of the refugee camps there in
1986: we are one people. The Palestinians have a long history of
struggle in which each generation has had to break out of the coercive
prison imposed by British colonial, Arab, Israeli, and now American
rule, and we will do it again.
· Karma Nabulsi is fellow in politics and international relations at
St Edmund Hall, Oxford University karmanabulsi@hotmail.com
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