Wishful thinking

Wednesday, November 10, 2004

The Israeli agreement to a Ramallah burial was not accompanied by any other goodwill gesture. On the contrary, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s security cabinet emphasized that while the Palestinians would be in charge of security inside Ramallah for the actual event, Israel would take steps to guarantee security everywhere else. A closure will be imposed on the territories, meaning nobody from the West Bank will be allowed to leave the territory, Gazans (except for Israeli approved VIPs) will not be allowed to travel to the funeral in Ramallah; freedom of movement, anyway curtailed for Palestinians in the territories, will be further restricted to prevent Ramallah from being flooded by mourners – or, as Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu pointedly worried at the morning cabinet meeting, preventing a march from Ramallah to Jerusalem. When one of the ministers asked whether Israel should be considering some goodwill gestures, a sign of turning over a new leaf in relations with the Palestinian Authority, Sharon rejected it out of hand – for now.

Sharon is under growing pressure now, internationally and domestically, to change the unilateral aspect of his disengagement plan into a coordinated handover of the territory to the PA. So far, he is resisting that pressure on the grounds that first the Palestinians have to get through the funeral and the consolidation of the new leadership. He is also aware that at least half that pressure domestically is coming from people who are against any disengagement or withdrawal from any settlements, such as the National Religious Party, which formally quit his coalition yesterday but would be ready to rescind its resignation if Sharon were to announce he is postponing disengagement until there is clarity on the Palestinian side. Netanyahu, too, used Arafat’s impending death as his excuse for not following through on his two-week old resignation threat issued because Sharon refused to order a national referendum on the disengagement.

The working assumption this morning was that a somewhat ghoulish diplomatic minuet was being played out between Jerusalem, Ramallah, Paris, Cairo, and other capitals involved as mediators. In Paris, a top Islamic cleric from Palestine was due at Percy hospital to be at Arafat’s side when he finally dies, and then to take responsibility for preparing the body for burial. In Jerusalem, Israel did its part by allowing the Ramallah burial, and presumably that will set in motion events in Paris so that some time soon, the hospital would formally announce that Arafat – who according to PA Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath did suffer a massive brain hemorrhage on Monday night -- died. That would set the stage for the Cairo ceremonies, offered by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak yesterday, to go into full preparations, presumably so many Arab leaders who would want to attend the Arafat funeral would be able to attend without having to encounter Israeli security (even if it is not applied to the VIPs, as promised informally by Israel) either at B-G airport or a Jordan River bridge. And in Ramallah, preparations could begin for turning Arafat’s Muqata offices into a mausoleum. But the working assumption has been wrong many times in the last 14 days since Arafat collapsed in his office and the next day was flown to Amman and then Paris.

he Palestinians so far seem to have formed a consensus around the dual leadership of Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazin) as PLO and Fateh boss, with Ahmed Qurei’ (Abu Ala), as prime minister, holding the security reins that Arafat refused to give up. They are backed by all of the PLO executive, the Fateh central committee, and the PA cabinet. Furthermore, key security officials Mohammed Dahlan and Jibril Rajoub have made clear they are taking orders together from ‘the two Abus’ as some Israelis are already beginning to refer to Abbas and Qurei’. The Palestinians are expected to follow their Basic Law and make Palestinian Legislative Council Speaker Rouhi Fattuh the acting chairman of the PA. But since Fattuh is a somewhat unknown politician, the assumption on the Palestinian side seems to be that his role will be purely symbolic while Abbas and Qurei’run things for the 60 days until Palestinian elections called for in the Basic Law. Abbas is expected to run as Fateh’s candidate and the Hamas is also expected to field a candidate. There is also talk about Marwan Barghouti, in an Israeli prison serving several life sentences for orchestrating terror attacks that killed Israelis in the Jerusalem area during the early days of the intifada, appearing as a candidate on a ballot.

But as far as Rightist Israelis and some academics are concerned, without a authoritarian leader like Arafat, Palestinian politics is doomed to descend into a hellish anarchy with armed struggles for power and war lords acting in the name of religion or Arafat’s memory dominating everything, rendering meaningless the institutions of the nascent Palestinian democracy. The predictions of chaos go as far as self-confident radio chatter by academic experts on the Middle East saying that Al Qaida, Iran and Hezbollah will take over in Palestine.

Much, however, depends on Israel. For years, for Israelis – and much of the West -- Arafat was the symbol of a Palestinian political intransigence with a proclivity for violence. But Abbas in particular spent the last four years making clear to anyone who listened to him that he was against the use of violence and had fully adopted a Western, democratic approach. Abbas resigned in mid 2003 as the first Palestinian prime minister because of two people: Arafat’s refusal to allow reforms to take place in the security and governmental apparatus in the Palestinian Authority, and Sharon’s refusal to show any generosity of spirit toward the Palestinians, freeing a few hundred petty criminals from Israeli jails instead of hundreds or even thousands of prisoners deemed terrorists by Israel and freedom fighters by Palestinians.

Now, Sharon is under a combination of international and domestic pressure that might not give him much of a choice but to adapt his unilateral disengagement plan, which was predicated on the ‘no partner’ theory represented by Arafat, to the new reality in which Abbas is a welcome visitor to the White House. Domestically, Sharon’s coalition has been reduced to a minority government of 55-56 MKs in the 120-seat Knesset. Internationally, nobody will accept Israel’s claim of ‘no partner’ even if Abbas does not immediately go to war against the armed Palestinian factions. All along, he and Qurei’ plan was to coopt the armed groups like Hamas and the Al Aqsa Brigades, into the PA’s security services, turning the Hamas and other opposition groups into political parties. Sharon will have to decide – and soon – how Israel will respond to Palestinian (and international) pressure for elections. He will have to decide – and soon – how Israel’s defensive/offensive posture against terror must change, lest it undermine ‘the two Abus.’ And he will have to come up with a better explanation than ‘they aren’t warring against terror’ when President Bush asks Sharon why he isn’t engaging the new Palestinian leadership in dialogue.

In short, while Sharon did everything he could to make Arafat ‘irrelevant’ in the last few years, by dying, Arafat has become more relevant than ever, forcing Israel to look in the mirror to decide, as one columnist said this morning, if it wants to make peace at a heavy price or to continue living by the sword. The smart money this morning was waiting before it placed its bet – though some were suggesting that Sharon, who seems determined to go down in history as drawing at least some of the permanent borders of Israel, could yet surprise us all. We’ll see – but first we’ll have to hear the official announcement of Arafat’s death.