The Politics of Change in Palestine

State-Building and Non-Violent Resistance

Michael Bröning

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2011
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781783714308
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book contradicts the dominant myth that incompetent, corrupt, and uncompromising Palestinian decision-makers are responsible for the lasting stalemate in the Middle-East Peace Process. It highlights recent political developments in Palestine that fundamentally redefine important parameters of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Contrary to public perception, new political trends in the Palestinian Territories bolster prospects for the realisation of Palestinian national aspirations. Michael Broning identifies key indicators which fundamentally question dominant Israeli narratives and pose an unprecedented strategic challenge to the Israeli leadership. These include the reinvention of Hamas, the reform of the Fatah movement, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad's state-building efforts and the surge of non-violent resistance against Israel. This persuasive book forces us to reconsider the perceived wisdom that the Palestinians are powerless to influence events as they struggle for peace.

1

Introduction and Overview

We have written ‘no’ out of sympathy and ‘no’ out of love, ‘no’ out of hate and ‘no’ out of passion – and now we would like to say ‘yes’ for once.

K. Tucholsky, 1929

1. PROGRESS AND STAGNATION

The Middle East peace process has empowered few, frustrated many and brought remarkably little peace to the region. Despite decades of negotiations, Palestinians and Israelis continue to live under perpetual threat of escalating violence, with fears and insecurity exacerbated by political stagnation.

The region again stands on the brink of bloodshed. In Lebanon, an unstable coalition government and a fragile ceasefire are threatened by clashes along the Israeli border. Israeli–Syrian relations have deteriorated in view of the Israeli Government’s unwillingness to consider the return of the occupied Golan Heights. In Turkey, growing hostility towards Israel since the raid on the Gaza flotilla in May 2010 has severely hampered formerly amicable relations. In Egypt, the battle over who will succeed the now ageing President Hosni Mubarak after 30 years of his authoritarian rule has resurfaced and the looming wars of the Diadochi seem likely to result in serious internal conflict. In Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s coup d’état of summer 2008 has increased instability, causing worldwide concern in light of the anticipated Iranian nuclear weapons programme and giving rise to a new round of international sanctions. As a result, Western–Iranian relations remain strained and promise to have severe repercussions for the disastrous ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’ and the volatile graveyard peace following the US-led invasion.

At the heart of this inflammatory deadlock of overlapping conflicts lies the seemingly intractable and asymmetric struggle between Israel and the Palestinians. Also here, the trend of 2010 seems less than encouraging. On the diplomatic front, after months of ‘proximity talks’ orchestrated by US Special Envoy George Mitchell, direct negotiations on final status issues were opened by President Obama in September 2010. While the world hopes for a fundamental break from the ritual of Middle East negotiations, a new round of talks recalls years of failed efforts. Peace summits at Camp David and Taba were accompanied by high hopes in 2000, but resulted in an unprecedented wave of violence. In the West Bank, Israeli settlements continue to expand unhindered by the ‘settlement freeze’ announced to ovations in the US in 2010. In Gaza, the humanitarian situation remains dire, while the rift between Fatah and Hamas continues to deepen. And finally Jerusalem, the City of Peace, stands on the brink of violence, with calls for a ‘unified eternal capital of Israel’ sung against the backdrop of house demolitions and the expropriation of Palestinian residents.

Have prospects for a two-state solution all but disappeared? An increasing number of observers would agree – some reluctantly, some triumphantly. Israel’s Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman in July 2010 unveiled his alternative to a comprehensive peace by proposing to turn Gaza into an ‘entirely independent entity’, while prominent Israeli historian Benny Morris candidly argues for a Palestinian–Jordanian confederation in a bestselling tract on how to resolve the ongoing conflict. Given ‘the emptiness of Jordan’, Morris earnestly pronounced, a ‘redistribution of the Palestinian population’ was the only feasible alternative. While this argument can be traced back to David Ben Gurion and Chaim Weizmann and thus echoes decades of suggestions to expel Palestinians by force from their homes, thinly veiled calls for ethnic cleansing by a prominent Israeli historian have resulted in little more than cursory criticism from the Israeli public (Morris, 2009, pp. 199–200). In view of the uncompromising Israeli stance, increasingly sceptical Palestinian voices have raised serious doubts about the prospects of a two-state solution. In 1999, the late Edward Said argued that ‘real peace’ could ‘come only with a bi-national Israeli–Palestinian state’, since the inherent contradictions of the Oslo Accords precluded the establishment of a viable Palestinian state (Said, 1999). Based on widespread disillusionment concerning Israel’s readiness for compromise, public opinion in Palestine has increasingly embraced Said’s pessimistic or – depending on one’s outlook – overly optimistic assessment. In March 2010, a survey by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem found that Palestinian support for a one-state solution has risen to 29 per cent. Similarly, the results of a poll by the Jerusalem Media and Communication Centre and the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung of April 2010 reports that support for a ‘bi-national’ state has risen to 34 per cent.

Translated into a coherent political agenda, this shift in Palestinian public opinion would pose an unprecedented challenge to the Zionist ideal of a Jewish state. Would the path followed by South Africa not be the inevitable alternative? Should Palestinians give up their national aspirations and claim full civic equality in the State of Israel, a state that would extend from the ‘sea to the river’? Israeli mainstream decision-makers have begun to express some apprehension. In 2007, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warned that the State of Israel would be ‘finished’ if the two-state solution ‘collapse[d]’, while in January 2010 the leader of the Israeli Labour Party and Minister of Defence Ehud Barak argued that the absence of a two-state solution ‘and not an Iranian bomb or any other external threat – [was] the most serious threat to Israel’s future’.

Is this the reason why Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu approved in principle a two-state solution in his speech at Bar-Ilan University on 14 June 2009? Under pressure from the US administration, Netanyahu reluctantly acknowledged that ‘in the heart of our Jewish Homeland now lives a large population of Palestinians’ and declared that Israel did ‘not want to rule over them’. Opting for the most limited of formulas (entirely unacceptable to Palestinians) and just short of an outright rejection of US demands, Netanyahu grudgingly accepted the basic consensus of the international community. It therefore seems that while the prospects of a two-state solution have been eroded by Israeli policies on the ground, the international community has increasingly adopted the two-state blueprint as the only solution to decades of violence. George W. Bush’s Roadmap to Peace (2002), the Annapolis Conference (2007) and more recent policies of Barack Obama are evidence of this commitment. Despite obvious disappointments, growing scepticism and despair, the two-state solution continues to be supported by the majority on both sides of the Israeli–Palestinian divide. Thus at least theoretically – and rhetorically among decision-makers – the objective of two states for two peoples continues to fuse both international and local political consensus.

If, however, political support for the two-state solution has grown in the international sphere and among the majority of Israelis and Palestinians, the question as to why progress has remained elusive is salient. Who has been responsible for the decade-long failure that is the ‘peace process’?

2. THE MYTH OF A MISSING PALESTINIAN PARTNER

Common wisdom has a clear – and convenient – response: the Palestinians. Represented by uncompromising and corrupt leaders and fuelled by irrational religiously motivated inflexibility, the Palestinian side has ‘never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity’, as Abba Eban (Israel’s foreign minister 1966–74) famously declared. At the root of this perception lies the failure of the Camp David talks of July 2000 and the subsequent spin-offs. The dominant narrative of Camp David – conveniently written by those responsible for its failure – singled out the Palestinians for rejecting what has been continuously presented as a ‘generous offer’. In his memoirs, President Clinton repeatedly blamed Yasser Arafat for his ‘colossal mistake’ and labelled his ‘rejection’ an ‘error of historic proportions’. For obvious reasons it was easier to blame the ‘uncompromising’ Palestinians rather than the US negotiating team, which was not an honest broker, having only succeeded in aggravating internal Palestinian mismanagement.

Unsurprisingly, a similar assessment was presented by the then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. In view of pending Israeli elections, it was no time for self-criticism. Instead, Barak resorted to the mantra-like incantation that all but destroyed the Israeli peace camp: ‘I have turned every stone on the way to peace’; there is ‘no Palestinian partner’. Re-enforced by the Israeli perception of Palestinians from the second Intifada, this narrative has become increasingly accepted by Israeli public opinion since 2000. In November 2007, a survey conducted by the Israeli scholars Daniel Bar-Tal and Eran Halperin found that 80.8 per cent of Israelis agreed with the statement that ‘despite Israel’s desire for peace, the Arabs [have] imposed war time and again’. Based on this, diplomatic efforts by the Israeli Government have so far succeeded in convincing large segments of the Western public that the peaceful Israelis do not have ‘a partner for peace’ on the Palestinian side. An internal review of public opinion polls in the US compiled by Woodnewton Associates for the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) in April 2010 found that US ‘sympathy’ for Israel had increased more or less continuously since 2003, reaching 63 per cent in November 2009. This constitutes an unprecedented peak since 1997 despite the humanitarian crisis resulting from military incursions into Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza in 2008–9. In comparison, US ‘sympathy’ for the Palestinians has hovered around 18 per cent since 2002.

Public support for Israel and Western news media have worked hand in glove with what even Washington’s strategic establishment has come to label the US’s ‘Israel-centric approach to the negotiation process’ (Mead, 2009, p. 65). Time and again, the near-unconditional and comprehensive financial, economic, political and military support by the US for Israel has, on a diplomatic level, been represented as a hardly equidistant approach to peace-making in the Middle East. The repercussions of this have seriously undermined the Palestinian position, distorting the perception of actual developments on the ground.

3. CHANGE IN PALESTINE

As of 2010, against the background of uncompromising Israeli government policies, overshadowed by the security focus on Iran, eclipsed by the Gaza war and the beginning of final status negotiations under US auspices, change has taken place at different levels of Palestinian politics. These politics of change significantly break with previous attempts to achieve Palestinian national aspirations. While developments are not free of contradictions and setbacks, they fundamentally question dominant Western and Israeli narratives and ultimately pose an unprecedented long-term challenge to the Israeli leadership, irrespective of the outcome of current negotiations. The most notable political trends can be identified in terms of the programmatic reinvention of the Hamas movement, ideological and personal developments in Fatah, state-building efforts of Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and in the rise of non-violent resistance to Israeli policies.

While adhering ideologically to the abstract objective of ‘liberating all of Palestine’, the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, has recently initiated a significant programmatic transformation towards the factual and pragmatic acceptance of a two-state solution. This change has gone widely unnoticed by Western observers but fundamentally alters the parameters for engaging the movement in a constructive manner. The prospects for taking advantage of this significant development may, however, be jeopardised by the failure of Western governments to recognise Hamas as a relevant and dynamic political player capable of change. Hamas has traditionally been characterised exclusively on the grounds of outdated sources, such as the Hamas Charter. As moderate forces from within Hamas attempt to bring constructive change to the movement, Western decision-makers – and Arab governments – are at risk of contributing to self-fulfilling prophesies by inadvertently supporting radical forces that thrive under the current policy of diplomatic and economic isolationism.

Change has also come to the secular Fatah party. In August 2009, Fatah surprised most international observers by holding its Sixth General Conference in a delayed response to the 2006 landslide electoral defeat. Sixteen years overdue, the party convention committed Fatah to non-violent resistance and transformed the movement from a heterogeneous group with an extensive support base abroad into a streamlined political institution firmly rooted in the Palestinian Territory. While by no means a fully functioning political party yet, Fatah renewed its leadership and bolstered forces that are, in principle, in favour of a negotiated solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. While core challenges remain on Fatah’s agenda, an important first step to reforming the moribund and archaic dinosaur of Palestinian politics has been taken.

Also in the PNA, Palestinian decision-making has undergone an untold revolution since 2009. Breaking with the previous dogma of ‘liberation before state-building’ as represented by the 1988 proclamation of the Palestinian State in Algiers, Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and President Mahmoud Abbas in August 2009 began to implement a comprehensive plan for Palestinian state-building. Fighting nepotism and corruption, this is attempted largely via unilateral state- and institution-building and is supplemented by efforts to lobby internationally for the recognition of a Palestinian state. Despite a noticeable lack of formal democratic legitimacy which has been vehemently criticised by some Palestinian observers, Fayyad enjoys the support of most Western governments and a growing number of Palestinians. His state-building policies have claimed Palestinian rights to self-determination through constructive initiatives despite the challenges and ambiguities of Israeli occupation.

While these politics of change have occurred at the institutional level in the three leading agencies of Palestinian nationalism, a fourth revolutionary development has emerged largely outside formalised political institutions: a general shift away from violent struggle to strategies of non-violent resistance. While non-violence per se has never been as sporadic in Palestinian politics as it has been absent in Western (and Israeli) news coverage, the concept has by now been embraced by all relevant political institutions in Palestinian politics. Originally brought forward by community leaders such as Mustafa Barghouthi, today Fatah, the PNA, Palestinian civil society and, to a certain extent, Hamas, have all de facto adopted non-violence as their principal method of choice in recent months – albeit to different degrees in terms of formal endorsement and irrevocability. While not free of contradictions, this trend towards non-violence has the potential to alter fundamentally the equation of confrontation in terms of global public support for legitimate Palestinian demands. After all, these have often been compromised by illegitimate forms of resistance, which have not only caused human suffering among civilians – both Israeli and Palestinian – but have also played into the hands of hard-line Israeli decision-makers.

This fundamental and largely overlooked progress on the Palestinian side stands in stark contrast to a policy of stagnation on the Israeli side. Despite Netanyahu’s qualified endorsement of a two-state solution, a major shift to the Right has pushed Israel’s left-wing parties into an existential crisis since the failure of Camp David. This development threatens to alter fundamentally the balance of Israeli party politics. Right-wing parties have forced debates in the Knesset on openly racist legislation, while nearly half of Israel’s school students do not believe that Israeli-Arabs (Israeli-Palestinians) should enjoy the same rights as Jewish citizens according to a poll published in March 2010. As described in the Economist, these shifts in Israeli public perception are indicative of a counterproductive Israeli siege mentality in which memories of historical victimisation, notably the Holocaust, and perceived global hostility have severely limited Israeli willingness to compromise with the Palestinians. In short, a fundamental push to the political Right has made Israel ‘a worse place, not just for the Palestinians but also for its own people’ (Israel’s Siege Mentality, 2010). This analysis is supported by a survey conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute in August 2010, which found that 77 per cent of Jewish Israelis are convinced that ‘it makes no difference what Israel does, the world will be highly critical anyway’ (Peace Index Main Findings, 2010).

The most obvious example of this is the expansion of Israeli settlements. As is (perhaps not) widely known, since the signing of the Oslo Accords, the number of Israeli settlers has virtually tripled continuously and steadily, irrespective of the political party in power. Against this backdrop, Israeli peace veteran Uri Avnery has openly mocked Ehud Barak’s Camp David mantra by pointing out that Barak had indeed ‘turned every stone’ – although not in promoting the supposed peace process, but rather in the unabated pace of settlement construction. The ‘settlement freeze’ which ended in September 2010 made no exception to this general rule. Hailed as an ‘unprecedented step’ by the US State Department, a report by the Israeli organisation Peace Now in August 2010 appears to indicate otherwise. Eight months into the ‘settlement freeze’ saw the construction of ‘at least 600 housing units in over 60 different settlements’, of which ‘at least 492 [were] in direct violation of the law of the freeze’ (Ofran, 2010).

It is against this background that observers within and outside of the region have called for what Henry Siegman (2010, p. 18) labelled ‘forceful outside intervention’. For obvious reasons such voices are rejected by the Netanyahu government and US advisers such as Dennis Ross, who have successfully attempted to frame any US pressure as ‘well intentioned’ but counterproductive (Ross and Makovsky, 2009, p. 127). While potentially promising, the notion of an imposed solution was ultimately rejected by the US at the opening of final status negotiations in September 2010, when President Obama declared that ‘the United States cannot impose a solution’ as the US ‘cannot want [peac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures, Table and Charts
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Prologue
• 1 Introduction and Overview
• 2 Hamas in Transition
• 3 Changing Fatah
• 4 PNA State-Building: Putting Palestine on the Map
• 5 Beyond Terror: Politicising Non-Violent Resistance
• 6 Epilogue
• 7 Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index