The new Palestinian leadership got off to a good start but the real tests lie ahead, writes Graham Usher from Ramallah Three weeks after Yasser Arafat's death the old/new Palestinian leadership is navigating the rapids of succession. Last week PLO Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei and interim PA president Rouhi Fattouh played host to a procession of foreign ministers, each one blessing the new order, supporting the PA presidential elections on 9 January and expressing the hope that Ariel Sharon's disengagement plan would somehow evolve in to a peace process (as opposed to Israel's unilateral abandonment of one). This week the three went to Egypt and Jordan to garner support for the same goals and invest the new leadership with regional legitimacy. Next week Abbas, Qurei and Fattouh will visit Damascus, aiming to close the door on the cold war that existed between the PLO and Syria during so much of Arafat's leadership. They will probably also meet with Palestinian faction heads based in Damascus, including Hamas political leader Khaled Meshal. But there have been squalls. Potentially the most damaging of these came in the throes of Fatah's choice of Abbas as its candidate for the PA presidency. The decision was taken by the movement's supreme Central Committee and Revolutionary Council, two bodies dominated by the so-called "old guard" -- Fatah leaders who returned with Arafat from exile in the mid-1990s and who have been jealously guarding their positions ever since. It was contested by the "young guard", those Fatah leaders who rose to prominence in the first and second Intifadas but whose strength resides in unofficial, unrecognised bodies like the West Bank Higher Council and militias like the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. The dispute was not so much over the candidate, since most wings of Fatah agreed that Abbas was the most suitable leader for what all see as a transitional period. It was over the way he was chosen, says PA minister and young guard leader, Qaddura Fares. "We are passing through a particularly delicate phase. The process of choosing a candidate [for president] requires the greatest legitimacy, which can only be done by involving the largest number of Fatah activists. Legitimacy is definitely not enhanced by narrowing down the circle of decision to the Central Committee and Revolutionary Council." It was a view with which imprisoned West Bank Fatah leader, Marwan Barghouti, agreed, buoyed by demands from many in the movement that he run against Abbas. For a few agonising hours on 26 November it seemed that he might, a move that would cut Fatah's official leadership from its base. Following a four-hour meeting with Fares at Israel's Nafha prison the next day, however, Barghouti decided to back Abbas "in the interests of unity within Fatah and to avoid giving Israel a pretext not to negotiate with the Palestinian leadership", said Fares. Within 24 hours of Barghouti withdrawing his challenge the FRC declared that on 4 August, 2005 -- Arafat's birthday -- Fatah's sixth general conference would be held, the first such convention in 15 years. This has been a long-standing demand of the young guard since it is the General Conference that elects the FCC and FRC. And once that suffrage occurs "we will thank the existing FCC and FRC for their contribution to the national cause and then tell them goodbye," says Fares. But whatever pledges Barghouti received last week might not be enough. On Wednesday evening he reversed his decision and announced, through a statement read by his wife Fadwa, that he will contest the elections after all. Abbas is aware that keeping Fatah together may well be the most difficult of the tasks ahead, not least because the old guard also has its militias and power bases and will not hesitate to activate them to maintain their positions. But there are other challenges. One is to persuade the militias to end what he sees as the self-defeating violence of the Intifada in favour of a peace strategy based on renewed negotiations with Israel and international and regional support. And for this he not only needs all wings of Fatah on board but also the Islamists of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. With Barghouti's decision to contest the vote, he has also chosen to deliberatly split Fatah. Hamas is signalling that it will accept Palestinian ceasefire, at least for the period of Palestinian elections. But it wants a commitment from Abbas that parliamentary elections will follow the presidential one. It also wants "guarantees" that Israel will respond to any truce with an end to its assassination and incursion polices and the release of Palestinian prisoners. On 28 November the FRC recommended that parliamentary elections be held on 15 May 2005, the anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba. As for the terms of the truce Abbas will no doubt be discussing these when he meets Meshal and other faction leaders in Damascus. Other than this Abbas is burnishing his legitimacy by remaining absolutely loyal to the "national constants" laid down by Arafat. He has reiterated that there can be no peace without a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital or an "agreed" resolution of the Palestinian refugees right of return based on UN resolution 194. He has ruled out a new interim agreement and, in a departure from Arafat's legacy, promised that any final status agreement would be subject to a Palestinian national referendum. His problem is that none of this squares with Israel and America's vision of the next phase, a new interim arrangement based on Israel's withdrawal from Gaza, de facto annexations of the West Bank courtesy of the settlement blocs and West Bank wall and a provisional Palestinian state that would give "temporary" covenant to both. If Abbas cannot stop and reverse that project "then his future presidency is likely to be no more successful than his past premiership", says one Fatah young guard parliamentarian.
