On the eve of the new year Graham Usher in Jerusalem looks at the divided state of the Palestinian national movement. He argues it must unify its ranks and policy in 2003 if it is not to repeat the mistakes it made in 2002 The Palestinian Authority began 2002 mid-way through a Palestinian cease-fire in the hope that such restraint would encourage an American rescue from an Israeli government bent on its destruction. It is beginning 2003 in the hope that a US-backed diplomatic "roadmap" will eventually beat a path back to political negotiations. The first hope proved to be forlorn. So may be the second, given President Bush's decision to defer all movement on the roadmap until after the Israeli elections and perhaps a war with Iraq. But there are differences between last year and the next. One is that Israel enters 2003 in total military reconquest of the West Bank and large swathes of Gaza, courtesy of a new occupation regime of checkpoints, bypass roads, walls and enveloping settlements. A second is that the PA barely exists as a central, governing authority, certainly not in the West Bank, and only partially so in Gaza. It lies collapsed and buried under the unebbing tide of two Israeli military invasions in 2002: "Defensive Shield" in March and "Determined Path" in June. A third is that at the start of 2002 the Palestinian national movement chafed under one leadership; it is now chafing under three. The first is PA leadership. Its main tribune (PLO Secretary-General Mahmoud Abbass) now openly calls the Intifada a colossal error whose only result has been "the total destruction of all we [the PA] have built and all that had been built before that". In its stead he advocates a negotiations-only approach of Oslo vintage to "expose Sharon". In practice, this boils down to adherence to the roadmap and a cease-fire agreement with Hamas, if not yet to end the armed resistance in the occupied territories, then at least to ban attacks on civilians inside Israel. The second is what remains of Fatah's younger political leadership, the so-called tanzim, whose turn to the street and armed struggle in October 2000 transformed civilian protests against Israeli actions in Jerusalem into the Palestinians second national revolt in less than a decade. The national and domestic policies it advocates probably still command a majority among Palestinians in the occupied territories, particularly its insistence on democratic reform and that a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza remains the "strategic goal" of the national struggle. But its depleted cadre -- including Israel's arrest of its main ideologue and spokesman, Marwan Barghouti -- currently lacks the constituencies and allies required to turn popular opinion into political power. The third is the armed resistance led by Hamas and Islamic Jihad as well as Fatah offshoots like the Al-Aqsa Brigades in the West Bank and the Popular Resistance Committees in Gaza. Fired by a stronger Islamist ideology and allied with Islamist and nationalist forces in the Arab and Muslim world, their unstated political aim increasingly appears to be to forge a new national movement out of the ashes of the old. The means is the "resistance-only" path charted by Hizbullah in south Lebanon. If there is a national goal, it is not peace but Israel's forced withdrawal or "unilateral separation" from all or most of the occupied territories. All three roads may be deemed legitimate for a people under military occupation, though many would question the morality of a policy that licenses indiscriminate attacks on civilians. What is untenable is for all three to be taken simultaneously. The PA's embrace of the Oslo-like security arrangements enshrined in the roadmap cannot be squared with Fatah's call for armed and popular resistance in the occupied territories. And neither is compatible with a "resistance" that acts in conscious opposition to the first, yet views itself as unbound by the discipline of the second. For many Palestinian observers the only exit from this impasse is for the three wings to strive for a "common policy" for the uprising. Only this time it should be agreed not by agreement between the factions but rather by the democratic verdict of the Palestinian people as expressed through local, national and presidential elections. For this suffrage to be meaningful it must be part of an internationally guaranteed process that moves tangibly toward ending the occupation, with a first step being a monitored Israeli withdrawal from the reoccupied Palestinian towns, villages and refugee camps. Elections are now perhaps the sole arena where the future direction of the national struggle could be legitimately, because democratically, decided. Abbass has said it would be the job of a new Palestinian government "to specify the road we should take, announce it openly and convince our people that the road will lead to our desired goals". Barghouti has endorsed elections as the "democratic and legal way" to force the departure of "many Palestinian officials and leaders" who have failed "in their roles and responsibilities in this decisive battle". And Hamas political leaders in Gaza like Aziz Rantisi have confirmed they would abide by any "majority Palestinian decision if the elections were free and not restricted by the limitations of Oslo". But Hamas and many in Fatah are convinced that neither Israel nor the US under their present governments would tolerate elections that would grant Yasser Arafat a renewed mandate from his people or Hamas a stake in any future Palestinian government or policy. They are probably right in this conviction. Yet in the absence of an inclusive reform process of this kind the Intifada is likely to degenerate from a national struggle against occupation to an attritional, competitive and unaccountable contest for a post-Arafat leadership. It is certainly the responsibility of the Palestinian national movement or movements to unify their ranks around a common policy. But it is also the responsibility of the world to enable the material and political conditions in the occupied territories that would allow them to do so.
