Unprepared for the worst

By Graham Usher
The official response was neutrality laced with accusation. "We respect the choice of the Israeli people, and hope the peace process will continue," Yasser Arafat told journalists on 6 February. Palestinian negotiator Yasser Abed Rabbo was blunter. "The Israelis will come to regret this decision," he said. "It will cost them internal division, international isolation and confrontation with the Palestinians".
But, away from the rhetoric, there is no disguising the fear the election of Ariel Sharon as Israeli Prime Minister has caused the Palestinian leadership. This is not simply because, with a whopping vote in his pocket, Sharon believes he has a mandate to "continue the peace process" on his terms rather than theirs. It was also because Sharon's erstwhile rival and possible defence minister had already kicked off the process of revision.
On 8 February, Ehud Barak announced that all the "understandings" broached with the Palestinians at Camp David last year and during the Taba negotiations in January would not be "binding" on the next Israeli government. Within hours -- in what was clearly a prearranged move -- US State Department spokesman Richard Boucher declared that neither would the Bush administration be "bound" by proposals on a final status deal submitted by President Bill Clinton in December.
The Palestinian negotiators watched their entire pre-election strategy go up in smoke with characteristic confusion. Palestinian Speaker, Ahmed Qurei, announced negotiations would resume "from the point they left off" in Taba or they would not resume at all. PLO negotiator, Nabil Shaath, then said it was "no regret" if Clinton's proposals went down with him. Arafat pleaded with his people for "patience." But patience is wearing thin.
Four months into the Al-Aqsa Intifada, the Palestinian Authority is on the brink of collapse. First there is the human cost inflicted by Barak's unprecedented aggression -- 360 Palestinians dead, 13,000 injured, the razing of thousands of acres of Palestinian farmland and the damage or destruction of over 2,000 Palestinian homes. In Gaza, the latest, most ferocious onslaught came on 12 February, when the Israeli army used tanks and heavy machine guns to bombard Khan Younis refugee camp, leaving 30 homes ablaze, 77 Palestinians wounded and 10 more incapacitated through inhaling a "new" form of toxic gas. The army said the shelling was in reprisal for an armed attack on one of their military bases.
Then there is the economic toll -- an estimated loss to the Palestinian economy of nearly $3 billion, an unemployment rate of 45 per cent and a 50 per cent hike in poverty levels, calculated at living on or below $2 per person per day. The crisis is compounded by Palestinian charges that only $50 million of the $1 billion pledged to the "Intifada fund" by the Arab summit in October has actually been disbursed to the PA. The Islamic Bank -- responsible for administering the donations -- says $230 million has been raised but cannot be released without greater "transparency" on the PA's expenditure plans. Meanwhile, over 75,000 Palestinian public employees have yet to receive their salaries for January.
But the deeper crisis lies at the level of leadership. Very few Palestinians buy the Israeli line that their uprising was engineered by Arafat: like its progenitor in 1987, they insist, it was a spontaneous and national revolt against occupation, even if one now clothed in the dress of the "Oslo peace process".
But equally few Palestinians would deny that Arafat rode the wave of the intifada to strengthen his position vis-à-vis Israel at the negotiating table. It is no less clear to them that their leader had no other strategy save that, and certainly no policies for creating a society able to withstand the terrible cost of a popular and armed struggle against Israel.
Which is why, when that strengthening of position failed to materialise, Palestinian negotiators meekly returned to the same discussions in Taba that they had rejected in Camp David. "It was amazing," admits Palestinian analyst, Mustafa Barghouti. "We thought we had been fighting for a new framework for negotiations, for international protection and adherence to UN resolutions. But they [the negotiators] went back to the same table and the same track. It's as though the sacrifices of the intifada had never happened."
Nor is the return to negotiations the only rift between leaders and led. There is also a crisis of governance. In Gaza farmers have set up camps to protest a loss to their sector of $127 million due to army policies of land sweeping and closure. "Some farmers have lost 90 per cent of their lands," says one farmers' leader. The PA has promised them a compensation hand-out of $5 million. "Five million!" snorts one farmer. "That's less than Hisham Mekki had in his bank account." (Mekki was the head of the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation who, last month, was shot dead by masked men for "corruption". It was suspected he had embezzled between eight and $18 million of public funds).
Sometimes criticism is less passively expressed. On 4 February, the PA's Preventive Security Force (PSF, headed by Mohamed Dahlan) attempted to arrest a 13-year-old Hamas activist in Gaza's Jabalyia refugee camp, ostensibly for "collaboration" but actually for his bravado boasts to carry out a suicide operation in Israel. The PSF followed up with a sweep of another 18 suspected Hamas activists. And the people of the camp took to the streets and stoned the local PSF office, outraged that the PA should be acting to ensure Israel's security at the very moment when its army was shelling Gaza and often killing its residents.
"We are in disarray, whether at the level of negotiations or the intifada," admits Haydar Abdel-Shafi, former chief of the Palestinian delegation and one of the wisest heads the Palestinians have. His remedy is at once moderate and radical. "We need domestic reform," he says. "A functioning and independent judiciary, freedom of expression and transparent public funds." But "the precondition for these is the replacement of the present Palestinian leadership with a broader national coalition committed to democratic change. For without elections -- and the maximising of our potential they would allow -- we will not be able to exit the impasse we are in."
Many Palestinians saw Sharon's election victory on 6 February as evidence of an Israel reverting to type, deluded yet again that security comes from military might rather than from a just settlement with their Palestinian and Arab neighbours. "Less a general election than a generals' election," said one Gazan. But the growing understanding among Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank is that to truly deal with Israel's "new-old guard" they must first deal with their own.
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