On Friday afternoon, a money changer sat in his office on Salah ad-din Street, the main street of East Jerusalem, watching his computer screen. But it wasn't showing the minute-to-minute changes in the exchange rate, or the price of gold – he was watching the protests in Egypt being broadcast live on Al-Jazeera. “Policemen have taken off their uniforms and have joined the demonstrators”, he said, his blue-green eyes widening in amazement. A taxi driver from Beit Hanina nodded in deep affirmation, and said that the protests were “good.” Also on Saturday, a small group of Palestinian East Jerusalem women – some of them from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, one a grassroots Fatah activist – convened in a small but energetic spontaneous demonstration outside the Damascus Gate entrance to the Old City, chanting and holding handmade signs in support of the popular protests against bad government in both Tunisia and Egypt. [Some of the usual suspects called for a demonstration in support of the Egyptian protests, in front of the Egyptian consulate offices in Ramallah on Sunday.] For the most part, Palestinians polled for this article responded with laconic expressions of enthusiasm, and with contained admiration for the ability of the Egyptian protesters to go out on the streets and effect change. But, at about the same time, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (like Libya's leader Muammar Gaddafi) was extending political support to a faltering Mubarak. On Saturday morning, according to the official Palestinian news agency WAFA, Abbas called Egypt's President Husni Mubarak to convey his “solidarity with Egypt” and his commitment to its “security and stability”. Perhaps by purest coincidence, Abbas actually went out of the Muqataa security bubble to attend Friday prayers at the Gamal Abdel Nasser mosque in Ramallah central market. Both Mubarak and the Palestinian Authority have designated Islamic movements (respectively, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Hamas) as their major enemy. Mubarak's mediators have sided, subtly but surely, with the Palestinian Authority against Hamas, and worked in harmony with U.S. and Israeli policies to pursue an inter-Palestinian political reconciliation [or not] on terms that would consolidate the legitimacy of the Ramallah-based PA at the expense of Hamas' political claims. Hamas has not just signed on the dotted line, as Egyptian officials insisted they should do. Unlike the late Yasser Arafat – who had a good working relationship based on mutual accommodation of interests with the late leader of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin in Gaza – Mahmoud Abbas scorns and despises Hamas, a feeling widely shared in Fatah (and also in the much smaller leftist Palestinian “factions”). Hamas' surprise defeat of Fatah – who proved to be rather sore losers – in the 2006 PA elections for the Palestine Legislative Council, was taken as an extreme irritant. Then, some 18 months later, following months of severe rivalry exacerbated by sanctions imposed by international donors (with the U.S. leading the charge), Hamas carried out a rout of Fatah/Palestinian Preventive Security forces that Hamas had come to believe were planning an anti-Hamas coup in Gaza in mid-June 2007. Abbas also carries a personal grudge, however. He says he has evidence that Hamas planned to assassinate him – despite the shelter he previously provided to Hamas leaders earlier threatened by Israel with targeted assassination – during one of his infrequent visits to Gaza before the mid-June 2007 events, which he said amounted to a “military coup”. In response, Abbas carried out his own political coup, declaring Hamas a terrorist organization, then dissolving the short-lived and Saudi-brokered National Unity Government to create the present Hamas-free administration. Ali Abunimah, masterful and indefatigable user of Twitter, and co-founder of the Electronic Intifada website, wrote later Saturday that here that “If the Mubarak regime goes, the United States will lose enormous leverage over the situation in Palestine, and Abbas' PA [Palestinian Authority] will lose one of its main allies against Hamas”. A separate report from Gaza posted on the Electronic Intifada website said that “perhaps the most excited were the youth of Gaza, who saw the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Jordan as evidence of the latent power of their generation … Opinions about what they want and what will happen as a result of the ongoing uprising in Egypt vary within Gaza — ranging from euphoria, to skepticism that Mubarak would actually fall, to concern that the alternative to Hosni Mubarak will be an Islamist government like Hamas, which has become unpopular among many Palestinians in Gaza”. This is posted here. BM
