The Search for Good Governance in Palestine
Charmaine Seitz
(Charmaine Seitz is managing editor of the
Palestine Report.)
The second Palestinian
intifada, a spontaneous
expression of anger against
the persistent Israeli
occupation, has been
sustained since last
September through a
complicated interplay of
forces. The early Israeli
deployment of
sharpshooters quickly shut
down large-scale popular
protests. In their place, a
type of guerrilla resistance,
given staunch moral support
by the rest of the
population, has arisen.
Israel's military closures of
Palestinian towns and
villages have forced local
leaders of Fatah, the main
faction in the Palestinian
national movement, to take
charge. Yasser Arafat's
Palestinian Authority (PA)
is mostly silent about its
long-term intentions with
regard to the uprising,
perhaps partly out of a
desire not to be seen
internationally as directing
the confrontations.
On the occasions when the
PA has gripped the reins to
steer the intifada in the
direction of political compromise, it has been
largely successful. Confrontations have eased,
despite vocal resistance from some quarters. But
the mainstream Fatah grassroots has
swollen with an energized membership that has set
forth its own demands. These include the
continuation of the intifada until the occupation
is gone.
Simultaneously, what might be called the "Oslo
aristocracy"?those Palestinian leaders
commonly associated with the new money and
concessionary politics of the agreements
crafted in 1993?has lost ground to a mainstream
consensus rejecting the precepts of the
Oslo period. All of these developments are greatly
altering the Palestinian political scene. A
bit tentatively, Palestinians are wondering if
those changes can be made permanent.
Altered Public Trust
The Nablus office of Fatah is judiciously located
just above the offices of the British Council.
If it struck this Palestinian political
headquarters with helicopter-borne missiles, the
Israeli
military would risk destroying the local British
cultural mission. Still, as he greets his guests,
Nablus Fatah leader Issam Abu Bakr glances wryly
at the row of windows adjacent to the
long, roughly finished conference table. The
obligatory joke he tells about the possibility of
assassination rings of bravado, given the deep
shadows of exhaustion under his eyes. Abu
Bakr pauses when asked about his appearance. "I
live a really difficult life," says the father of
three. "There is a lot of fear. We are sitting
here in this room and someone could kill us.
There is so much pressure?before the intifada, we
weren't thinking about carrying guns
against the Israelis."
The job of reorganizing the several hundred Nablus
Fatah members who returned to active
party participation with the outbreak of the
uprising fell to Abu Bakr. "Many of them were in
the Palestinian Authority and when the intifada
broke out they all wanted to return to Fatah,"
he says, referring to the mass migration from
"official" desk and security jobs to activism in
the uprising. "This made a mess." Fateh in Nablus
has some 33,000 members, of which "not
more than 1,000 are active," estimates their
leader.
Abu Bakr differentiates between the bureaucratic
and security institutions of the PA, which
are largely Fatah-controlled, and the political
party infrastructure of Fatah itself. It is a
seemingly fine distinction, as both memberships
overlap, but one that is crucial for
understanding the challenges Fatah faces today.
Abu Bakr is candid about the tension
between the different tendencies of his faction.
He says the friction between the two has been
sporadic, but persistent in Nablus. Right now,
however, the relationship is at a low. "Any
intifada comes at the price of the authorities. In
the first intifada, the Israeli authorities
became zero," he remembers, using a common Arabic
expression for worthlessness. "People
don't want any interference. If the Authority
comes in and tries to enforce the law, they find
that this is hard to do."
Weakened Bureaucracy
The city of Nablus has just seen one possible
result of this tilting balance of power. Two
children, Firas al-Agbar, 13, and Khayr al-Din
Masri, 17, were killed in a shootout in
Nablus streets after confrontations between
infamous Fatah fighter Ahmad Tabouk, his
followers and residents of the Balata refugee
camp. Reportedly, Tabouk opened fire on a
member of the PA security services in the camp,
injuring several. The camp residents flooded
Nablus streets, participating in a full-fledged
gunfight in which the two youths were killed.
The incident was political in that it matched
Fatah against Fatah (the security officer had
allegedly once jailed Tabouk in the mid-1990s).
But it was also a sign that the rule of law,
never strong under the PA, has become much weaker
in the climate of the uprising.
The July incident provoked the PA to denounce
lawlessness that might play into Israeli
hands. "All our citizens should realize that
Israel is trying to transfer the battle to Palestinian
society so it can defeat our steadfastness," West
Bank intelligence head Tawfiq Tirawi told
Voice of Palestine radio. "We will not permit
anyone to play with the security of Palestinian
society; everybody should comply with Palestinian
laws." While the municipality has since
arrested several of those involved in the
shooting, in mid-July, the authorities were still
investigating the incident. "They have to put
[those responsible] in prison," Abu Bakr says,
quietly shaking his head. As Tabouk's superior in
the Nablus tanzim, the Fatah activist
corps, Abu Bakr finds himself implicated in this
contretemps between elements of the
quasi-state party.
This is not the first time that armed fighting has
broken out in the city streets. In September
1999, Bashar Abu Salhieh was shot in his butcher
shop in Nablus after another dispute
between camp and city residents. Then, the New
York Times reported, the PA arrested
several Fatah members in the Palestinian security
branches after days of unrest. But today,
the power of the judiciary is weakened by the
Israeli closure that prevents the movement of
judges and staff. The power of the bureaucracy is
weakened by a decimated budget, and the
power of the civil infrastructure is weakened by
the lack of services or safety. In their stead,
the armed grassroots has grown in stature and
influence.
Abu Bakr gives a different example of the
redistribution of power. The leadership of Fatah in
Nablus never directly authorized members to begin
carrying out armed operations with
Hamas and Islamic Jihad, he says. Once joint
operations took place, the Authority was
unable to arrest the perpetrators who were not
from Fatah, while allowing its own men to
remain free. The implicit understanding here is
that because Fatah forms the core of the PA,
Fatah decides the Authority's course of action.
(As one Fatah member in Nablus avers, "We
are the ones who give the police their power.") At
the beginning of the intifada, Palestinian
opposition groups were not a part of circles
planning armed resistance. In practice, all of the
armed groups now have gained strength, while those
trying to curtail armed actions are
weakened.
A few blocks away from Abu Bakr's office, through
a heavily guarded hallway and a thick
metal door, the mayor is also candid. "We have a
problem here," admits Ghassan Shakaa.
He turns in a black leather office chair. "There
is no law and order. [But] the police and the
security services, they have to work within the
law." But which law? Laws against carrying
weapons? Or "laws" against flouting the authority
of the PA leadership?
"Palestinians are experiencing a very chaotic
internal situation right now," explained analyst
Ghassan al-Khatib in May, listing deterioration of
the rule of law, health, security and quality
of life. Israeli measures calculated to bring the
PA to its knees are behind most of the chaos.
The same week that Fatah members in Nablus turned
on each other with guns, Mayor
Shakaa was considering cutting off electricity to
the city for four to six hours a day. The
municipality can no longer foot the bill, due to
the crippling Israeli economic siege that saps
municipal revenues in various indirect ways. Angry
citizens complained loudly about the
mayor's rumored personal extravagance and
financial favors to his friends. Without redress
for the mounting disorder and discord, Abu Bakr
predicts an eventual explosion. "The
masses are hungry and if they don't have a
solution, there will be problems," he warns.
Hopes for "Good Governance"
For all its dangers, the erosion of PA rule has
also spurred hope in some Palestinians. The
same return to grassroots militancy that has
pushed the Oslo aristocracy into the background
feeds the aspirations of others to instill
practices of good governance in the Palestinian
leadership.
Since the start of the uprising, demands to remedy
the PA's fiscal and political corruption,
lack of transparency and favoritism have threaded
through the communications of local
organizers to the highest levels of leadership.
Yasser Arafat acknowledged as much when he
spoke of the need for political and institutional
reform at a March meeting of the Palestinian
Legislative Council.(2) Despite repeated official
denials, the PA newspaper al-Hayat
al-Jadida has reported that a cabinet reshuffle is
in the works, and that Hamas has been
offered seats in the new cabinet (although
certainly at some cost). The public consensus
appears to support such a "unity government," and
has coalesced around the need actively to
fight Israel at the same time as
Palestinian-Israeli talks continue. Off the record,
however, an
influential Fatah leader says that even if such a
government is established, he doubts that the
new leadership will work to root out corruption or
its causes.(2) This source believes,
however, that the intifada has opened the door for
an overhaul of the system. He also
predicts "an explosion" if public anger over
corruption is not addressed.
Another long-time Fatah member says that
"corruption is not the problem. The problem is
the system itself, the type of culture leading the
system." The corruption noted repeatedly in
reports by the Palestinian Legislative Council and
foreign institutions working in
PA-controlled areas is only symptomatic of a
political culture that has been carried from
Jordan, to Lebanon, to Tunis and now to the West
Bank and Gaza Strip. "The Palestinian
Authority of today was born not in 1994, but in
1968." One independent analyst notes that
although Arafat meets regularly with local leaders
of the uprising, those meetings do not
guarantee any effective participation in strategic
decision making. In the end, Arafat decides.
One official in the PA describes the sentiment
inside Fatah this way: "In the inner circles of
Fatah, when we meet, everyone says, 'We are sick
of it. We all know what the problem is.'"
Those interested in change fear that any movement
in that direction might be manipulated by
Israel for its own benefit. Decentralizing
authority might reinforce in political terms the
Israeli
military's division of the West Bank and Gaza
Strip into disconnected cantons. Some Fatah
members may interpret campaigns for good
governance, particularly if targeted at
"corruption," as the efforts of outside forces
trying to damage the PA. But the desire for
radical change is there. Palestinian thinkers and
political leaders fear that once the intifada is
over, those pushing for good governance from the
inside will be coopted into the system. The
"Oslo aristocracy" could quickly return to its
former dominance. For his part, an influential
Fatah leader says that something must give, but he
is unsure how to start the ball rolling
toward a better system. He's got enough on his
shoulders trying to fight the occupation and
protect himself and his men. But, he says, he's
taking suggestions.
Endnotes
1 Rema Hammami and Jamil Hilal, "An Uprising at a
Crossroads," Middle East Report 219
(Summer 2001).
2 All quotes in this section are taken from a
small-group, off-the-record discussion on islah
or good governance, held by the Jerusalem Media
and Communications Center in July 2001.
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