On 4 November 1995, an Israeli religious fanatic by the name of Yigal Amir assassinated Itzhaq Rabin as the Prime Minister was leaving a pro-peace rally in Tel Aviv. This criminal act underscored the divisions in Israeli society and sent a shudder throughout the world. Elections for the Knesset and the premiership were six months away and the political debate within the country had become bitter. Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu had called for the abrogation of Oslo and equated its acceptance with treason. Rabin had responded by pointing out the benefits to Israel of what he had signed.
In reality the differences between the Rabin and Netanyahu positions were purely tactical. Rabin accepted the Oslo Agreement and what followed it without making substantial concessions to Arafat and the Palestinian Authority. His disdain for Arafat was obvious and he had openly rejected the idea of a Palestinian state. Netanyahu advocated annulling the Oslo Agreement because it accepted the PLO as representative of the Palestinian people and implied a vague promise of Palestinian statehood. Although it escaped the morbid minds of the Amirs of this world, the way the agreements were being implemented reconciled the two positions. Hanan Ashrawi and Faisal Husseini, among others, believe that the Palestinians are better off negotiating with Likud and Netanyahu – that it is easier to argue against their open belligerent policies than against Labour’s subtle equivalent.1
Unedifying as it is to criticize an assassinated leader, what followed Rabin’s death demonstrated a universal lack of understanding of how he had used Oslo. President Clinton, King Hussein, President Mubarak and other world leaders attended his funeral and made solemn speeches decrying the death of ‘a peacemaker’. Even Oman and Qatar were represented by official delegations. Arafat did not attend, mostly for security reasons, but the PLO sent a six-man delegation. Four days after the funeral Arafat paid a secret visit to Mrs Rabin in Tel Aviv and, in accordance with Arab tradition, respectfully took off his headdress. Speaking to the press afterwards, he lamented the death of ‘my partner in the peace process’. The negotiations were still stalled.
Rabin was succeeded by his Foreign Minister, Shimon Peres, the man whom Ashrawi had accused of smiling and making fools out of the Palestinians. With Israel traumatized by the assassination and an election approaching, Peres saw no benefit in moving things forward. During a meeting in December he played to Arafat’s vanity and addressed him as ‘rayyes’ or ‘president’. The television pictures of this event showed Peres using the word and turning to Arafat for a reaction, and the latter beaming like a happy child. The only thing on which both men agreed was that the time to hold the long-delayed elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council and president had come.
Although international observers, including former President Jimmy Carter, monitored the elections on 20 January 1996 and reported that they were fair, the scope of their observation covered the possibility of coercion and ballot rigging and nothing else. In December 1995, a month before the actual voting, Arafat had delayed the registration of voters in the cities of Jerusalem, Gaza, Hebron and Khan Yunis.2 This illegal move was followed by massive registration of loyalists to guard against an anti-PLO outcome in these cities. During the campaign, airtime on Palestinian radio and television was denied to candidates opposed to Oslo.3 Both actions gave the PNA candidates a substantial advantage.
The results of the elections came as no surprise. Samiha Khalil, a brave member of the Palestinian Women’s Movement, ran against Arafat and got 12 per cent of the vote of slightly over one million. Since there were no existing electoral district boundaries they had to be created for these elections, which allowed for an element of creativity. Then, by conceding those constituencies where they were most likely to lose, Fatah ensured it was not wasting votes which could be put to good use elsewhere. Reflecting this built-in bias, Fatah received 30 per cent of the vote which somehow guaranteed it 51 seats in the 88-seat legislative council, 58 per cent of the total.4 Members of the Tunis PLO received more votes than local people in thirteen of the fifteen polling districts. Among the outsiders who won seats were Nabil Sha’ath, Intissar Wazir, Abu ’Ala, Hakam Balawi, Hassan Asfour and Marwan Kanafani.
Perhaps it was the behaviour of Kanafani which told more about the elections than anything else. Israeli television filmed him kissing Arafat’s hand to thank him for his victory. To Edward Said, the elections sanctified the division between the insiders and the outsiders;5 people like Balawi and Kanafani were not known to their constituents. And Arafat capped it all by appointing the unpopular Abu ’Ala Speaker of the legislative council and thus his legal successor.
The atmosphere surrounding the elections and the actual voting was inconsistent with what Arafat called ‘a totally free, democratic process’. The opposition parties, including the Islamists, did not participate in the elections, though a few of their members did on an individual basis. The terms of Oslo allowed Israel to guarantee a PLO success and they saw no point in participating. (Article 3 of the basic law, which covers the elections, states: ‘This does not affect the authority of the PLO and its organizations, including representing the Palestinian people.’) The Palestinian National Authority bought family, regional and religious allegiances to try to endow the elections with legitimacy. The mushrooming PNA bureaucracy, including the security forces, numbered over eighty thousand with an average of five dependants each and was also used effectively. Many of the outsiders in the security services were registered in districts where the independent opponents of the PLO were strong.
Other events before and after the elections cast doubt on whether their results represented Palestinian feeling. Among them was the funeral of an engineer, Yahya Ayyash, who had allegedly masterminded several suicide bombings. Ayyash was killed by a mobile telephone explosion on 5 January 1996, sixteen days before the balloting. His funeral attracted three hundred thousand Gazans. However, when it came to voting the overall turn-out fell short of what the first election in Palestinian history had been expected to produce. In Jerusalem something akin to an election boycott took place – only 40 per cent of the electorate voted. The turn-out in Hebron was still low, at 66 per cent. Gaza, however, reflected its special status as the home of Arafat’s bureaucracy; the turn-out was 87 per cent there compared to the West Bank’s 74.
The elections, slated to be held ‘in keeping with democratic principles… no later than nine months after the DoP [Declaration of Principles]’, were a failure. Arafat took the oath of office on 12 February 1996. This stipulated that the Palestinian National Charter be amended to accept the right of Israel within secure boundaries, and confirmed him as Prime Minister and commander in chief. But his dictatorial inclinations showed very early when the Legislative Council held a meeting in Bethlehem in March 1996. When some members questioned the powers vested in the office of the president, he stomped out shouting, ‘Dogs and sons of bitches!’ and threatening to ‘get rid of the whole lot of them’. Although the Council’s powers do not allow it to act on its findings, Arafat still resented it because its mere existence signalled potential trouble – a source of control on his behaviour.
The post– election divisions among the Palestinians were the worst in the PLO’s history. The opposition from leftist guerrilla groups and the Islamists was strengthened by that of the people of the West Bank and Gaza, the areas covered by the various agreements. The Tunis outsiders, traditional leaders and many followers of Fatah were behind Arafat, but most of the ordinary people were turning against an unproductive Oslo. However, Arafat succeeded in blaming what was happening exclusively on the Israelis. This helped his personal approval rating, which was considerably higher than the approval for Oslo – 41 as against 20 per cent. The leftists and Islamists thought otherwise, and the latter responded violently.
On 25 February two explosions, one in Jerusalem and another in Ashkalon, occurred within hours of each other, killing twenty-four people and injuring ninety others. Leaflets claimed they were in revenge for the death of Ayyash. Another closure of the West Bank and Gaza was ordered; the Israeli government also suspended contacts with the Palestinians and again called on Arafat to act against the perpetrators. A day later when a Palestinian-American drove his car into a crowd in Jerusalem he killed one person and injured twenty more. On 4 March another bomb in Jerusalem killed nineteen and injured ten, and an explosion in Tel Aviv left fourteen dead and a hundred injured. Arafat responded by imprisoning hundreds of people and by outlawing several Islamic groups and closing some of their schools, orphanages and charity organizations. But this was not enough for Peres who, using the articles of Oslo and Oslo II, ordered the Israeli army into the autonomous areas and took direct action against the organizations behind the bombings. Most Palestinians felt that the two security services were in alliance against them.
The detention of hundreds of suspects by both sides did nothing to halt the decline in Peres’s popularity, and the opinion polls showed a shift towards Likud and Netanyahu. Though there were constant meetings between the Palestinian and Israeli security people, they were unproductive. Arafat genuinely had nothing to offer the Israeli government and settled for stopping donations to all Islamic groups. The frustration of the Israeli government culminated in an over-reaction to incidents along the country’s border with Lebanon. Skirmishes along this border were an everyday occurrence, but Peres’s determination to appear tough led him to invade Lebanon on 11 April in what the Israelis called Operation Grapes of Wrath. Hundreds of people died or were wounded (the Kana village massacre alone left over a hundred dead) and three hundred thousand people fled southern Lebanon.
Arafat’s desperation drove him into adopting another unpopular position. He referred to the Hizbollah fighters who had justified the Israeli invasion as ‘terrorists’. This diminished support for the Palestinian Authority within the Arab world, Lebanon in particular. Soon afterwards, he and Peres agreed to delay implementing the agreement on an Israeli withdrawal from Hebron to avoid inflaming those segments of the Israeli public which were against it. Arafat followed this by convening the PNC on 24 April and, citing the distress the continued closure was causing, he received approval to amend the Palestinian National Charter in accordance with Oslo, Oslo II and the United Nations resolutions. He promised to publish an amendment to the original articles calling for the dismantling of Israel and announced, ‘I am very happy to have kept my commitment [to Israel].’ Everything Arafat did during this period was aimed at helping Peres win the Israeli elections. But his efforts backfired.
On 31 May 1996, the Israeli voters elected Benjamin Netanyahu Prime Minister of Israel and gave the Likud coalition a 62 to 52 Knesset majority. Although Arafat resorted to declaring, ‘We do not interfere in Israeli affairs. The Israeli election is a matter for the Israeli people’, in reality he was devastated. The devious methods of the Labour party had suited him. They did not expose his position and allowed him to inflate the small gains his PNA had achieved and to exaggerate their importance. Netanyahu followed the same policies openly and this made the Palestinians see the agreements in a totally negative way. Netanyahu was against withdrawal from the Syrian Golan Heights, a Palestinian state, the strictures on building settlements, any negotiations on the future of Jerusalem and the return of any Palestinian refugees. Labour had used suspect definitions to achieve the same ends; Netanyahu, out to humiliate Arafat, refused to accept any restrictions, even decorative ones.
The election signalled a low point in Arafat’s career. Netanyahu’s distrust of Oslo, dislike of Arafat and the PLO, and determination to follow policies which ignored both became clear very early in his premiership, when he reiterated that he was elected to undo the inequities of Oslo. A mere four days after his election, on 4 June, settlers in Hebron and Nablus announced their intention to enlarge their presence. Netanyahu accused the PLO of being behind terrorism, saddled Arafat with personal responsibility and declared that the PNA was violating the agreements. According to Netanyahu, Israel would not follow up on the agreements until all acts of terror ceased. The Israeli newspaper Ma’arev said that Netanyahu ‘aims to violate the agreement’.
He did, flagrantly. Moreover, his open espousal of hard-line policies and his abrasive manner were in sharp contrast to Arafat’s reliance on the atmosphere of an event to determine its worth, which allowed him to make it palatable to his people. Netanyahu, an MIT graduate, had little time for Arafat’s quintessentially Arab ways. The differences in style added to the problems of implementing agreements which were unsound and which Netanyahu had redefined. The two men personalized the problem between their peoples and moved in opposite directions. The view of Palestinian intellectuals was shared by Arafat’s Israeli biographer, Dany Rubenstein: ‘The main problem for the Palestinian Authority stemmed from the character of the agreements.’6 Netanyahu exposed that character.
The Arab countries responded to Netanyahu’s election by holding an Arab League meeting on 23 June. They reaffirmed their commitment to the various agreements on the basis of UN resolutions stipulating the exchange of land for peace. Netanyahu called the universally accepted principle of exchanging land for peace a precondition and rejected it. Though he stopped short of openly abrogating the agreements, his rejection amounted to cancelling them and restarting negotiations on a different basis. To him, everything – even the agreement on withdrawal from Hebron reached between Arafat and Peres – had to be renegotiated. Arafat responded by describing the agreements as ‘internationally guaranteed ones which cannot be cancelled by one side’. He followed this with praise for ‘My partner in the peace process, Mr Rabin’. Arafat was beginning to blame Rabin’s death for his problems.
On 2 August, Netanyahu officially eased the restrictions on settlement building. The American election campaign was in progress and both presidential candidates trumpeted ‘the legitimate problems of Israeli security’ and sought to gain favour with Israel and Jewish voters. The negotiations between the two sides centred on Hebron, and Netanyahu’s rejection of the previous agreement between Arafat and Peres produced new Israeli demands. The United Nations and the United States called for the two concerned parties ‘to settle the outstanding problems between them’ through direct negotiations. It was another unequal contest.
Netanyahu’s intransigence finally produced an explosion. On 31 September he ordered the opening of a tunnel in Jerusalem which bordered the Muslim Mosque of Omar and the Dome of the Rock. Although it had been built years before, the Labour government had refrained from opening it to avoid inflaming Muslim sensibilities. Though forewarned of possible trouble, Netanyahu went ahead. Jerusalem erupted in violence which soon spread to the rest of the West Bank and Gaza. It took four days to restore order. The number of casualties was high – fifty-seven Arab and eighteen Israeli dead, and several hundred wounded.
This was the first major confrontation between the Palestinians and the Israeli government since Oslo, and it produced an eruption of intifada proportions. In several towns the Palestinian security forces responded to Israeli attacks on Palestinian civilians by helping their compatriots; there were several shoot-outs with the Israelis. And another of Arafat’s sources of power, the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation, exhorted the Palestinians to greater effort. Netanyahu accused him of complicity in both. Arafat followed the signals from his security people and broadcasting authority; he knew he could not sit out the confrontation and survive. Relations between the two men got worse. The tunnel remained open, the negotiations continued at a slower pace, the date for the start of the final status phase came and went without being noticed.
An agreement on Hebron was finally signed on 15 January 1997, but only after a last-minute intercession by King Hussein, who, fearing the collapse of the whole peace process, acted as an intermediary. Once again, Hussein’s role betrayed the Israelis’ preference for him; Netanyahu had refused to meet Arafat. The new Hebron agreement secured less for the Palestinians than the original one with Peres which had given them seven-eighths of the city. It amounted to a dictat by Netanyahu, the result of a new peace process.
The agreement afforded the 400 Israelis residing within the town of 120,000 Arabs a direct road link with Kiryat Arba, the home of Baruch Goldstein. To the British journalist Tim Llewellyn this road link ‘destroyed the continuity of the town’.7 Joint Israeli–Palestinian patrols were entrusted with keeping the peace, with 120 UN personnel acting as observers. Ten thousand Palestinian residents of downtown Hebron, its commercial and market heartland, effectively remained under Israeli rule. Israeli patrols protected the Jewish settlers and paid little attention to protecting the Arabs.
Nowadays the Arabs of Hebron are constantly pestered and hassled by the aggressive settlers in their midst. According to Llewellyn, ‘The Ibrahimi Mosque situation is a disgrace. Muslims have been restricted to their areas of the site, but Jews can go anywhere.’ The settlers are armed and do not shy from using their weapons or dumping refuse on Arab pedestrians. And the relationship of the Hebronites to the outside is not much better. They are cut off from the hinterland and no one can easily get to other parts of the West Bank, even if they use ‘Arab’ roads. The Israelis stop them anywhere and any time they like. A day after the signing of this lopsided agreement, Arafat gleefully declared: ‘Hebron is a liberated city.’ Faisal Husseini described it differently: ‘Hebron was a negative agreement.’ To academic Ghassan Khatib, this was another confirmation that ‘the interests of the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian people are different; they are in conflict’.8
As with the PLO two decades before, the interests of the Palestinian Authority and the personal interests of Yasser Arafat became one and the same. His dependence on the United States to achieve a lasting solution to the Arab–Israeli problem turned into a dependence on Israel – even under Netanyahu – and what it was willing to offer to achieve the same end. Almost everyone in the occupied territories agrees with Khatib’s statement. Dr Khalil Shikaki, head of the Centre for Palestine Research and Studies, states: ‘All decisions are in Arafat’s hands. He thinks he is a father deciding for his children. He has set his mind on creating a state, regardless of its shape.’9 Bassim Eid of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group is vehement that Arafat ‘decides every little thing’.10 Dr Mahdi Abdel Hadi of PASSIA, the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs, speaks of the disappearance of hope which held the Palestinians together in the past, laments the absence of a structure to replace hope, then delivers his stunning condemnation: ‘The Palestinian Authority is a mafia which does not define the Palestinian problem.’11
The Oslo Agreement is now five years old. Judged by any yardstick it has been a failure, even when one follows Arafat and assigns to it the prime Palestinian aim of establishing a state. Although the judgement rendered by academics and human rights activists reflects the attitude of the Palestinian people, Arafat’s attitude and what he has created can only be assessed through understanding conditions on the ground. Hanan Ashrawi and Khalil Shikaki insist that the internal situation must come first. To them, the nature of the Palestinian entity determines its ability to negotiate with Israel to realize the goal of a Palestinian state. To Arafat the entity, regardless of its form, must be protected to produce a state.
The argument between the Palestinian Authority and Israel, though it has gone through many ripples, excitements, changes of venue, suspensions and direct and indirect intervention by outside powers, remains the same as it was after the Hebron agreement. Even Israeli plans to ring Jerusalem with settlements; the building of the huge one called Jabal Abu Ghneim (known to Israelis as Har Homa), and the massive suicide bombings of August 1997, which left 12 dead and 157 wounded, are footnotes to the larger picture which repeats itself disturbingly. Israel refuses to follow the spirit and letter of Oslo, and uses the issue of security to justify its position. Unable to abrogate Oslo, Netanyahu has rendered it null and void. The only real change has involved the evolution of the status and workings of the Palestinian Authority, and that is Arafat’s creation.
There is a massive contradiction in the articles of the various agreements which led to the establishment of the Palestinian National Authority as the governing body of Gaza and parts of the West Bank. The agreements called for the replacement of the Israeli occupation authority by a PNA designed by the PLO and Yasser Arafat. It also called for power to be vested in a democratically elected Legislative Council, but made clear that Israel would not tolerate the election of groups opposed to the agreements. In other words, whatever democratic process was embodied in the agreement was aimed at perpetuating the rule of Arafat and the PLO under Israeli supervision.
After an election carried out in highly questionable circumstances, the boycott of the opposition parties, Israeli strictures (the Israelis have the right to veto any enactment by the Council within a thirty–day period) and the PLO’s use of money to guarantee a favourable outcome, Abu Mazen’s appointment to head the electoral committee and Abu ’Ala’s elevation to Speaker represented the administration of a coup de grâce. To Khalil Shikaki, ‘Abu ’Ala is not democratic; this ended the council before it began [functioning].’ A cursory examination of the workings of the Legislative Council based on my attendance of its meetings in Ramla on 23 and 24 April 1997 proves Shikaki’s point. The eighty-eight members of the Council behave as if they belong to a club. They address each other as ‘Brother’ and ‘Sister’, smoke during the official sessions, hold private meetings within the larger meeting, and use ‘Okay’ and other English colloquialisms. There are no opposition blocs – each member acts on his or her own initiative – and the importance of any question relates to the status of who asked it rather than to its inherent value.
The Council operates within the traditional confines of the Muslim concept of Walayi Al Amr, the decider of all things. During the two sessions I attended there were several important questions about the release of Palestinian prisoners languishing in Israeli detention centres, the need of money to support martyrs’ families and a motion of no confidence against the Minister of Education. Every time the questions became hard and Abu ‘Ala had no answers for them, he closed the debate by stating that the matter was in ‘the hands of Brother Abu Ammar [Arafat]’. This ended the debate; no one dared persist. So Arafat’s decisionmaking powers are debated without any effort to control them.
During my two days in attendance there were demonstrations in front of the Council building in support of striking teachers, who were demanding an increase in their monthly US $300 salaries. The strike had started a month before and the demonstrators were students from the nearby Beir Zeit University. Some of the placards they carried called for the release of thirty teachers who had been arrested for striking by the PNA’s Preventive Security Service. Not a single member of the Council addressed himself to the matter of illegal arrests in a meaningful way. The four members interviewed by me spoke of the strike undermining the authority and majesty of ‘the state’, implying that they were members of that state and therefore threatened by the strike.
When I questioned a young, well-spoken member of the Council, Hussam Khader, about why all questions ceased after Abu ’Ala spoke of the issues being referred to Arafat, he answered that Arafat was ‘the symbol of the Palestinian state and without him there would be nothing’. In other words, Arafat should not be questioned or undermined because there is no individual or system to replace him. Other members of the Council agreed with Khader. One shook her head in dismay. In weakening Arafat, the Israelis too are aware that there is nothing to replace him.
Later I asked Hussam Khader about an issue which he himself had raised in the Council weeks before. Someone, unknown to this day, had imported US $70 million worth of Romanian flour which turned out to be old and mouldy and caused a lot of illness in a population for whom bread is a staple part of their diet. Khader confirmed that the Authority, that is, Arafat, had refused to release the name of the importer. When Khader persisted Arafat invited himself to dinner at his house in Nablus and made a personal appeal to him to desist from pursuing the matter. Khader was intimidated by the visit of ‘the head of the Palestinian state to my humble abode’. Instead of representing a parliament, Khader, understandably, became a member of a tribe. The matter is still pending.
The one member of the Legislative Council who would not accept the concept of Walayi Al Amr and was beyond intimidation was Heidar Abdel Shafi, the old Washington negotiator who, having received the highest number of votes in Gaza, consistently advocated a democratic system through reform of the PNA and limiting Arafat’s powers. In August 1997 Shafi resigned his seat in the Council, declaring that it had ceded its power to the executive branch – Arafat. Since then, the Council has made accusations of corruption against four members of the Arafat cabinet and demanded their resignation. This drew promises from Arafat to appoint a new cabinet and to address the issue of corruption. Later, he used the stalled negotiations with Israel as an excuse not to do anything.
In the absence of an effective legislature, the judiciary was supposed to act as a brake on Arafat’s power. However, though an independent judiciary was stipulated in the agreements, this did not happen and subduing it proved easy. Arafat used his usual methods to gain the loyalty of its members. When this failed, he simply dismissed them. On 3 September 1996 he summarily fired the chief justice of the West Bank, Amin Abdel Salam, because Salam demanded that the PNA justify the arrest of over twenty students from Bir Zeit University and ordered their release.12 This arbitrary act was overshadowed by the riots which followed the opening of the tunnel in Jerusalem, and Arafat once again used his problems with Israel to cover an illegal act. The rest of the judiciary took fright. Corruption, denial of human rights and freedom of speech went unchecked and became the order of the day.
The institutionalization of corruption which accompanied Arafat’s rise to power and was an integral part of his Tunis organization followed him to Gaza. However, the potential for corruption in the PNA was greater, because its authority was greater and it had more money. After overcoming the constraints on the use of aid money by appointing himself chairman of PEDCAR, Arafat personally continued to use large sums of it to buy the loyalty of people, either directly or through hiring their relatives and adding to the problems of an inefficient bureaucracy. Of course, the money earmarked for special projects was under the control of loyalists who found several ways of creaming off commissions from suppliers and contractors. Becoming an import agent was another way of making money, and the Tunis cabal allocated themselves import agencies in accordance with an honour-among-thieves system. The newest way of making money was through the use of official offices, mostly those of the district governors, to settle land and ownership disputes. With the judiciary in limbo, Arafat’s officials arrogated to themselves the right to act as judges and arbitrators and decided in favour of those who offered them the largest bribe.
The first examples of corruption in Gaza involved attempts to solve the PLO’s financial problems through manipulating donations and contracts. The Wall Street Journal of 3 February 1995 reported that the telephone contract for the territories under Arafat was manipulated by Gabriel Banar, a Moroccan Jew, Pierre Rizk, a Lebanese intermediary, and the man known as both Khalid Salam and Mohammed Rashid, who was Arafat’s Kurdish adviser on financial affairs. The money realized was deposited in a Cayman Islands bank account and Salam controlled it as Arafat’s deputy. Soon afterwards, at a donors’ meeting in Paris on 25–26 April 1995, the International Monetary Fund gave the PNA US$18.5 million. According to Edward Said, US$18 million of this money was deposited in Arafat’s name and only half a million was paid into the account of the PNA.13 This was the period which witnessed several reports that the notorious arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi was interested in investing in PNA-controlled areas. For the first time ever, there were suggestions that the Arafat household was involved: his wife Suha was seen shopping in Paris’s Faubourg St Honoré with Khashoggi’s wife.
During the initial period the PNA functioned through corruption; there was no other source of income. And while there is no evidence whatsoever that Arafat used money for his personal ends, he still overlooked the underhand dealings of his Tunis entourage. Arafat’s commitment to reward loyalty instead of talent encouraged moral and financial corruption which alienated the local people. This meant that Arafat needed more money to appease the locals, and the ugly cycle perpetuated itself.
There are enough stories of PNA corruption for a whole book. Here there is only space to mention some representative major instances which reflect on the PNA’s workings, on how corruption weakened it and made it unable to deal with the Israelis, and on how this is leading to disaster. For example, according to the Sunday Times of 4 January 1998, several members of Arafat’s entourage imported Mercedes cars without paying taxes on them and then sold them on the open market for profit. There were several instances of high PNA officials forcing landowners to sell them land at a low price. A man called Zaki Nahas, a resident of Nablus, was arbitrarily imprisoned by the local police when he refused to sell a piece of land coveted by an Arafat official. When my own family tried to divide a piece of land among my grandfather’s heirs, Arafat’s local district governor said he would not approve the proposed division unless he was paid the equivalent of 15 per cent of the land’s value.
Many of the newcomers who accompanied Arafat from Tunis used commission money to build luxurious villas, a double blow to the sensibilities of the poor local people. No less damaging was the behaviour of Arafat’s senior adviser, chief negotiator and Minister of Planning and International Cooperation, Nabil Sha’ath. A widower, Sha’ath remarried in 1996. In an extraordinary show of vulgarity he held four lavish wedding receptions, two in Jerusalem, one in Nablus and one in Gaza.14 Among Sha’ath’s official pronouncements were ones calling for increased aid to the Palestinian Authority. How would-be donors reacted to the news of his stream of party-giving is not known, but they could not have been impressed. The local people were infuriated.
Titled ‘Shameless in Gaza’, the Guardian newspaper report of Sha’ath’s wedding receptions also revealed the existence of a construction company called the Al Bahar Co. ‘Al Bahar’ means ‘the sea’, but the activities of this company were so extensive that the local people referred to it as ‘Al Muheet’, or ‘the ocean’. One of the major shareholders in this business is Suha Arafat. There is no evidence that her involvement in the company’s affairs went beyond shareholding or that she actively promoted its business, but there is little doubt that a company partly owned by the President’s wife has an advantage over others. As with other situations, Arafat pretended that nothing of importance was happening.
There were other cases which confirmed the prevalence of corruption. A Palestinian businessman who spoke off the record told me how a contract to build a cement factory was manipulated. In 1996 a friend of his presented the PNA with a scheme to build such a factory and lessen the dependence of the Palestinians on Israeli products. He had gone into partnership with a French company and drawn up detailed plans for a US$50 million plant. He asked those responsible in the PNA to grant him a licence, explaining that this would produce considerable savings and lower the price of cement from US$70 to US$50 per ton. The PNA people to whom he made his presentation referred him to Arafat’s adviser Khalid Salam, the man entrusted with decisions on big projects. Salam listened to the licence-seeker, requested a copy of the blueprint, then asked a Tunis loyalist to approach the French company and undertake the project with them. The local businessman lost the deal.
The Romanian flour deal to which Hussam Khader had objected represents an example of the secrecy and dishonesty which are typical of the PNA. In fact, there are many dual agencies with Israeli businesses and most of them are registered in the names of mysterious companies. The Tunis crowd owns most of them. Why the PNA uses Israeli agents to import office furniture from Italy when local factories are capable of supplying it and are in desperate need of the business is also unknown. Why Suha Arafat’s uncle, George Hawa, was briefly imprisoned by Arafat15 for corruption and then released is another unknown.
The hundreds of incidents of known and suspected corruption pale in comparison with the devastating revelations made by the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz on 4 April 1997. After listing projects belonging to the Al Bahar Co., Sha’ath-owned Team Corporation and agencies represented by one of the sons of Abu Mazen, the paper made a direct accusation against Yasser Arafat and Khalid Salam. It claimed that US$170 million collected by the Israelis as value added taxes and refunded to the PNA had been deposited in a Tel Aviv bank, the Hasmonaim branch of Bank Leumi, and that Arafat and Salam were the designated co-signatories of the account. For weeks, the story of the secret account in an Israeli bank and questions regarding the depositors’ ability to face the Israelis in negotiations were the number one topic of conversation among Palestinians worldwide.
The Legislative Council, afraid of the consequences to its credibility, summoned Salam and questioned him. It was a strange occasion – after all, the man had no official title. He responded to all the questions from Council members in an arrogant manner and gave away nothing. According to Salam, the money went into a special presidential fund. He claimed that he was nothing more than a controller. To whom the money went, and why, were for the President to know. Unable to stick anything on Salam, the Council gave up. The VAT money was the equivalent of the Chairman’s Fund for Lebanon and others which Arafat had controlled over the years. One might call the VAT money Walayi Al Amr’s Fund.
On 17 July 1997 the Wall Street Journal ran an editorial decrying the corruption of the PNA and calling for an end to Arafat’s war chest. This is a misnomer. There is no war in the offing, and Arafat personally still has no use for money. Most of the corruption money has gone into creating an overblown bureaucratic system which the PNA cannot afford. This system is under the direction of a man who does not understand economics and who adheres to a tribal system of giving and receiving. His use of these antiquated methods encourages others to follow suit. On 26 May that year the Independent of London reported that US$323 million had been lost to corruption the year before – half of the money spent by the PNA. In August, at a presentation at the International Institute for International Affairs in London, Arafat responded to a question about corruption in his administration by stating, ‘Corruption? What corruption? How can you have corruption when you have no money?’ It was a stupid answer.
Criminal as the level of corruption in the PNA undoubtedly is, it does not compare with human rights and freedom of speech violations by Arafat’s security apparatus. Human rights activist Bassim Eid insists that nobody knows exactly how many people there are in ‘the various branches of Arafat’s security apparatus. But it is probably the highest police to population ratio in the whole world.’ Academic Ghassan Khatib cites Amnesty International and believes that they number about forty thousand; ‘At one point he halved their salaries and doubled their number and, of course, this was done with the Israelis’ approval.’ Khalil Shikaki states, ‘Cooperation between Palestinian security and the Israelis is excellent.’
Altogether there are nine police/security organizations. Some of them, like Force 18, are small and relatively inactive; but others, such as the Preventive Security Service, have thousands of members and are involved in all aspects of everyday life. A third group, Force 17, is a presidential guard, but its members also carry out special security assignments on Arafat’s personal orders. Of course, there are the pretenders to military status: the Palestinian navy, which is headquartered in Gaza, and the Marines, amusingly located in landlocked Nablus. Whatever their names and numbers, the heads of these various services report directly to Arafat. As chief of the chiefs of police, he is ultimately responsible for everything they do and for the cooperation with Israel.
The various security departments responsible to Arafat are behind the deaths of sixteen Palestinian citizens in custody.16 There are forty people who have been detained for over two years without being charged, and 117 who have suffered the same fate for over one year. Yuval Ginbar of the B’Tselem Israeli human rights centre states: ‘The number of people under detention by the PNA and Israel at this time [April 1997] exceeds the numbers under Israel detention in the past.’17 In March 1996 the PNA arrested over 1200 people in one sweep, and some of them are still in prison. An Amnesty International report quotes police general Yaser Yususf response to a prisoner’s complaint that the law should be applied: ‘We are the law.’18
According to Amnesty International, prisoners are tortured on a regular basis; the methods used are among the cruellest in the world. Prisoners are suspended from ceilings, whipped, burned with cigarettes, dowsed with icy water, kept in solitary detention and denied food and sleep. They are subjected to gross indignities. Islamists are made to shave their beards, or occasionally half their beard, which destroys their honour, and some have been left without clothes for days at a time. Interrogators heap abuse on them and call their sisters and mothers whores. Not only is there no judicial recourse, but their families have been threatened when they protested loudly.19
Hanan Ashrawi, determined to do something constructive, and now a member of Arafat’s cabinet in charge of higher education (‘Someone has to protect our achievements in the education field’), says, ‘Enough is enough. Arbitrary imprisonment and torture has to stop.’ Bassim Eid points an accusing finger: ‘He [Arafat] is behind every single act of his security services. No one [member of the security services] has been arrested for human rights abuses for more than a week or so, the murderers are free. He sets them free after a phoney investigation.’ Whenever confronted with questions on this subject, Arafat speaks of ‘unfortunate mistakes’. During a presentation to the London-based International Committee to Save Jerusalem, Abu ’Ala too spoke of ‘unfortunate mistakes’.
Arafat cannot be absolved, but reasons beyond his control are partially responsible for making the situation as bad as it is. The lack of training and attitude of the security services are major contributors. Though some of them are undergoing training now, members of the security services assumed their responsibilities without adequate preparation. Moreover, according to Faisal Husseini, ‘They brought the bad habits of the countries where they were stationed [other Arab dictatorships].’ Of course, Israeli pressure on Arafat adds to the problem in a major way. Israel has made the eradication of terrorism a requirement for moving the negotiations forward, and in the process has forced Arafat to resort to police methods, particularly against the Islamists. Israel approved the expansion of his security services and their use in ways which contradicted the commitments to democracy contained in the various agreements. In this Israel has the support of the United States, which calls on Arafat to ‘address himself to the issue of terrorism’ without exercising any restraint. Even the death under torture of a US citizen, Azzam Muslih, did not provoke an American response against the PNA. Violations of the human rights guarantees contained in Oslo appear to be acceptable to both the Israeli and US governments.
The combination of an emasculated Legislative Council and judiciary, lack of training and appropriate attitude by members of the security services, Israeli pressure and American explicit connivance (the CIA has a representative office which works with the security apparatus of the PNA) would not amount to much without Arafat’s personal approval. He handles the human rights situation the way he behaved towards the Achille Lauro hijacker Abul Abbas; he responds to what affects his position and standing with outsiders. Even when demonstrators called for Arafat ‘to take his dogs and leave’,20 and thirty thousand of them ran through the streets of Tulkarem in protest against the actions of the security service, Arafat still thought his goal of a Palestinian state justified his behaviour.
The last hurdle of opposition to Arafat’s singular purpose was the press. He moved to control it. The first closure of a newspaper by Arafat and the PNA took place in March 1966, less than a year after Arafat’s arrival in Gaza. Al Istiklal, a publication of the Islamic Jihad, was shut down by a presidential order which offered no justification for the action. The following September the newspaper Jenin, named after the city where it was published, suffered the same fate on the orders of the local security service. It was an independent organ and its only crime consisted of criticism of the municipality and the local trade union organization, both beholden to Arafat. Several times during 1996 the distribution of An Nahar, a widely read daily with Jordanian connections, was stopped by members of the Preventive Security Service. The editor, Othman Halaq, was ordered to run an editorial declaring his allegiance to Arafat. He did, but it was not enough; his association with Jordan was unacceptable, and after repeated interference in its distribution the paper ceased to publish in January 1997.
The closure of newspapers was accompanied by the arrest of several journalists and the intimidation of others. Samir Hamato of An Nahar was arrested in March 1996 and kept in detention for seven months. Imad Abu Zahra, the owner– editor of Jenin, was detained on several occasions. In May 1996 Maher Al Alami, an editor of Al Quds, the highest-circulation daily, was detained for five days. He had put a story favourable to Arafat on page eight instead of on the front page, where the President thought it should be. Khalid Ammayrah of the satellite television channel of the United Arab Emirates was harassed, stopped, interrogated and detained for brief periods throughout 1996. In April 1997, what the foreign press dubbed ‘the thought police’ arrested lawyer Jameel Salameh after hearing of an article he was writing and before anything appeared in print. The following May, Daoud Kuttab, a Palestinian–American freelance journalist, was detained for a week for filming sessions of the Legislative Council during which members made statements about corruption. Kuttab wanted to air the proceedings on the Al Quds educational channel. After his arrest, the channel was shut down.
The state of fear generated by these arrests was so great that the local press failed to report them, even when the arrested journalist worked for them. When a number of academics approached Al Quds newspaper to publish an appeal to Arafat against the detention of journalists, owner Mahmoud Abu Zuluf refused to publish it. Meanwhile PNA orders instructing newspapers how to handle certain stories, including the space which should be allocated to them, increased. President Arafat’s press spokesman, the same Marwan Kanafani of hand-kissing fame, became the moderator of a weekly one-hour news programme on Palestinian television. The programme devotes most of its time to promoting Arafat and his deeds. Meanwhile, according to Sama’an Khoury of PBC, ‘cooperation with Israeli media [radio and television], though not admitted, is total’.
The assault on the press was followed by others on human rights activists and academics. Dr Raja Sourani, director of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, was arrested several times on the personal orders of President Arafat. Bassim Eid of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitor was arrested twice by the Preventive Security Service for criticizing the PNA’s failure to provide opposition candidates with equal radio time. Eid was abused and tortured. Cooperation with international human rights organizations such as Amnesty International is not allowed, and people belonging to any organization involved in human rights work are harassed.
Undermining academics and centres of education followed the enactment of illegal measures to control the interpretation of these laws by the local chiefs of police. According to the human rights organization Al Haq,21 ‘sports, cultural and social events’ need a police permit. There is no legal basis for this. It amounts to an attempt to control everything that happens in the nine universities and the schools of the West Bank and Gaza. On occasions these events were stopped by the local police even after permission was secured. What happens in classrooms and lecture halls is also controlled. In November 1997 Dr Fathi Subuh of Al Azhar University in Gaza was arrested for discussing corruption during one of his lectures. Everything a teacher or lecturer does is reported to the police by paid informers.
According to people in the Legislative Council, academics and several PNA officials, Arafat has gone from just ignoring advice to refusing to listen to anyone. Until recently Abu Mazen was an exception, because he went back to the more democratic days of Fatah in Kuwait. The two men used to have disagreements and shouting matches, but Abu Mazen eventually relented. Nowadays Arafat’s control of the PNA is greater than the one he exercised on the PLO, because the latter’s various committees and councils occasionally resisted Arafat and forced him into using circuitous methods. Except for feeble and unproductive attempts by the Legislative Council, his control of the PNA is absolute.
In exercising this control Arafat relies on a large collection of yes-men with suspect talents. The exact number of people who report to Arafat directly is unknown, but it runs into the hundreds. All twenty-four members of the cabinet report to him. Heads of the security apparatus come next. District governors, in reality military governors of areas each made up of several small towns, follow suit. There are no fewer than fifteen advisers, over eighty legates to foreign countries, forty-eight mayors, the head of the Wafa news agency, the director of the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation, the Speaker of the Legislative Council, the head of the Negotiations Affairs Department, members of the PLO’s executive committee, the head of the Palestine National Council and ten people without portfolio who often carry more clout than titled functionaries. Even important merchants report to him.
It would be impossible to detail the relationship which binds all these people to Arafat. However, the major ones fall into three distinct categories. Financial people come first, and there is no exaggerating the importance of Khalid Salam, the untitled co-signatory on the Tel Aviv bank account. A quiet, behind-the-scenes man, Salam has greater influence on the running of the various departments of the PNA than any other person besides Arafat. According to Hussam Khader of the Legislative Council, the Ministry of Finance does not know what is happening: ministers, directors and advisers defer to Salam and solicit his help in obtaining money for their departments. Salam’s position of power is totally dependent on the person of Arafat; otherwise there would be no place for an Iraqi Kurd in a Palestinian administration.
Next in importance are Arafat’s image-creators, most of whom double as internal propagandists and spokesmen on the peace process. Arafat’s chief press officer Marwan Kanafani, the ex-footballer on the Legislative Council, owes his very existence to Arafat. Antipathetic and unpopular, Kanafani is a Beiruti outsider who wears white suits and sports a cigarette holder; he looks and feels uncomfortable in Gaza. Special adviser Nabil Aburdeneh is another outsider, from Jaffa, who is totally beholden to Arafat. Kanafani, Aburdeneh and Bassam Abu Sharif form a triangle of propagandists who defer to Arafat and never question his word.
The official spokesmen are augmented by negotiators and others in high positions whom Arafat uses selectively. Speaker of the Legislative Council Abu ’Ala is one. His inability to perform this function is best demonstrated by his statement in London in August 1997 when he announced that he was not ‘the architecture [Sic] of the agreement [Oslo]’. Abu ’Ala follows Arafat obediently, and this is why Arafat trusts him. Watching him make a presentation in London, I came to the conclusion that he has adopted Arafat’s manner of speech and his gestures. Nabil Sha’ath, chief negotiator and Minister of Planning and International Relations, is a spokesman whom the Legislative Council has accused of corruption and whose dismissal it has demanded. He is unlikely to oppose or advise Arafat on anything. Saeb Irekat, Minister of Local Government, has never addressed himself to local problems, and derives particular pleasure from being a negotiator because he is a US citizen who likes dealing with Americans in high positions. He is a leftover from the original negotiating team who was elevated to prominence by Arafat to provide the PNA with acceptability. Another spokesman is Minister of Information Yasser Abed Rabbou. But he too is an outsider who acted on Arafat’s orders to ban the books of Palestinian writer Edward Said. There is no evidence that any of the people mentioned has ever shown any independence or an ability to provide constructive advice.
Hanan Ashrawi speaks either when the press go to her directly or when Arafat’s favourites are not up to the task. She is no longer a member of the inner circle; in particular her criticism of the PNA’s human rights record has not endeared her to Arafat. Moreover, in a show of petty hastiness if not lack of character, Arafat has on several occasions referred to her as the ‘sharmotah’, ‘whore’.22 The reasons behind Arafat’s use of this objectionable description also govern his attitude towards Faisal Husseini. Ashrawi and Husseini are popular, knowledgeable and independent, and none of these qualities appeals to Arafat. He has taken to keeping Husseini waiting hours at a time to see him, and in December 1996 in Bethlehem he berated this quiet, gentlemanly figure in the presence of foreign visitors who were there for the Christmas celebrations. During the March-April 1997 confrontation over Israeli plans to build a new settlement on Jabal Abu Ghneim (to the Israelis, Har Homa), Arafat ordered Husseini to stop acting as a spokesman against the project even though the contested area fell within Husseini’s responsibilities as Minister for Jerusalem. Arafat thought Husseini was grabbing too much of the limelight.
The third important group are the security chiefs. They are all outsiders, or people who spent enough time with the Tunis PLO to absorb their ways. As mentioned earlier, Hakam Balawai of the Mossad scandal is in charge of national security. But the most important among the others, the one closest to Arafat, is Colonel Jibreen Rajoub of the hated Preventive Security Service. Colonel Rajoub has arrested and tortured more people than the rest of the chiefs; he has detained journalists and human rights activists and has been involved in selecting lists of candidates for the Legislative Council. Rajoub is in charge of coordinating security with Israel and has been invited to Washington for consultation. Many think of him as a replacement for Arafat. True or not, this says a great deal about Arafat’s rule. In a dictatorship the chief of police is always close to the source of power and is in a position to exercise it.
The rejection of Hanan Ashrawi and Faisal Husseini is symptomatic. The resignation of Heidar Abdel Shafi from the Legislative Council and his strained relationship with Arafat is another sign of alienation by local politicians. But Arafat’s attitude includes whole groups, and, according to Ghassan Khatib, there is a divide between the PNA and the intellectuals in the territories. There is not a single intellectual or thinker among Arafat’s close circle of spokesmen/advisers. There are many Palestinian think-tanks which produce studies that could be helpful to the PNA, but they are shunned and kept under close watch.
The divorce between the PNA and local intellectuals extends to its relations with Palestinian thinkers in the diaspora. Mahmoud Darwish and Shafiq Hout were the two intellectual members of the PLO Executive Committee and they both resigned after Oslo. Edward Said has been the most vocal critic of the agreements and of what Arafat has created; his books are banned. Ibrahim Abu Loughud, a former professor at Northwestern University in Chicago and one-time adviser to Arafat, is another alienated intellectual. The Centre for Palestine Studies, once a source of support for Arafat and which has produced more books about the Palestinian problem than any other organization in the world, has published several books critical of Arafat and the agreements.
The massive changes in Arafat’s political fortunes have affected his personal behaviour. Although he was never careful about what he said, his penchant for speaking before thinking has become considerably worse and often comical or embarrassing. His myth-making is back to where it was in his early days, before exposure to Beirut’s foreign press made him more cautious. Also worse are his inclination to place loyalty ahead of competence and his intolerance of criticism. According to Dilip Hiro, he suffers from paranoia, love of power and egotism.23
Arafat’s references to Saeb Irekat as ‘ignorant’, his accusations that members of the Legislative Council are dogs and sons of bitches and, most disgustingly, his use of the epithet ‘whore’ to describe Hanan Ashrawi are enough to establish his credentials as a master of foul and derogatory language. Nowadays, he dispenses such words and phrases ever more freely. According to a PLO Legate to a central European country, ‘Alsanu ziphir’ – he has a dirty tongue. He certainly has a vivid imagination. According to biographer Dany Rubenstein, Arafat told a visitor that Spartacus was Palestinian.24 He has also gone back to exaggerating his early days, even when what he says is offensive. In June 1997 he told CNN interviewer Larry King, ‘I don’t take a salary, I live off the money I made in Kuwait.’ On a number of occasions he spoke of ‘when I ran Lebanon’, without much thought to how objectionable the statement is to the Lebanese and how it endangers the Palestinian refugees in that country.25
But there are other signs which merge pure story-telling with dictatorial complexes. When an aide introduced a Palestinian– American visitor as leader of the Palestinian Greek Orthodox community in the USA, Arafat retorted, ‘I am more Greek Orthodox than he is. I truly am.’ The visitor could not tell whether Arafat was joking or not, but nodded polite agreement. When Al Quds editor Maher Al Alami was imprisoned, Arafat summoned him from his cell for a late-night conversation. He wanted to make sure Alami understood the reasons behind his incarceration. Alami too did not know what to make of Arafat’s behaviour.
In one case what Arafat did reflected the atmosphere of fear which envelops the Palestinians. Late in 1996, four members of the Preventive Security Service who were in Washington for training visited the CIA offices accompanied by a member of the PLO’s mission in America (because America does not recognize the PNA as deserving representation, it still operates as a PLO office). During one meeting a CIA officer asked them to advise Arafat to cancel a request to visit Washington. The family of Leon Klinghoffer, the man killed during the Achille Lauro debacle, were suing Arafat, accusing him of complicity in the murder. According to the CIA man, the Clinton Administration wanted Arafat to wait until the issue was settled without publicity.
The security men and the member of mission were simply too afraid to relay such a request to Arafat. A month later, when it was transmitted to Arafat directly and he was told of the original message, he had all four security officers imprisoned. He followed that by recalling the member of mission in Washington, and placing him under house arrest for four months. He ranted and raved about ‘the idiots who would not tell me that my life was in danger’. None of the people near him dared speak of the fear behind the behaviour of the five men.
Strangely, nothing represents Arafat’s personal faults more than the manner in which he walks from his office to his car, an event which is frequently filmed for television. He has never managed to cover the 50 or so feet in an organized way. Invariably his guards are there, with rifles at the ready, pushing and shoving people, There are always a lot of guards; the people being pushed about are petitioners who have been told they can wait for him. In fact the whole stage– managed exercise is very much to his liking – it demonstrates that people still need him and that he has troops to protect him. Bassim Eid of Human Rights Monitor tells of how he once drove from Gaza to Rafah and found the 30-kilometre highway connecting the two cities lined with troops. When he asked what justified the military display, he received an answer which amazed him: ‘The President is flying to Cairo from Rafah and the security people are there to salute him.’ In the same manner the President arranges for throngs of people to greet him whenever he returns from his frequent trips, and his pictures are on the walls of all the towns and villages of the West Bank and Gaza. It costs a great deal of money to pay for his greeters and pictures. Of course, this atmosphere is so contagious that people contribute to it by running dozens of ads in each newspaper issue congratulating the President on the smallest thing and thanking him for his deeds.
The economic structure of the PNA as it exists today is also undermining the prospects for the emergence of a Palestinian state. To survive, it relies on outside aid and the income of Palestinian workers in Israel. The misuse of aid money has limited its effectiveness and Israeli border closures, cruel and deliberate, have reduced the income of workers. Although this income accounts for more than 18 per cent of gross domestic product, it has become too erratic to be included in any long-term planning.
According to Dr Fuad Bseisu, a PNA minister without portfolio in charge of the newly established Central Bank, the GDP of the territories under PNA control declined 25 per cent between 1995 and 1996.26 The per capita GDP has declined to US$2596 a year.27 The prospects are for more of the same. The population density is high – 370 people per square kilometre. Seventy-five per cent of the water of the River Jordan, the only surface water source, and 81 per cent of spring water is diverted to Israel before it reaches the West Bank.28
Israel’s punitive policy on workers, mismanagement of aid money and delay in receiving it, a limited agro-industrial potential (also hampered by Israeli policy), the absence of an industrial base, the failure to attract substantial investment from outside and the concentration of economic power in the hands of the few are leading to disaster. Whether the PNA should continue its reliance on Israel, or change direction and attach itself to the economies of neighbouring Arab countries, is a decision which needs to be made immediately and followed by long-term plans to forestall an economic disaster. Dr Jad Itzhaq of the Applied Research Centre sees no hope in continuing the dependence on Israel, argues that the territories are rich in human resources (82 per cent of the population are literate and there are nine universities) and advocates cooperation with the Arab countries. Others describe Itzhaq’s recommendations as unrealistic.
Characteristically, Arafat subordinates his economic policies to political considerations. Politics stands in the way of everything from joint ventures to sound planning, and the political process is frozen. That the failure to answer strategic questions could lead to the collapse of the PNA escapes Arafat. He dismisses studies which show that under present conditions the PNA is unlikely to enjoy economic growth more than its rate of population increase of 3.7 per cent annually.29 In addition to a failure to plan, he rejects calls for economic integration with Jordan, and perhaps Syria, for fear that it might hamper his political independence. Meanwhile, Israel is using his economic dependence on it to weaken him, extract more concessions and destroy the peace process.
Israel is wholly responsible for the stalemate in the peace process, and partly responsible for Arafat’s behaviour. Netanyahu claims that Arafat is not living up to the articles of the agreement which call for the PNA to use its security forces to guarantee Israeli security, but there is not much more that Arafat can do in this regard. Even imprisoning thousands more would not stop every suicide bomber, a fact accepted by security and intelligence experts throughout the world. Shmueil Toledano, a former Mossad deputy chief and adviser to Premiers Meir and Rabin, puts it succinctly: ‘Arafat can’t help against Hamas.’30 Moreover, Netanyahu is guilty of violating the agreements regarding the building of new settlements, changing the demographic composition of Jerusalem, continuing to hold Palestinian prisoners and refusing to redeploy and cede more territory. These violations of the letter of the agreements are accompanied by violations of its spirit – closing the borders and encouraging settlers to resort to arms if necessary. Netanyahu has refused to allow the opening of a Gaza airport and harbour. The only things he tolerates are actions against the adoption of a democratic system – and of those he advocates more.
Arafat has lived up to the agreements, has accepted punitive Israeli interpretations of some of the terms and has never wavered in his commitment to the peace process. His failures have been in the areas of sound economic planning and the creation of a democracy, but neither is an issue with the Israelis or with the American sponsors of the peace process. Meanwhile, Arafat has never deviated from his goal of establishing a Palestinian state, though he is still without sensible plans to attain this end. Netanyahu’s policies preclude the creation of this state or anything resembling it, and the prospects of resurrecting the peace process – even an amended form of it – look more remote than ever.
There are two questions to be asked at this juncture: is a Palestinian state attainable, and would it be worthwhile? Arafat has proved capable of securing international recognition for such an entity. In addition, the Palestinian people want a state of their own. The combination of an internationally recognized state which also represents a distinct group of people would endow it with legitimacy. This, however, does not answer the questions of the state’s viability and regional acceptability.
A Palestinian state would not survive on its own; it would become either a shackled state dependent on Israel or a semi-independent entity within a larger Arab context. The dictatorial nature of the existing proto-state has been detailed and is obvious to the whole world. These two elements are connected – the inability to attain an economically independent Palestine means that democracy cannot flourish. Even if a Palestinian state does emerge, the choices will be between greater coercion and a more oppressive regime, and the radicalization of the territories because people’s expectations have not been met. In the latter case, the new radical entity might claim Jordan and become a political threat to the rest of the countries surrounding it, including Israel. With no progress in the peace negotiations likely, the Palestinian leadership is not capable of producing positive political or economic results for its people. To Mahdi Abdel Hadi of PASSIA, ‘If the present situation continues, then Gaza will sink into the sea and there will be civil war in the West Bank.’