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The New Palestinian Elite |
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by Danny Rubenstein, Haaretz, via gehrig
(No verified email address) |
30 Jun 2002
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"Nothing could be clearer, according to the political forecasts of many Palestinian public figures: Those who are out to destroy the Palestinian Authority and the Arafat leadership should know that the alternative is liable to be a good deal worse." Includes a brief history of Palestinian leadership. |
Sunday, June 30, 2002
The new Palestinian elite
Palestinian researchers warn that if their corrupt and inefficient national leadership is deposed, it will be followed by an upright and talented, but far more extremist and religious elite. Its name is Hamas
By Danny Rubinstein
Some Palestinian spokesmen said at the weekend that if Islamic groups take part in the forthcoming elections to the Elected Council (what the Palestinians call the Legislative Assembly and refer to as the parliament), it is very likely that "their people" (namely Hamas activists) will score major successes.
The remarks of Saeb Erekat, for example, could be construed as a warning or a threat to Israel, the United States and anyone else who has despaired of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and the government he heads.
Nothing could be clearer, according to the political forecasts of many Palestinian public figures: Those who are out to destroy the Palestinian Authority and the Arafat leadership should know that the alternative is liable to be a good deal worse. "Hamas is establishing an alternative to the Palestinian Authority" was also the conclusion reached by Israeli intelligence bodies, on the basis of documents that were seized in offices of the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah and elsewhere. Is Hamas really posing a threat to Arafat's rule? And what kind of Palestinian leadership are we likely to see in the future?
Palestinian political scientists have been preoccupied with the question of how the Palestinian leadership came to be formed in recent generations and what the future trends are going to be. Scholars such as Dr. Khalil Shikaki and Dr. Mahdi Abd al-Hadi have published studies on the subjects in the past few months, and the topic is also the focus of a new book, "The Formation of the Palestinian Elite" by Jamil Hilal of Ramallah.
Hilal, who has done postgraduate work at several British universities, has previously published studies on economic subjects. His new study is based on interviews with 54 figures who are involved in Palestinian politics. In order to obtain an understanding of what is going on now within the Palestinian leadership, Hilal surveys its history from the period of the British Mandate. It is a familiar story. During the nearly three decades of British rule, which ended in 1948, there was a traditional Arab leadership in Palestine, which was based on the notable families of Jerusalem.
The important political parties were established in 1934-1935: the al-Husseini family established the Palestinian Arab Party and the Nashashibi family set up the National Defense Party. There were also a number of smaller parties - Al-Istiklal, the Reform Party, the National Bloc, among others, which in most cases were established by public activists on a personal and local basis, and the League for National Liberation, an organization founded by the Communist Party.
The refugee era
In the wake of the 1948 war, the Palestinian elite disintegrated and all but vanished. The political center of distinguished Jerusalem families ceased to function. It was replaced by local functionaries in the large Palestinian centers on both sides of the Jordan River, the Gaza Strip, Lebanon, Syria and among the Arabs who remained within the boundaries of the nascent State of Israel. Palestinian students in universities in Beirut and Cairo formed small national organizations (such as Fatah), which would later become the backbone of the national movement, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
After the 1967 war, the various groups that constituted the PLO removed all the old elites. Yasser Arafat and his colleagues, together with the left-wing fronts (George Habash) ousted Ahmed Shukeiri, who had established the PLO under the auspices of Egypt and was the first leader of the organization. The Fatah activists overcame the Palestinians who were loyal to Syria, and ultimately succeeded in removing also the pro-Jordanian politicians in the West Bank. PLO activists in the territories that were conquered by Israel, and elsewhere as well, introduced into the Palestinian political arena a completely new type of leader. Residents of refugee camps, members of fellah families and Bedouin tribesmen came to the forefront in place of the old aristocracies. People from social classes that were considered low became public activists in organizations of workers, students and women, and in trade unions.
In addition to the descriptions Hilal offers in his new book, Palestinian works contain a variety of accounts about the events in the West Bank and Gaza when Arafat and his loyalists arrived from Tunisia and set up the Palestinian Authority. An initial, and familiar, phenomenon was that there were few members of the veteran elite of privileged Jerusalem families in the Palestinian corridors of power. The most notable of them was Faisal Husseini, the son of Abd al-Kader al-Husseini - the famous Palestinian military commander, who was killed in the battle for the strategic Kastel hilltop just outside Jerusalem in 1948 - and the grandson of Moussa Kazem Husseini, who was mayor of Jerusalem.
Relations between Yasser Arafat and Faisal Husseini were always edgy, and when Husseini died, a little over a year ago, the East Jerusalem journalist Atallah Najar said in his eulogy that Hussein was "the competitor of Arafat in his lifetime and the man who was going to succeed him after his death." In fact, even if Husseini had lived, it is highly improbable that he would have been able to restore the birthright of the traditional leadership. The prominent figures in the Palestinian leadership were those from the old guard of the PLO, whose prestige was due to vigorous national activity and not to the fact that they were the offspring of notable families.
Arafat, for example, is a descendant of the al-Kidwa family from Gaza on his father's side and from the Abu Saoud family of Jerusalem on his mother's side, both well-known families but without any special social status. Arafat's No. 2, Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) is from a refugee family from Safed, while Abu Ala is of ordinary rural origin, from the village of Abu Dis that abuts Jerusalem. Two apparent exceptions are Nabil Sha'ath, who is from a large, powerful family in Khan Yunis, in the Gaza Strip, and Marwan Barghouti, the Tanzim militia leader who is now in Israeli detention, who belongs to the largest rural hamula (clan) in the Ramallah region. But their road, and the road of others like them, to the top of the Palestinian political hierarchy, was not paved with their family origins. Other leaders in the Palestinian Authority in the past few years were Mohammed Dahlan, the head of Preventive Security in the Gaza Strip, who is from a refugee family that hails from a village near Ashkelon, and Jibril Rajoub, Dahlan's West Bank counterpart, who is from the town of Dura in the southern Mount Hebron area. They achieved political power on the basis of their struggle against Israel and their lengthy incarceration in Israeli prisons, not their family origins.
Hamas gathers strength
In the run-up to the creation of the Palestinian Authority, a new, Islamic political elite began to emerge in the territories. The Islamic movement was able to find a place on the Palestinian political stage because of the terrorist attacks it began to carry out against Israel, in addition to the social and educational work in which it was engaged. The Palestinian Authority was also well aware that Yitzhak Rabin decided to sign the Oslo agreement not because he was overcome with a sudden fondness for Yasser Arafat but because of Israel's fear that the Islamic extremists were about to achieve positions of leadership in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The Palestinian political leadership was wracked by a series of rifts and disputes during the period of PA rule: the "outsiders" (the Tunis exiles) were in competition with the "insiders." Thus, refugees from the Balata camp, next to Nablus, were in conflict with veteran local leaders, whom they called the "effendis of Nablus." There was competition between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, among the different units of government, and between the young and old generations. However, the deepest schism was generated in the wake of the threat posed by the Hamas leaders to the very existence of the Arafat administration. Hamas was the only political body that defied the PA, and it was able to withstand attempts by Arafat to weaken it.
Jamil Hilal notes at the conclusion of his study that in 2000, the year in which the current blood-drenched intifada erupted, a number of public opinion surveys in the West Bank showed that the rate of support for Hamas was the same as that for the Fatah movement - each had the backing of about 25 percent of the population. Dr. Mahdi Abd al-Hadi, the head of a Palestinian research institute in Jerusalem, noted that three groups are leading the current intifada: the young generation in Fatah, the Islamic activists and, in the background, the Palestinian nongovernmental organizations (mainly human rights organizations that were established in the past few years and are fighting against the various restrictions imposed by Israel). There are other studies show the following picture: the removal of the veteran corrupt, inefficient leadership - which the international community is now demanding of the Palestinians - is liable to bring in a new political elite in its wake. It will be morally upright, young and talented, but it will adopt a far more religiously oriented and extreme approach in the struggle against Israel than is the case today.
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