Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Ramallah, 2002. Paulo Pellegrin/Magnum Photos
May 14, 2014
Until
Secretary of State John Kerry began his intensive efforts to finally resolve
the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, politicians on both sides of the conflict
were rather pleased with the status quo. The Israeli government succeeded, as a
result of the Oslo Accords, to shift responsibility for controlling Palestinian
protesters to the Palestinian National Authority. Israelis have also enjoyed an
economic boom in part by milking the occupied territories, avoiding paying an
economic price for its illegal occupation, and control (directly and
indirectly) over millions of Palestinians. For its part, the Palestinian
National Authority is delighted that Palestine has a president, a prime
minister, passports, an Olympic team, and even postage stamps. These trappings
of state were given symbolic international recognition when the United Nations
General Assembly voted to recognize Palestine as a non-member state. The vote
on November 29, 2012—International Day for Solidarity with the Palestinian
People—gave a 138–9 result. The United States, Canada, and Israel were among
the no votes.
Yet, the
UN vote that gave the Palestinian National Authority the right to call itself
the State of Palestine did nothing to change the lot of Palestinians still
under the boot of the Israeli army. It did nothing to halt continued Israeli
land confiscation and colonization in the West Bank, nor did it lift the
unprecedented years-long siege of the Gaza Strip. The UN move did not lead to
the suspension of illegal settlement activities or curb the continuing attempts
by radical Jewish groups to gain a foothold on the Haram Al-Sharif, site of the
sacred Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem’s Old City.
Like so
many earlier Palestinian efforts with the UN and other international bodies,
this decision did little to produce a tangible change in the status of the
occupied territories. In fact, the international community has debated the Palestinian
issue ad nauseam without much to show for it. Indeed, international
meddling has tended to harm Palestinians rather than help them—dating back to
the eve of the First World War when imperial Britain gave contradictory
promises regarding the future of Palestine to both Jews and Arabs. A striking
illustration of international failure to address Palestinian rights can be seen
in a panel of four maps displayed in New York City subway stations and in other
cities around the world, which depict the dramatic loss of Palestinian land
from 1946 to 2000.
Fatah and Resistance
Palestinians
throughout the first half of the twentieth century were largely disorganized,
and suffered from internal divisions and factional fighting. Then in 1948 came
the nakbah, or catastrophe: the loss of western Palestine in
Israel’s War of Independence, and the creation of the Palestinian refugee
problem—hundreds of thousands of people who fled the conflict and settled in
squalid refugee camps in eastern Palestine (the West Bank) and the Gaza Strip,
and in neighboring Arab states.
It took
Palestinians a decade to regroup and establish an organized resistance
movement. Palestinian activists in Kuwait decided to take things in their own
hands, and in 1959 established Harakat al
Taharur al Watania al Falastinia, or the Palestinian National Liberation Movement, known
by its acronym, Fatah. At the time of Fatah’s launch, the big talking point was
the right of return for Palestinian refugees—as called for in UN Resolution 194
adopted in December 1948. Fatah started an underground newspaper called Our
Palestine to
raise national consciousness among refugees, and on January 1, 1965, announced
its first military operation launched from Lebanon. Nonetheless, the group and
its leaders—including Yasser Arafat, Khalil Al-Wazir, Salah Khalaf, the Hassan
brothers (Said and Hani), and Mahmoud Abbas—remained largely unknown even to
the majority of Palestinians.
The
devastating Arab defeat in the June 1967 war led to a change of fortunes for
the Palestinian resistance movement, which would include a variety of other
factions, notably the Marxist-oriented Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine (PFLP), led by George Habash. The defeat of Egypt, Syria, and
Jordan—and Israel’s capture of the Sinai Peninsula, Golan Heights and West Bank
(until then controlled by Jordan)—galvanized the young guerrilla movement.
Fatah began staging frequent resistance attacks from Jordanian territory. One
day in the spring of 1968 Fatah fighters, with the help of the Jordanian army,
managed to repulse a raid by the Israeli army on a Fatah base in the town of
Karameh; when news of the guerrilla victory spread, donations and volunteers
poured in. Before long, Arafat and his comrades were able to take over a
political structure created by the Arab League—the Palestine Liberation
Organization (PLO).
The
challenge of leveraging armed resistance in a political strategy became quickly
apparent, however. The unruly Palestinian fedayeen irked East Bank Jordanians and
posed a threat to Hashemite rule; in 1970, King Hussein’s Bedouin army fought
the brief but bloody “Black September” civil war and drove the Palestinian
guerrilla fighters out of the kingdom. They regrouped in Lebanon, where they
were able to use Palestinian refugee camps as the crucible for revolution and
build coalitions with like-minded Arabs unhappy with the ruling regimes in the
Arab world. The romantic Palestinian armed struggle coupled with an Arab
cultural and intellectual blossoming helped consolidate a Palestinian national
movement that would inspire Palestinians inside and outside the occupied
territories for years to come. At least for a while, the movement helped
restore Arab pride, and even kindled dreams of the Arab renaissance that had
once spanned from Iraq to Andalusia.
Yet,
while the armed struggle attracted Palestinian, Arab, and even international
supporters, it did little to change the balance of forces with Israel, nor did
it do much to improve the lives of the refugees. It did bring some hope to
Palestinians, and it helped them demonstrate their national identity; in 1974,
the Arab League recognized the PLO as the “sole legitimate representative” of
the Palestinian people. Arafat had begun to use the armed struggle as a means
to a political end. At the United Nations in the same year, the PLO chairman
gave a speech from the podium, declaring to the world: “I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.”
Neither
the gun nor the olive branch proved decisive. Israel rejected any dealings or
negotiations with the PLO; the armed struggle did little to change the
equation. Indeed, the “purity” of the freedom fighter’s gun had become
increasingly corrupted by the use of violence. Palestinian militants hijacked
international airliners in episodes that often ended in fatalities; a group
from Arafat’s own Fatah organization masterminded a seizure of Israeli athletes
at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich that left eleven of the Israelis dead. The
spectacular exploits, intended to draw attention to the legitimate Palestinian
cause, instead boomeranged on the Palestinians. The violence enabled Israel to
brand Palestinians as ruthless terrorists who have little regard for innocent
civilians.
Intifada
It would
take an uprising by young people inside the occupied territories to palpably
change the calculus of the struggle. The intifada erupted in Gaza in December
1987, and quickly spread to the West Bank. The images of unarmed teenagers
throwing stones at Israeli military forces helped draw attention to the
Palestinians as a people fighting for a legitimate cause; lethal Palestinian
attacks, albeit in the face of an iron-fisted Israeli response to the intifada,
eventually undermined the nonviolent picture. Nonetheless, the popular
resistance led inexorably to new political opportunities; in 1993, the Israeli
government and the PLO signed the Oslo agreements providing limited self-rule
in the occupied territories, and a path to negotiating a final peace accord.
Sari
Nusseibeh, a Palestinian professor at Birzeit University in the West Bank, once
posed two options to his students: sharing the power, or sharing the land. He
explained that sharing the land meant that Palestinians must come to terms with
the existence of Israel in historic Palestine; in the two-state solution,
Palestinians would have to accept a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Then
Nusseibeh offered a provocation: he argued that if the old PLO slogan of a
secular state was to be truly implemented, then young Palestinians should call
for Israel’s annexation of the West Bank, join the Israeli army, and transform
their fight into a civil rights struggle for equality. That shocked the
students, and some of them actually attacked Nusseibeh after one of his classes
in 1986.
In fact,
nonviolent struggle was not new to Palestinians. In 1936, Palestinian Arabs
went on a six-month general strike to protest the continued flow of illegal
Jewish immigrants into Palestine under the British Mandate. Later, Mahatma Gandhi
and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. would provide tangible proof to the
world that nonviolence produces political results. Mubarak Awad, a Palestinian
activist who had become an American citizen, returned to Jerusalem in 1985
promoting nonviolence, and created the Palestinian Center for the Study of
Nonviolence. His lectures and discussions influenced many Palestinians,
including Faisal Husseini, a Fatah leader in Jerusalem and son of Abdel Qader
Husseini, one of the most revered Palestinians heroes of the 1948 war, who died
fighting in the defense of Jerusalem. Israel deported Awad in 1987.
But
Palestinians were not totally convinced of the effectiveness of nonviolence
with the Israelis occupiers. They argued that unlike the powers that Gandhi and
King confronted in India and the United States, Palestinians faced a
militarized settler regime that was neither willing to pull out their soldiers
nor provide equal rights to all people under its authority. This realism
effectively sidelined the demand for a unitary secular democratic state as
outlined in the PLO Charter and by Arafat in his UN address. At the Palestinian
National Council meeting in Algiers in November 1988, the PLO accepted an idea
that had originated with intifada leaders under occupation to declare a
Palestinian state alongside Israel. The slogan that Palestinians were against
the occupation and not the State of Israel launched the process that would lead
to the signing of the Oslo agreements at the White House—in which Israel
recognized the PLO and the PLO recognized Israel.
The Oslo Accords fooled many into believing that
resistance (whether violent or nonviolent) was a thing of the past. No one told
this to the Islamic movement Hamas, which opposed the peace process. At
critical times, such as when Israel was about to withdraw soldiers from certain
areas as per the agreement, Hamas launched suicide bomb attacks, often against
civilians. Nor was Israel totally on board with Oslo either. Settlement
activities continued despite the famous handshake on the White House lawn
between Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The assassination of
Rabin by a radical Jewish militant in 1995 proved to be a critical setback to
the peace process.
Israel’s
ambivalence toward the Oslo agreements following Rabin’s death forced
Palestinians to reconsider their strategy. President Bill Clinton, at Israeli
Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s urging, held a summit at Camp David in 2000 in a
last-ditch attempt to salvage the Oslo peace process before the end of his term
of office. But Israel’s refusal to halt settlement construction and continuance
to deny Palestinian rights in Jerusalem pushed Palestinian leaders to rethink
their strategy further.
After the
collapse of the Camp David summit, Ariel Sharon, the right-wing leader who
aspired to become prime minister, made a provocative visit to the Haram
Al-Sharif. Demonstrators hurled stones; Israeli security violently put down the
unrest, killing dozens of Palestinians. News of the deaths in Jerusalem spread
quickly throughout the occupied territories; another uprising, the Al-Aqsa
Intifada, had begun. This time, Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel joined the
protests; Israeli security forces killed thirteen Israeli Arabs in the
disturbances. An orgy of violence continued for more than two years; suicide
bombings struck deep into the heart of Israeli communities, resistance fighters
launched guerrilla attacks on Israeli occupation forces, while Israeli troops
eventually reoccupied most Palestinian cities and encircled Arafat’s
headquarters in Ramallah.
The idea
of violent resistance seemed to satisfy various and often competing groups of
Palestinians. Left-wing Palestinian revolutionaries romanticized the return of
Kalashnikovs and Che Guevara insignias, and resurrected slogans for a secular
democratic state. PLO centrists from Arafat’s Fatah movement found themselves
obliged to join the new resistance or risk losing their political stature.
Militant Islamists fantasized the idea of martyrdom; they carried their attacks
into the State of Israel to propagate their view that all of historic Palestine
is an Islamic waqf (endowment) that should be
liberated by force with the help of mujahideen fighters willing to die in the
service of Islam. After Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2006, Hamas
launched homemade rockets on Israel—violence that Israel used to justify the
massive Operation Cast Lead incursion of Gaza in 2007.
This violence and refusal to recognize Israel’s existence
played into the occupier’s hands. Israel constructed a huge separation wall,
continued building settlements, and brutally crushed any form of Palestinian
resistance, violent or otherwise. Israel became even more hawkish with the
election of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and the settler camp increased
its influence within the Israeli Knesset. The Israeli peace camp was completely
undermined, unable to defend its position in the face of citizens being killed.
The election of Mahmoud Abbas as the president of the
Palestinian National Authority following the death of Yasser Arafat in 2004 put
Palestinians more firmly on the road of moderation. Abbas represented a
realistic platform that rejected what he called the “militarization of the
intifada.” His platform was also consistent with the Oslo Accords which he had
signed, supporting the two-state solution, coordinating security with Israel,
and cooperating with the U.S., Europe, and moderate Arab countries.
However,
Abbas’s rejection of violent resistance was not matched with genuine support
for nonviolent resistance. Abbas spoke in favor of “popular resistance” and
succeeded in getting the sixth Fatah general congress in 2009 to adopt a
resolution in favor of “popular struggle.” Hamas leader Khaled Meshal also
supported the idea.
In truth,
this was little more than lip service. Palestinian leaders from Fatah, Hamas,
and the PFLP failed to support the various movements and groups that sprung up
to oppose Israel’s wall and other settlement activities through civil
disobedience. Palestinian leaders preferred to complain that Oslo’s failure was
proof that peaceful actions don’t work. They loved to repeat Egyptian President
Gamal Abdel Nasser’s injunction: “What was taken by force, can only be restored
by force.” It was rarely noted that violent actions by Hamas and Fatah in the
second intifada failed to get Israelis to change their position or to withdraw from the occupied territories.
The Way Forward
Disillusion
with both major Palestinian groups (Fatah and Hamas), including over their
failure to reconcile their factional differences, has led many Palestinians in
the diaspora to search for ways to get involved in the liberation of their
homeland by supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement.
These
Palestinians, as well as many inside the occupied territories who support BDS,
have not reached a consensus on the political goals of the movement. Some such
as Ali Abunimah, author and editor of the Electronic
Intifada online
publication, argue that Palestinians should push for a single secular
democratic state. Others are in favor of using the BDS campaign to pressure
Israel into agreeing to a two-state solution that includes the establishment of
a viable Palestinian state. Islamic militants inside and outside Palestine
continue to believe in the armed jihad despite their lack of success with such
an ideology. Hamas, however, appears to be curbing violent attacks at least for
the time being, acting often to stop more radical groups from launching rockets
from Gaza against Israel.
For now,
we can say that the long Palestinian struggle has been reduced to two
approaches: the talks on a two-state solution led by the Palestinian National
Authority, and the civil resistance movement including BDS. These parties
appear to be working separately, although generally with a similar goal. The
failure of John Kerry’s intensive diplomatic efforts will certainly provide a
wider opening for the still largely leaderless nonviolent movements inside and
outside of Palestine.
The era
of Arafat and Abbas may be nearing an end. If Abbas ultimately fails to deliver
tangible change, Palestinians will undertake a serious re-evaluation of their
political strategy. It is incumbent on Palestinians to develop a long-term and
agreed-to strategy that can address Palestinian aspirations of both freedom
from occupation and independence. Such a strategy will need to take into
consideration the aspirations and needs of all Palestinians—not just those
living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, 22 percent of mandatory Palestine.
Palestinians including refugees living outside Palestine are a huge force that
if properly deployed can be a major asset to any liberation strategy.
Ultimately, Palestinians must launch a national process that unifies
Palestinians and leverages the enormous energy and resources of more than
eleven million Palestinians around the world.
Daoud
Kuttab is a regular columnist for Al-Monitor and the Jordan Times. He is the director
general of Community Media Network, an NGO supporting independent media across
the Middle East and North Africa. He is the recipient of the Committee to
Protect Journalists’ International Press Freedom Award (1996) and the
International Press Institute’s World Press Freedom Hero Award (2000). He
resides in Jerusalem and Amman. On Twitter: @daoudkuttab.