[Mb-civic] The Palestinians' Crisis of Leadership - Aaron David Miller - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

The Palestinians' Crisis of Leadership

By Aaron David Miller
Tuesday, January 24, 2006; A17

More than 50 years after its creation, the Palestinian national movement 
-- in both its secular and Islamic guises -- lacks a coherent strategy 
and the means to realize Palestinian national aspirations. No matter 
what the outcome of tomorrow's elections, this will remain the central 
challenge confronting Palestinians and their politics.

At some point in the history of any national movement, its leaders (and 
followers) must be judged by their ability to carry out the goals they 
set for themselves. It is true that these goals can evolve over time, in 
some cases tailored by circumstances, in a more pragmatic direction. In 
the 1960s the Palestine Liberation Organization preached the destruction 
of Israel. In the 1970s it endorsed a secular democratic state for Arabs 
and Jews. In the 1980s and 1990s, Palestinians shifted -- under 
pressure, to be sure -- to a two-state solution.

Most Palestinians have grudgingly come to back a Palestinian state 
alongside Israel, provided it is based on 1967 borders, has its capital 
in East Jerusalem and offers a resolution to the refugee problem that 
includes some kind of right of return.

Sadly, however, history has no rewind button, and if such a solution was 
ever possible, it certainly seems unlikely now. Ariel Sharon had the 
power to move toward a conflict-ending solution, but he had no incentive 
to do so -- nor will his successors. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas 
has the incentive but lacks the power. In any case, unilateral action, 
not bilateral negotiations, seems to rule the day and will probably be 
the course chosen by Sharon's successor.

The Palestinians deserve a large share of the responsibility for their 
tragic predicament. Simply put, their leaders have failed to outline a 
coherent strategy, to devise effective tactics or to condition their 
public for compromise. Instead, a political culture of grievance and 
avoidance of responsibility has been the Palestinians' operating software.

The hardware has also failed. Armed struggle as a tactic has been a 
disaster. And while Hamas boasts (with some justification) that it was 
the gun that forced the Israelis out of the Gaza Strip, the gun has also 
wreaked havoc on the Palestinian society and image. Suicide terrorism 
has not only alienated Israel and America but also pushed them closer 
together. And without Israel and America, a Palestinian state will be 
stillborn.

Gaza may be free, but it is also uncontrollable, and sooner or later 
Israel may reenter to stop the Qassam rocket attacks. As Palestinians 
look east toward the West Bank, they see settlements and roads 
crisscrossing Palestinian land, with Jerusalem more tightly under 
Israeli control than ever. Hamas, or even the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, 
may toy with the Hezbollah precedent and believe that the gun can 
liberate Qalqilyah, Bethlehem and Jerusalem. But it will prove a fool's 
game that even Hamas may be clever enough not to play.

With Gaza a mess and their internal affairs in disarray, the 
Palestinians confront perhaps the deepest crisis and largest question 
for their nationalist hopes: how to maintain a monopoly on force. From 
its inception, the Palestinian national movement has never had its 
"Night of the Long Knives." Such a reckoning would have allowed Fatah -- 
its dominant faction -- to impose control and articulate a coherent 
national strategy. But Fatah, highly decentralized and ministering to 
its dispirited, dispossessed refugee constituency, chose to accommodate 
rather than confront. Indeed, it allowed smaller groups of varying 
political persuasions to undertake terrorism and violence that put the 
entire national movement in the dock.

Today that situation is worse than ever. Yasser Arafat's real 
transgression was not his unwillingness to accept what Ehud Barak 
offered at Camp David (no Palestinian leader could have done that and 
survived), it was his willingness to allow his monopoly over the forces 
of violence in Palestinian society to dissipate and to acquiesce in, if 
not encourage, terrorist attacks by the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and 
Hamas. Abbas's effort to create "one authority, one gun" has morphed 
into no authority and many guns.

Israel and the United States may deserve much of the responsibility for 
not seizing the opportunity to empower Abbas in the wake of Arafat's 
demise, but the crisis facing Palestinians is largely one brought about 
by their own hand, and they must resolve it.

Perhaps this week's elections will bring the beginning of real politics 
and a parliament that will press for real reform, pragmatism and 
peacemaking. Given the cacophony of Palestinian voices and the 
inevitable competition between Fatah and Hamas, whatever change occurs 
is likely to be excruciatingly slow. And in the interim, the 
Israeli-Palestinian conflict will grind on, inexorably eroding the 
possibility of a conflict-ending solution. But such is the fate reserved 
for peoples whose leaders, whether they be Palestinian, Israeli or 
American, bungle or pass up the rare moments of opportunity that history 
provides them.

The writer has been an adviser to six secretaries of state on 
Arab-Israeli negotiations. He is now a public policy scholar at the 
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/23/AR2006012301256.html?nav=hcmodule
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