After the declarations at Sharm al-Sheikh this month, it seems Abu Mazen might pull off his gamble: a ceasefire with Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, all integrated within the Palestinian security forces. But will Israel keep its promises? And will the United States and the international community give him the support he needs?
YASSER ARAFAT’S death will fundamentally transform the contemporary Palestinian land-scape, as his political ascent had shaped it. He was unique, and uniquely suited to his people’s condition after the 1948 war: defeated, dispossessed, dispersed, without a state to defend them, a territory to hold them or a political strategy to unite them.
Palestinians were divided by family, class and clan, scattered throughout the region and beyond, exploited by the competing purposes of many and prey to the ambitions of all. Because of his history and personality, charisma and guile, cajoling and bullying, luck and perseverance, Arafat came to represent them equally and became the face of the Palestinian people, to them and to the world.
His paramount goal was national unity, without which, he believed, nothing could be achieved. He was the bridge between Palestinians in the Diaspora and those on the inside, those who were dispossessed in 1948 and those who were occupied in 1967, West Bankers and Gazans, young and old, rich and poor, swindlers and honest toilers, modernists and traditionalists, militarists and pacifists, Islamists and secularists.
He was national leader, tribesman, family elder, employer, Samaritan, head of a secular-nationalist movement and deeply devout, aspiring to be the pre-eminent embodiment of each of these disparate groups, even when they held opposing views. His style was often criticised and disparaged but his pre-eminent position was seldom questioned. No Palestinian leader is likely to reproduce his kind of politics, almost certainly not under conditions of occupation, and not right now.
The man chosen to succeed him is in most ways different but in one critical respect the same. Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) is, like Arafat, a rarity: a genuinely national Palestinian figure, but in a radically dissimilar fashion. Where Arafat attained national status by identifying with and belonging to every constituency and factional interest, Abu Mazen did so by identifying with none. Arafat immersed himself in local politics; Abu Mazen floats above it, his service is to the national movement as a whole. Arafat - “the Old Man” - with his inexhaustible bravado, ruled through an overwhelming and overpowering rhetorical and physical presence.
Abu Mazen, unassuming and understated, a man of few words but many deeds, has made a career of running from the limelight. With Arafat’s passing, the politics of weightiness will give way to the politics of the light touch.
Arafat inhabited a Borgesian world where a thing and its opposite could cohabit the same point in space and time; where what mattered was the impact of language, not the meaning of words; where myths combined with facts to produce reality. Abu Mazen’s world is rooted in what is familiar and recognised as the order of things. His language is acceptable, more everyday, his reality far less animated by the ghosts of the past. Instead of the politics of ambiguous and creative intensity, he stands for the politics of cool and clear rationality.
A politician of conviction
Abu Mazen is a politician of conviction, which is to say not much of a politician at all until recently. He rarely schemes; his behaviour is, if anything, an outgrowth of his emotional and temperamental makeup, a feature that accounts for his many successes and not a few of his setbacks. Guided by a deep sense of ethics, repugnance for political expediency, and an exaggerated faith in the power of reason, he will seldom give in or fight back when rebuffed or slighted. Convinced that he has logic and reason on his side, and that logic and reason are the faculties that guide all others, he would much rather passively wait until people see things his way.
There is little of the manipulator, deceiver, or conspirator in him, which is perhaps why he is so unforgiving of the manipulations, deceptions and conspiracies of others. That was the key to his seesaw relationship with Arafat: because he did not hesitate to disagree with the Old Man, he chose seclusion over confrontation or compromise; because Arafat knew that Abu Mazen’s motives were sincere rather than opportunistic (unlike so many of his colleagues), he rarely lost trust in him and almost always forgave him.
Abu Mazen is also a profoundly pious Muslim. Inspired by Islam but allergic to its role in politics, he prays daily and fasts at Ramadan but publicises neither, feeling as he does that religion is a matter of private belief not public display, let alone public regulation. In his now regular dealings with leaders of Hamas or Islamic Jihad, this gives him an unmistakable edge; he is convinced that he is no less a Muslim than they are, and when he meets a self-proclaimed Islamist politician, he sees the politician, not the Islamist.
Most important, he holds to a core set of principles from which he is disinclined to depart or compromise. In autumn 1999, in the aftermath of Ehud Barak’s election as Israel’s prime minister, he presented US officials with a straightforward proposal for a final deal: a Palestinian state within the borders of 4 June 1967; East Jerusalem as its capital; and recognition of the principle of the refugees’ right of return. Within those parameters, and consistent with international legality, he left room for discussion. There would be minor and equitable swaps of land to take account of some Israeli settlements; provisions to allow Jews unimpeded access to their holy sites; and the right of return would be implemented in a manner that would not threaten Israel’s demographic interests.
But prior acceptance of the basic proposal was paramount, for without it there could be neither international legitimacy nor a just peace. The US and Israel ignored his suggestion. Negotiations followed a bazaar-like route of posturing and deal-making, unsecured by any core principle: the percentages of West Bank territory to be turned over by Israel varied wildly, as did the proposed allocation of sovereignty over East Jerusalem and the number of refugees allowed to resettle in Israel.
This mode of negotiation was anathema to Abu Mazen, who believed that nothing good would come of it, and felt that it was counter-productive for Palestinians and, to the extent that it raised false expectations about the scope of possible Palestinian compromises, dishonest to Israelis. When his suggestion in the spring of 2000 for secret negotiations between non-officials from each side was spurned by Barak, and other, less suitable, Palestinian officials were selected to lead the talks, in essence he withdrew.
Uncomfortable with the way that negotiations had proceeded before the Camp David summit of July 2000 (1), Abu Mazen was adamantly opposed to the outbreak of violence that followed it. He had long viewed violence as pointless and unsound, a use of the weakest Palestinian weapon to assail Israel’s strongest flank. He estimated the cost-benefit of violence, and while the costs were high, benefits were few: Israelis closed ranks, the United States took sides, the international community turned its back, and the Palestinian Authority fell apart.
Means and ends meet
Abu Mazen believes the goal should be to engage with Israeli political groups, talk in a language that Washington understands, and rally the world to the Palestinians’ cause. To that end, Palestinians must stabilise the situation, restore law and order, rein in all armed militias, build transparent, legitimate centralised institutions and, above all, cease armed attacks against Israel. In his vision, means and ends mesh: if Palestinians make a fair case, they can get a fair hearing. Palestinian restraint should result in stronger international support and the Israeli public’s greater receptivity to logical demands.
His belief in persuasion and principle over violent pressure is risky and, to many Palestinians, reckless. As they see it, Palestinians did not militarise the confrontation, Israel did; in the opening weeks of the intifada, most casualties were Palestinian, not Israeli; when tentative and informal ceasefires were reached, Israel breached them; if the Palestinians were to stop fighting, they would unilaterally disarm, removing all pressure on Israel to compromise.
Abu Mazen’s different view is informed by his long experience with Israel. As part of a PLO team with Yasser Arafat and Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad) (2), he oversaw contacts with Israelis in the 1970s. Although these began with fringe, anti-Zionist activists, they gradually included Arab-Israelis, the Zionist left, moderate former military officers and members of the Labour party. After the secret Oslo accords of summer 1993, Abu Mazen expanded his reach to include less obvious but, to him, more relevant forces: Likud and Orthodox Jews.
From those exchanges, he concluded that Israeli society was both intriguingly complex in its divisions and disarmingly simple in its aspirations: to achieve normalcy and security. He believed that Israelis, if offered those, would ultimately be willing to make the concessions required for a stable and just peace; his conviction strikes some Palestinians as the height of naivety, others as the pinnacle of pragmatism.
Abu Mazen, a man without a genuine following, has become a man without an effective opposition. This very much accounts for his smooth and uncontested path to power. Four years into a devastating armed confrontation with Israel, and with the loss of the only leader they have known, Palestinians are in shock, afraid and tired. Neither the public nor any significant constituent group is in the mood for a fight. Abu Mazen, who was the first choice of no single constituency, was every constituency’s natural choice. He is today the last Palestinian with national stature and historic credentials, the only one who can authentically speak on behalf of all. Any other leader would have caused a protracted, costly, and divisive struggle for succession. His election was less an exercise in conferring legitimacy than in confirming it.
Many divergent interests have coalesced around him. Palestinians frightened that Arafat’s death would bring further chaos see in Abu Mazen the reassuring symbol of personal security and collective stability. For the many exhausted by the intifada, he is viewed as the man most likely to bring calm and even perhaps some benefits. For militants hunted by Israel, he could be the man to negotiate an amnesty that returns them to normal life. Members of the business community and the social elite believe that he understands their needs and can create a climate more supportive of their commercial interests. Members of the entrenched bureaucracy that grew alongside the Palestinian Authority, resentful of losses since the uprising, hope Abu Mazen will restore them to the position they enjoyed after 1993.
Palestinian refugees and members of the diaspora, worried that their interests will be discarded once negotiations resume, are comforted by his origins in the now-Israeli town of Safad, his record of political struggle outside the territories and his long support for the right of return. There are some who have closed ranks around Abu Mazen because he is deemed to have been anointed by the only power that counts, the US, their preference being a reflection of the imagined preferences of others.
Strange bedfellows
Circumstances have made for strange bedfellows. With Israel’s scheduled withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, distrust between Palestinian West Bankers (who fear Gaza will go its own way) and Gazans (who fear their West Bank counterparts will seek to scuttle the disengagement) has worsened. Yet both sides rallied around Abu Mazen, who is regarded as beholden to neither and therefore unthreatening. Some expected that young Fatah members (3) would challenge him, but the succession came too soon; defying the established leadership of a deeply divided movement would have been too costly.
Instead, self-styled future leaders saw in Abu Mazen someone unaffiliated with any particular faction, a guarantor of continuity and, most of all, a transitional figure during whose rule others could prepare to take over. Old Arafat loyalists concerned for their positions, including members of the Fatah Central Committee, cling to him as insurance against the suspected ambitions of these newcomers.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad are well aware that his programme is incompatible with theirs, that he rejects violence and the existence of armed militias. But they have lived with him before and are confident they can do so again. They believe they know his ways - to coopt, not to crush. Convinced that Israel will not give him a fair chance and that he will fail, they can afford to wait for the next round while benefiting from an overdue respite. As for the US, Israel, Europe and the Arab countries, Abu Mazen not only believes in the agenda they claim to hold dear - ending armed attacks, building Palestinian institutions, asserting the rule of law - but, more significantly, he is thought of as the only Palestinian remotely capable of delivering it.
Among this wide array of domestic and international constituents, those who adhere fully to his political vision are few and those who believe he will ultimately see things their way are many. But for now, Abu Mazen is relatively free to speak and act on his own, freer than he or most others expected. Because they came to him rather than he to them, he is under surprisingly little pressure from groups that Arafat perpetually sought to placate - and who sought to tie his hands. Whatever competing centres of power once existed are for now dormant, unwilling or unable to form an organised and effective opposition.
Most important, he has achieved this position because, more than any other Palestinian leader today, his political inclinations are in harmony with his people’s immediate priorities: security and the desire for a normal life free of fear of Israeli attacks and Palestinian gangs; material betterment and resumption of basic economic activity; freedom of movement, to circulate again without constant roadblocks, curfews and humiliation. Palestinians now aspire to the conditions that prevailed before the intifada - the very conditions that precipitated it; Abu Mazen seems to them best equipped to restore those conditions.
Ariel Sharon has won the current round of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His goal, an old one, was for Palestinians to tire of their national struggle. To cause the impoverishment and despair of the Palestinian people was never his purpose as such, but he viewed that as a prerequisite to diverting the Palestinians’ concentration from political issues to mundane matters of more immediate concern. He appears to have achieved this ambition, an outcome Abu Mazen long predicted, which is why at the beginning of the armed intifada in 2000 he called for it to end. The uprising, he warned, would hurt Palestinians more than Israelis; ultimately, they would have to return to square one, cease the uprising and rebuild their lives, only more divided, battered and isolated than before.
Palestinian exhaustion suits both men’s purposes for now, though they differ sharply on what they intend to do with it. For Sharon, it provides a welcome means to depoliticise the Palestinian national movement; for Abu Mazen, it is a necessary phase before the Palestinian nation can be re-politicised a different way.
A time for unilateral steps
Abu Mazen has little hope that a comprehensive settlement can be reached with Sharon. Too much separates them, not least Sharon’s preference for a long-term interim agreement in which hard issues, such as the final borders, status of Jerusalem and fate of refugees, are indefinitely deferred. Abu Mazen believes that now is not the time for a bilateral agreement but for unilateral steps, with Israel withdrawing from Gaza and the northern West Bank, and Palestinians putting their house in order.
Negotiations leading to a permanent settlement remain his goal, but he does not think that the other side is ready yet. By rebuilding Palestinian institutions and the national movement, genuinely renouncing violence, rekindling international ties and clearly articulating basic and unalterable Palestinian requirements, he believes that the post-Sharon stage can be prepared for or even accelerated and that, meanwhile, his people will benefit from new and long-awaited tranquility.
This is a gamble. Abu Mazen’s support is as wide as it is fickle, reflecting circumstance far more than adherence to his person or programme. The current state of shock among Palestinians is likely to subside, their fear to abate and exhaustion to end, at which point more political demands - to release Palestinian prisoners, stop settlement construction or end the occupation - will be voiced.
As time passes, choices will have to be made - and enemies. Some who half-heartedly support Abu Mazen now will break ranks, there will be the prospect of an organised and effective opposition, and calls for renewed violence. Abu Mazen hopes that by then he will have produced stability, law and order, better standards of living, and freedom of movement, accumulating political capital more quickly than he spends it and compensating for the loss of support from some constituents by the consolidation of support from others.
To succeed, he is banking heavily on support from the international community, principally the US, to go beyond the immediate, material improvements in the Palestinians’ situation. Ending violence and implementing institutional reforms are causes he believes in and will carry out, no matter what, for the good of the Palestinian people. But he also sees an important side-benefit, which is to put President George Bush to the test and confront him with his words. More than once, Bush has said that reining in militant groups and democratising Palestinian society would lead to a two-state solution. If the Palestinians keep their commitments, Abu Mazen hopes, the US will have to do the same, putting pressure on Israel to make the political concessions he will need so much.
Abu Mazen is also relying on changes within Israel, expecting that the quieter situation he will create can lead to domestic pressure for a comprehensive deal, rather than popular contentment with the status quo. If that can be done quickly enough, Palestinian impatience can be managed and a return to armed confrontation averted. He must get enough movement, and fast enough, from Israel and the international community or the tired Palestinians might eventually tire of him as well.
Three critical differences
This is the same gambit he vainly attempted during his brief prime ministership (from 29 April to 7 September 2003). But with three critical differences: Arafat is gone, Palestinians are more willing to give Abu Mazen a chance, and Israel and the US have had time to learn from that unfortunate precedent.
Here the difference with Arafat is palpable. Abu Mazen stands where he does today because the popular mood is in tune with him, while Arafat stood where he did for so long because he laboured tirelessly to remain in tune with the popular mood. By actively engaging with every domestic Palestinian constituency, Arafat ensured that his status was impervious to circumstances; by remaining outside the fray, Abu Mazen is ensuring that his status will be tied to its constituents. He enjoys a power that is more nearly absolute yet more temporary. Unburdened by the need to cater to every constituency, his margin of manoeuvre is remarkably broad. But should the mood change, the US fail to pressure Israel or Israel fail to respond, the consensus that has swiftly formed around him will just as quickly evaporate.
He confronts two paradoxical challenges. Because his principal asset is international credit rather than domestic credibility, and because Palestinians are convinced that the US can get from Israel what they cannot, more will be expected of him than of Arafat. And, insofar as his backing is the result of popular fatigue, the more he succeeds in improving the situation, the more he risks losing support.
Among potential problems, two lie immediately ahead. The first is Israel’s disengagement from Gaza. This is not something he can oppose: land is being turned over to Palestinians and, for the first time in the history of the conflict, settlements are to be evacuated. Gaza, free of Israel’s presence, can be rebuilt and serve as a model for the rest of the occupied territories. But it also is something he cannot afford to embrace warmly: many of his people fear that with all eyes fixed on Gaza, the withdrawal there will be accompanied by a greater density of settlement blocs inside the West Bank, more Israeli construction in the strategic area of Jerusalem, and continued building of the separation wall, all part of a suspected broader plan to impose long-term, de facto borders that will divide the West Bank into cantons.
Balancing these considerations, Abu Mazen is likely to praise the Gaza withdrawal as an achievement that is part of the road map (4), keeping any coordination with the Israelis to a minimum and most international attention on the West Bank.
He knows the second imminent problem; the Israeli proposal to establish a Palestinian state with interim borders in Gaza and parts of the West Bank. Eager for a political achievement, and obsessed with the imperative of institution-building, the US and Europe are likely to press for his approval. Even some Arab countries, desperate for stability and any sign of progress, can be expected to join the chorus. But what some see as an Israeli concession, Abu Mazen sees as a trap, an attempt to defuse the conflict, deprive it of its emotional power, reduce it to a simple and manageable border dispute, and defer a comprehensive settlement. He will strive to find a way neither to alienate important international backers nor break faith with his own deep-seated conviction that the proposal is a ruse; he probably does not yet know how he will do it.
Power undoubtedly will affect him, as it affects all who sample it. Already, he has had to acquire, or feign, a taste for oratory and pressing the flesh, for which Arafat was famous. His political survival will require the kind of tough balancing act he disdained and generally left to Arafat: focusing on material improvement without neglecting political issues; maintaining Israeli and American confidence without losing that of Hamas or Islamic Jihad; disciplining the armed militias without crushing them; looking out for the older generation without disappointing the new; maintaining Fatah’s unity without being hamstrung by it; fulfilling the US’s demands without appearing to comply with all of its wishes; ending the violence without seeming to submit to Israel; and moving away from Arafat’s legacy without breaking with it.
Over time, the fundamental challenge will be to reconcile the many expectations he now embodies and channel the lukewarm backing he has from often competing groups into active support for himself and his policies. In this sense, he is both stronger and weaker than the electoral results indicate. The more than 60% who voted for him are not all faithful supporters, and the more than 30% who voted for his rivals do not constitute an organised or unified opposition (5).
There are unanswered questions. What will happen if Abu Mazen cannot deliver what the US and Israel require, or if Bush and Sharon do not produce what Abu Mazen needs? What if Abu Mazen is unable to reach a deal with Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah militants, or if he reaches a deal but it does not hold, or if it holds but Israel continues its military attacks? What if the fragile political consensus around him breaks down or if violent infighting breaks out?
For now Abu Mazen is the object of often incompatible desires. A protector and a saviour, a transitional figure and a generation’s last best hope, the devil they know for some and the lesser evil for others: to Palestinians, Abu Mazen is all of these, all at once. He must wonder where his constituents have come from, how long they will stand by him, and what he has done to deserve their abundant and often cumbersome company.
Robert Malley is a former advisor to President Clinton and director of the Middle East and North Africa programme of International Crisis Group (Brussels). They have adapted this article from a text published by the New York Review of Books
Hussein Agha is a specialist in Israeli-Palestinian issues and Senior Associate at St Antony’s College (Oxford
Original text in English
(1) See Alain Gresh, “Camp David’s thwarted peace”, Le Monde diplomatique, English language edition, July 2002.
(2) Founder, with Yasser Arafat, of Fatah in 1959, Abu Jihad was assassinated by the Israeli secret services in 1988, when he was coordinating the first intifada.
(3) See Graham Usher, “Dead end for the Palestinian resistance”, Le Monde diplomatique, English language edition, September 2003.
(4) Adopted on 30 April 2003 by the Quartet (UN, US, Russia, EU), it calls for the creation of an independent, democratic, viable Palestinian state in 2005 on the basis of UN resolutions; this will be based on the end of violence and of terrorism, democratic reforms by the Palestinian Authority and Israel’s withdrawal from Palestinian territories reoccupied since 28 September 2000.
(5) In the presidential election of 9 January, Abu Mazen won 62.35% of the votes; independent candidate Mustafa Barghouti 19.8%, Taysir Khaled of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine 3.5%, Bassam Salhi of the Palestinian People’s party (ex-communist) 2.6%, Abdelhalim al-Ashqar, independent Islamist 2.68%, Sayyed Barakah, independent Islamist, 1.27 %, and Abdelkarim Shoubeir, 0.67%; some 70% of registered voters took part.
our years ago, Alan Greenspan urged Congress to cut taxes, asserting that the federal government was in imminent danger of paying off too much debt.
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