As members of Fatah leave their conference preparing to govern their people effectively, they offered what sounds like a tantalizing commitment. They reiterated their commitment to the “peace option.”

We would like very much to take the delegates’ words at face value, and it would be a lot easier to do that if they hadn’t laced their resolutions with terms like “armed struggle.” Even now, Fatah has not spelled out exactly what terms it is offering as a “peace option.” The resolutions passed rarely mentioned “Israel” without the word “boycott” nearby and nowhere has Fatah disavowed its stated goal of destroying Israel — which we believe must be part of any serious regional peace effort.

New York Times editorial – A peace option without peace – August 15, 2009

Actually the New York Times featured no such editorial. Had the editors of the Times bothered to study the record of the Fatah convention – available at MEMRI – they might have made such arguments. Actually the above “editorial” is my spoof of “Being a peace partner,” the Times’s thoroughly dishonest of Prime Minister Netanyahu assuming office back in March.

The media’s incuriousness about what went on at the Fatah conference is remarkable. This willful blindness is really perverse given the tendentiousness with which they cover Israeli politics.

The Washington Post celebrated Netanyahu’s election with an editorial “Israel’s step backwards.”

ISRAEL’S ELECTION last week propelled the country back in time to a political era when the parliament was sharply divided between parties that favored or opposed a two-state settlement with Palestinians. As in the 1980s, the right has the upper hand: Likud party leader Binyamin Netanyahu appears to have the best chance to become prime minister, even though his party finished second behind the centrist Kadima. Americans who remember Mr. Netanyahu’s last stint as prime minister in the 1990s — and there are several in the Obama administration who were working on Mideast policy then — have to be concerned that he would repeat his strategy of seeking to delay or undermine all peace negotiations with the Palestinians. He might also press for Israeli or American military action against Iran, and he has promised to “topple” and “uproot” Hamas from the Gaza Strip.

The 1990’s, as I recall, was a time when Arafat said many of the right things to the Americans and the international media while fomenting terror against Israel. He was falsely hailed as a peacemaker as he sought and won recognition for a change that he never rmade. Netanyahu didn’t buy that act. If hesitating to give into an unrepentant terrorist is “undermin[ing] all peace negotiations” those negotiations were doomed to failure. Still for all the fears expressed by the Post’s editors in this editorial, they were still somewhat amazed that President Obama apparently accepted their advice. Later they observed that the President was only “Tough on Israel.”

ONE OF THE MORE striking results of the Obama administration’s first six months is that only one country has worse relations with the United States than it did in January: Israel. The new administration has pushed a reset button with Russia and sent new ambassadors to Syria and Venezuela; it has offered olive branches to Cuba and Burma. But for nearly three months it has been locked in a public confrontation with Israel over Jewish housing construction in Jerusalem and the West Bank. To a less visible extent, the two governments also have differed over policy toward Iran.

Still the Post’s editors have yet to pronounce any judgment on last week’s Fatah convention. The extremism on display really renders any Israeli moderation moot. It seems that just because Fatah is the “moderate” party in Palestinian politics, any inconvenient contrary evidence must be disregarded.

For example, little attention has been paid to the man now in position to succeed Abbas as head of Fatah. Here’s how Barry Rubin describes the situation:

Fatah has apparently chosen as its next leader a man, Muhammad Ghaneim, who rejects the 1993 Israel-PLO (Oslo agreement) and the ensuing peace process. He was so passionately opposed even to negotiating with Israel that he refused to go to the Gaza Strip and West Bank with Yasir Arafat in 1994. He refused to participate in the Palestinian Authority which was created by the Oslo agreement. And when he later decided to go to PA-ruled territory—but without denouncing his previous view—Israel blocked it.

It would be as if Russia chose a hardline Stalinist as its next leader and that fact was not deemed worth reporting. Might not this tell us something important about the politics and future policies of Fatah and hence of the PA, too?

Why did all those people—two-thirds of the delegates–vote for him? Ghaneim got 33 percent more votes than did Barghouti, who not only has a personal base of support but the appeal of being a “political prisoner.”

Ghaneim is simply not that personally popular. I can speculate that he is the candidate of hardline Fatah chief Farouq Qaddumi, a man who is close to Syria’s radical dictatorship, who is popular but too old to run himself. But the key reason is that Mahmoud Abbas, PA and PLO leader, and his colleagues told delegates to vote for Ghaneim.

In general Rubin writes:

These two men—Abu Ala and Dahlan—are among the most moderate in Fatah. In their heads, they probably know that a compromise two-state solution is the best way forward for the Palestinians. But they will never have a chance to implement such a policy for two reasons.

First, the movement will always choose a much more hardline leadership—and I don’t necessarily mean as the nominal front man but as the group’s and the West Bank’s real rulers. Already, it is clear that the next leader of Fatah, the PLO, and the PA is Muhammad Ghaneim a man who—and this is no joke—is far more hardline tactically than Arafat. Ghaneim has still not even accepted the 1993 Oslo agreement which Arafat signed and which provides the basis not only for the peace process but for the PA itself.

Second, they know that whatever their personal views they must out-militant everyone else, insisting that there can be no concessions to Israel and that the Palestinians must maintain their demands inflexibly, glorify violence, while competing with Hamas in their inflexibility and radical rhetoric.

Overwhelmed by a belief that peace is near, media outlets pretend that it is only unreasonable Israel inflexibility that prevents a deal, ignore the the extreme elephant in the room. Essential to that belief is that Fatah is moderate and is capable of making a deal. Peace must be near. Fatah must be moderate. So Israel must be intransigent. That’s the apparent reasoning. If the media wasn’t so stuck on moderate, maybe they’d realize that the other two premises they hold are also wrong.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Another important step is that the P.L.O. is to renounce terrorism, according to some officials. But they add that the P.L.O., now outlawed in Israel, is ready to go further, by formally recognizing Israel’s right to exist and revoking sections of its 1964 convenant that call
for Israel’s destruction.

When that happens — and one official said it could be a matter of only a few weeks — Israel and the P.L.O. would recognize each other. The Palestinian group’s leadership would then be allowed to move into Gaza and Jericho, several officials said.

“It would no longer be the same P.L.O.,” one official argued. “It would become in effect a political body and not a terrorist organization.”

And indeed, if it truly had renounced terror and its intent to destroy Israel, the PLO would have been a new organization. Supporting this step we had the late Chaim Herzog.

We also are seeing an exercise in leadership that has followed a completely unconventional route, attended by great dangers; seemingly it is irreconcilable with the approach universally accepted by most Israelis, who put the P.L.O. beyond the pale. What the leadership now maintains is that by the P.L.O. declaring its abandonment of the weapon of terror and its covenant calling for Israel’s destruction, it becomes a political movement with which one can negotiate and argue.

This is a unconventional approach, based on a long-range vision, But then that is what leadership is all about.

Then opposition leader Netanyahu wrote (rather prophetically):

The Rabin Government is now betting the security of Israel on Yasir Arafat’s promises. But his promises are worthless. He has violated every political commitment he has ever made. Since his “breakthrough” promise in 1988 to stop P.L.O. terror, his own Fatah faction has launched more terrorist attacks against Israel than any other Palestinian group. Similarly, he repeatedly “recognizes” Israel for some political gain — only to take it back later.

An armed P.L.O. state looming over Israel’s cities and overflowing with returning “refugees” (a million to start with, says the P.L.O.) is a far cry from a responsible compromise that would give Israel security and Arabs autonomy. Instead of giving peace a chance, it is a guarantee of increased tension, future terrorism and, ultimately, war.

(It is a strange exercise reading these articles. Netanyahu – who was correct – was, and still is often, considered a “right wing demagogue,” whereas those who supported the Oslo accords were considered the voices of reason.)

isabel Kershner reports on the most recent Fatah convention in Bethlehem.

“It speaks about a peaceful solution,” said Sarhan Salaymeh, the mayor of the West Bank town of Al-Ram, who spent 13 years in an Israeli prison. “It is the time for nation building, not fighting,” he said. “The rifle has its own time.”

Yet Fatah, still defining itself as a national liberation movement, is reluctant to fully abandon the gun. In a statement outlining the principles of its new political charter, the party reaffirmed its commitment to achieve a just peace, but said it believed the Palestinians, as a people under occupation, retain the legitimate right of resistance “in all its forms.”

Elder of Ziyon notes that Fatah’s old terminology persists. And Fatah has elected a convicted murderer to its central committee.

Yasser Arafat and Fatah made a down payment on legitimacy by supposedly renouncing terror in 1993. Now 16 years later Arafat’s successor still refuse to eschew terror and yet their international legitimacy persists.

Apparently those who consider “two states for two peoples living side by side peacefully” believe that the formulation is the equivalent of “liquidate the Zionist entity.”

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Some of the younger generation of reformers, who are hoping to increase their power within the movement, complained that the traditional leaders had packed the conference with their own supporters at the last minute.

“They brought their relatives, their secretaries,” said Hussam Khader, a firebrand Fatah leader from Nablus who has long campaigned against corruption in the movement.

Well apparently Kuddar has done more than campaign against corruption. The Guardian sat profiled him last year.

Khader was arrested at his home in March 2003 and convicted of being a member of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, the armed wing of the Fatah movement that played a key role in the second intifada, and of helping fund the group through connections to Hizbullah and Iran. He was sentenced to seven years in jail but released after five and a half. It was his 24th time in an Israeli prison – he was first arrested at age 13 for taking part in a demonstration against the Israeli occupation.

So he funded a terrorist group through Hezbollah and Iran. So “reformer” then isn’t necessarily such an innocuous term in this case.

Khaled Abu Toameh observed recently that Fatah was being radicalized and that …

… one of the most disturbing signs of the growing radicalization of Fatah can be seen in calls by top representatives for a “strategic alliance” with Iran’s dictatorial and fundamental regime.

Kershner doesn’t tell us if Khader is one of those advocating for that alliance, but given his arrest, it’s hardly a stretch to believe that he is. But of course, all we know him as is a “firebrand” reformer.

Later on Kershner writes:

Delegates have come to Bethlehem from as far as Yemen and the United States. They include people as diverse as Sari Nusseibeh, an intellectual from Jerusalem who has championed nonviolence, and Khaled Abu Asba, who took part in a notorious attack in 1978 in which an Israeli bus was hijacked and about three dozen Israeli civilians were killed.

Barry Rubin observed that the AP didn’t report:

… the cheers for terrorists who murdered Israelis but were present at the meeting.

And neither did the New York Times. Again I think it’s safe to assume that Abu Asba was applauded. Kershner, though, simply used him as an example of the “diversity” of those attending the conference. I don’t know that “diversity” is a virtue when it involves including and honoring murderers.

So when Kershner reports that

One point of consensus reached on Thursday was the notion that Israel was responsible for the death of Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader and Fatah founder, who died in 2004. In the convention hall, delegates blamed Israel for having kept the ailing Mr. Arafat under siege in his headquarters in the West Bank. Fatah officials said they would continue to investigate the circumstances of his death, and suspicions that Israel poisoned him.

it sounds more bizarre than malicious. It’s indicative that Fatah is still less interested in fighting corruption than in fighting Israel or in creating an independent state. (h/t memeorandum) But without more information – that Kershner could have provided – we can’t get a sense from her report how the Fatah conference has improved or hurt the chances for peace. Given those omissions, my suspicion is that the latter is true. That’s the sort of news that’s not fit to print.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

The day was filled with contradictory messages reflecting the disarray in Fatah. A huge poster on the wall bore the legend “Resistance is the legitimate right of our people” alongside a black-and-white photograph from the 1960s of a Palestinian youth with a gun.

Mr. Abbas reminisced about the early years of armed struggle against Israel. But he also stressed the need for new, more appropriate forms of resistance while pursuing negotiations for an independent Palestinian state. He blamed a lack of discipline in part for Fatah’s failures.

A stickler for law and order, Mr. Abbas also proudly noted that Palestinians now wear their seat belts, or face being fined.

I’m not sure what’s contradictory about calls for resistance if Fatah’s platform calls for “restrained violence.” Or does Kershner mean that the call for fastening seat belts was inconsistent with the calls for resistance.

Linda Gradstein reports in the Washington Post

Israeli officials, meanwhile, say they would like to strengthen Fatah as a counterweight to Hamas, which denies Israel’s right to exist.

Both articles play up the “moderation” of Fatah, which Barry Rubin has shown, stretches the definition of the word. Then again there’s a history of re-defining “moderate” when describing Fatah. (Though I give Kershner credit for at least mentioning the presence of the word “resistance.”)

Gradstein also writes:

The Fatah conference opened amid signs that the Obama administration is planning a new push for the resumption of peace talks. A spokesman for Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Tuesday that Barak told a parliamentary committee that the United States will present a new peace plan within weeks and that, in his view, “Israel should accept it.”

Israeli news media say the plan is based on a 2002 Saudi proposal calling for normalized ties between Israel and more than 50 Arab states in exchange for an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.

How will the supposed “moderation” of Fatah facilitate the Obama administration’s diplomatic efforts when Fatah is teaching its next generation that all of Israel is “occupied territory,” when its leaders are encouraging the Arab states not to engage with Israel and even “moderate” Arab states don’t seem to need that exhortation as the daylight the Obama administration has shown them has encouraged them to avoid normalization.

Or to put it succinctly: how can an American diplomatic effort help when even Fatah doesn’t make peace its priority? (And why would any Israeli politician encourage Israel to join in the American effort unlikely to accomplish anything?)

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Barry Rubin wrote an informative roundup of the personalities who will be participating. Most importantly he observed:

Of the Fatah Central Committee’s seventeen surviving members, only three can be classified as relative moderates. At least seven can be called radicals—many still oppose the original 1993 Oslo agreement—even in relation to the late PLO, Fatah, and PA leader Yasir Arafat. The remaining seven might be called hardliners whose views are close to those of Arafat, which makes any peace agreement with Israel impossible.

Terror Wonk republishes an old profile of radical Farouk Kaddoumi.

The agenda

According to Dion Nissenbaum, the conference will be about Fatah’s becoming relevant again. But Pinchas Inbari argues that the conference will be about going back to the past:

And here we come to the essence: Fatah retains the armed struggle as a strategy in order to liberate the whole of Palestine and eliminate Israel. Article 12 calls for “the liberation of Palestine completely and the elimination of the state of the Zionist occupation economically, politically, militarily, and culturally.”6 (Indeed, one of the methods mentioned in the Political Program for the “peaceful intifada” is an economic boycott of Israel.)

Article 13 calls for “establishing a sovereign democratic Palestinian state on the entire Palestinian territory that will preserve the legitimate rights of the citizens on the basis of justice and equality without discrimination on the basis of race, religion and belief, and Jerusalem will be its capital.”7 While the Political Program lists the “one-state solution” as an option in case the “two-state solution” fails, the Internal Order document mentions the “one-state solution” as the only solution.
Article 17 says: “The armed popular revolution is the only inevitable way to the liberation of Palestine.”8

Finally, Article 19 notes: “The armed struggle is a strategy and not just a tactic and the armed revolution of the Arab Palestinian people is a decisive factor in the war of liberation and the elimination of the Zionist existence, and the struggle will not end until the elimination of the Zionist entity and the liberation of Palestine.”9

While Fatah’s Political Program tries to accommodate international expectations and seems designed to mobilize international legitimacy for the re-launching of a “peaceful intifada,” Fatah’s “Internal Order” reminds us how deeply ingrained in Fatah is its ideology from the 1960s and 1970s.

The consequences

Israel Matzav sees a possible split in Fatah coming. Media Backspin sees the conference as a possible prelude to a new intifadah (and makes other observations too).

Conclusions

Despite the administration’s push for peace, it appears that there is very little appetite in the Arab world to make peace with Israel. Even Fatah, which presumably would have the most to gain has made it clear through the spoken and written (via memeorandum) word that it prefers terror to peace with Israel. In other words don’t expect much to change. Certainly not for the better.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

In the Washington Post’s report:

Israeli officials have, in recent days, pointed hopefully to indications that support for Hamas within Gaza is eroding. Israeli and Palestinian analysts say Israel’s strategy appears to be to weaken Hamas enough that the group has no choice but to sign a truce on Israel’s terms. But there is a risk that approach could backfire.

Rawiya Shawa, an independent Palestinian legislative council member who lives in Gaza City, said attacks on targets such as mosques and university buildings are uniting the population behind Hamas and neutralizing the internal opposition.

(Notice how no news reports say anything like “Hamas’s efforts to wreak havoc on Israel might backfire and lead Israel to destroy the infrastructure that Hamas has worked hard to build.” Only Israel has to worry about backfiring strategies.)

And of course there was Daoud Kuttab’s offensive op-ed (via memeorandum):

While it is not apparent how this violent confrontation will end, it is abundantly clear that the Islamic Hamas movement has been brought back from near political defeat while moderate Arab leaders have been forced to back away from their support for any reconciliation with Israel.

What’s abundantly clear is that it’s not at all obvious that Hamas will benefit from this war. If Israel miscalculates and ends the war unsatisfactorily, it will benefit Hamas just as the war in 2006 benefited Hezbollah. But if Israel significantly degrades Hamas’ capabilities and kills a number of Hamas’ leaders, Hamas will be weakened.

Contrary to what Kuttab wrote, Egypt (which has enable Hamas to re-arm and fortify its offensive capabilities) blamed Hamas for the fighting.

Now Jeffrey Goldberg reports that a friend of his from Fatah, is rooting for the IAF! (via memeorandum)

I’ve been talking to friends of mine, former Palestinian Authority intelligence officials (ejected from power by the Hamas coup), and they tell me that not only are they rooting for the Israelis to decimate Hamas, but that Fatah has actually been assisting the Israelis with targeting information.

(There is some room for skepticism. Would Fatah really admit to helping Israel? Or are they gauging that Hamas is that unpopular? After all Hamas was supposed to be the good government terrorists and they haven’t delivered a better quality of life for Gaza in the past two years.)

And Hamas isn’t necessarily winning hearts and minds in Gaza either:

[Interviewer] “How many were you?”

[Girl] “Seven.In the other room were my mother, my father, my yonger brother and another sister, who is 13 days old. I say, Hamas is the cause, in the first place, of all wars.”

Those concerns about Israel’s offensive backfiring are the hopes of those who doesn’t wish Israel to defend itself. I don’t think that it’s all “abundantly clear” that Israel will end up strengthening Hamas by destroying it.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Elder of Ziyon was on top of the escalation. (And I missed it before I posted.)

The NYT reports that Arrests Increase Tensions Between Palestinian Factions. Again I wonder if the arrests increase the tensions or reflect the tensions.

Tensions between the main rival Palestinian groups, Hamas and Fatah, spread from Gaza to the West Bank on Monday with reports of the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority security forces detaining more than 50 activists and academics associated with Hamas.

The timing of the detentions, which were focused in the northern West Bank city of Nablus, smacked of retaliation for a broad Hamas sweep against Fatah members and institutions in Gaza over the weekend.

(more links at yesterday’s Daily Alert.)

I think it’s safe to assume that those arrested won’t be getting married, allowed conjugal visits and given university educations. ABC News reports:

Two human rights groups on Monday decried widespread torture of political opponents by bitter Palestinian rivals Hamas and Fatah, and Associated Press interviews with three victims and a doctor backed the reports of abuse.

The findings emerged as the two sides carried out fresh arrest sweeps in the West Bank and Gaza — highlighting deep tensions in the Palestinian territories after a flare-up in violence over the weekend.

The ongoing conflict between Hamas and Fatah hasn’t escaped the notice of Lebanon’s Daily Star, which observes in an editorial:

Over the past few years, the rivalry between Hamas and Fatah has rapidly made its way up the list of threats to the Palestinians’ existence. In some circles, it is still fashionable to blame Israel for all of the Palestinians’ troubles, but in this instance, the leaders of Hamas and Fatah have committed crimes of equal magnitude against their own constituents. Not only have scores of people died at the hands of their armed forces, the fighting has also served to greatly undermine the Palestinian cause. It has become increasingly difficult for the international community to feel sympathy for the Palestinian people when their own leaders provide so much media ammunition to distract the world from their plight. The image of lawlessness and internecine warfare conveys the image of a people who are simply not ready for self-governance or an independent state.

Or as Lee Stevens puts it, a bit more generally:

But here’s another way to look at it: The Palestinian Authority is neither a nascent state nor a failed state project. Rather, it is a clan system of frequently competing interests that no Palestinian leader in his right mind would try to turn into a state, regardless of how much financial incentive the international community makes available. The problem is not that the Arab state system is breaking down, but rather that it never existed. And the proof is unfolding before us in, among other places, Hamas’ Islamic Republic of Gaza, the autonomous Hezbollah regions of Hezbollah Lebanon, and perhaps even someday soon in Iraq, as the Arabs redraw the borders of the region to their own taste with little concern for the international state system.

(h/t Instapundit)

I still doubt that Abbas was responsible for that blast on Friday. Hamas has strength in Judea and Samaria too, so it would be foolish of him to order something so brazen.

Even without further escalation, Hamastan will continue to be a source of instability for the foreseeable future.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.