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.â€
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.
