Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East (4 page)

The evening, like Palestinian politics, was a one-man show.

Over the years, in frustration and anger, rivals occasionally split off to form their own factions. Most of them were leftist. Fatah, ironically, had little ideology; it basically had a leader and a mission—to eliminate the state of Israel and expel all Jews who arrived after 1917. Arafat acquired weapons from the Soviet Union, China, and the eastern bloc, but the PLO was quite capitalist. It invested in Wall Street, through intermediaries, and ran a string of businesses, farms, and factories that produced furniture, clothing, toys, and kitchenware. Its conglomerate was often referred to as PLO, Inc.
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For all his claims of leading a simple life, Arafat wore a Rolex watch. His uniforms were custom-made Italian khakis. And his late-in-life wife and daughter led a luxurious life in Paris.

Arafat usually coerced or cajoled most of his rivals back together under the broader umbrella of the Palestine Liberation Organization. And he often took the toughest decisions to his inner circle as well as the Palestinian National Council, a parliament in exile. But it was usually to provide him cover to do what he wanted. Wily Arafat almost always prevailed.

Little changed after he returned from exile in 1994. From the Muqata, Arafat ran the new Palestinian Authority for the next decade as autocratically as he had the Palestine Liberation Organization. He also ensured that Fatah dominated all branches of government, the best private sector jobs, monopolies on lucrative imports, and the top security positions. Patronage was the lever of power. Laws passed by an elected legislature, including some impressive judicial and executive-branch reforms, sat on his desk ignored and unsigned for years.
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Critics were often picked up and released at his whim rather than the dictates of a court.

In 2004, a public opinion poll found that eighty-seven percent of Palestinians surveyed believed that Arafat’s government was corrupt and that its leaders were opportunists who became rich off their powers. Ninety-two percent wanted sweeping political reform of the Palestinian government.
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“Arafat became the curse of the Palestinian people. He was like a pharaoh,” Palestinian journalist Sufian Taha told me. “He had the blood of many Palestinians on his hands during the years he was in Jordan and Beirut. We also suffered when he came back.

“Arafat wanted people to be corrupt, because that was the way he could control them,” Taha said. “He could look them in the eye and know he could tell them what to do, because he knew what they were doing. He was like Don Corleone.”

Disdain was widespread. Reflected Said, the pollster, “For Fatah, power was like having an open credit card, and it was all free. They had a ‘shop ’til you drop’ attitude.”

In 2006, the Palestinian attorney general revealed that 700 million dollars in state funds had been squandered or stolen over the previous few years. Some of the money lost in fifty separate cases had been transferred to personal accounts locally and abroad. Twenty-five people had been arrested, but ten had fled overseas. The fraud included construction of fictitious factories and land deals that existed only on paper. The Palestinian Authority had received five billion dollars in foreign aid over the previous five years, but was still on the verge of bankruptcy.
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“I thought Arafat and his people would be accountable once they were face-to-face with the people, in a way they hadn’t been when in exile. But I was mistaken,” said Samir Abdullah, director of the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute, when we met at the Ramallah Coffee Shop, the hub of political gossip. Abdullah had been a delegate to peace negotiations in the 1990s and was an early deputy minister of economy. But he quit in disgust, he told me.

“Arafat was like any dictator who relied on the few around him. He wouldn’t listen. He never changed,” Abdullah said.

When he died in late 2004, Arafat was buried at the Muqata, in a space cleared in the parking lot next to his old headquarters. The grave was lined with soil imported from Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock, the resplendent tiled shrine erected in the seventh century to mark the spot where Muslims believe the prophet Mohammed began his night journey into the heavens, mounted on a winged steed and in the company of the archangel Gabriel, to receive the word of God. I visited the grave site four months after Arafat’s death. I was among the press traveling to the Muqata with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for talks with Arafat’s successor, President Mahmoud Abbas. Rice’s motorcade deliberately whizzed past Arafat’s grave. I ambled back to take a look. Arafat’s familiar black-and-white checkered kaffiyeh headdress was at the top of the grave. Self-conscious about his bald pate, Arafat had always covered it; he refused to be seen in public or to allow pictures without his headdress or military cap.

On a drizzling February day, the grave site seemed a forlorn place. It was inside a simple glass enclosure; plans were in the works to build a larger shrine and mosque around the grave. Three of the men who had protected Arafat in life stood at attention guarding his tomb. But there were no visitors. Arafat had quickly passed into history.

Arafat’s death was one in a convergence of catalysts that has begun to spur change in the Middle East. It symbolized the gradual—and ongoing—passage of the old guard of leaders who emerged between the 1960s and the 1980s and then hung on to power for decades. That early generation of leaders may have started out with popular ideology or nationalist zeal, but they all ended up corrupt, ineffective, or autocratic—and often all three. Each miscalculated the costs to their societies of monopolizing power. They became the obstacles to progress.

Each also insured that the pace of change in the Middle East would be slower and its course more complex than anywhere elsewhere in the world.

After decades of autocratic rule, the search for alternatives can divide societies. Change unleashes not only new democrats. Transitions can produce the unexpected and even the extreme, and the process is complicated by conflict.

During the final week of the campaign, I called on Khalil Shikaki, who heads the Palestine Center for Policy and Survey Research. Born in 1953, Shikaki is a sturdily built man who dresses impeccably, usually in dark suits, fashionably classic ties, and wing-tip shoes. He wears large aviator glasses and has a neatly trimmed mustache and beard. His center, which is on the third floor of a small office building in Ramallah, was bustling with young researchers at computers, preparing for the election.

The vote, Shikaki told me, was the most important turning point since the Palestinian Authority was founded twelve years earlier.

“Politics here was dominated for so long by Arafat and Fatah. Palestinians for the first time have a lot of options,” he explained, in his husky American-accented voice, as we chatted in a sunlit office. “So this election will go a long way in defining our future.”

Shikaki has spent his professional life chronicling the evolution of Palestinian politics in international foreign-affairs journals and at prominent American and European think tanks. But his own family reflected the evolving diversity too. The son of refugees, Shikaki came from a family that had farmed citrus, apricots, cucumbers, and wheat for generations in the village of Zarnouga, near Rehovot, in what is now central Israel. His parents fled in 1948. He was one of eight children brought up in a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. Education was often the only way out of rampant poverty among refugees; both he and his older brother Fathi won scholarships outside Gaza.

The Shikaki brothers, close in age and appearance, then chose opposite paths.

Khalil Shikaki earned a doctorate in political science at Columbia University in New York. He returned in 1986 to teach at a West Bank university. He later founded the first fully independent political research center in the Arab world. He became an outspoken advocate of democracy for the Palestinians and of peace with Israel, frequently speaking to Jewish groups and working with Israeli colleagues.

His older brother Fathi Shikaki took a medical degree at Egypt’s Zagazig University, a campus with a restive Islamist movement. He returned to the Gaza Strip in 1981 to practice medicine. He soon cofounded Islamic Jihad, the Palestinians’ most militant movement, and became its first leader. The goal of secret underground cells under his command was to eliminate the “Zionist entity” and reestablish old Palestine in a state based on Islamic law.

Khalil Shikaki refuses to talk about his older brother, a relationship that has complicated his own life and sparked controversy despite their estrangement.
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He responded only generically to my question about the political range—and contradictions—within a single family.

“Education was important in giving Palestinians the ability to express their own opinions,” he told me. “It’s not an issue now for family members to have quite different views and tactics. You’ll find it in dozens of cases, even in this election.”

The evolution of new leadership usually unfolds in uneven stages. For the Palestinians, it has been a particularly circuitous path because of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The goals and tactics of Palestinian politics have evolved through four stages since the so-called
Nakba,
the “disaster” or “cataclysm,” of 1948.

The early leaders who rejected a United Nations proposal to partition Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states were the traditional powers, including feudal landowners, clan patriarchs, and community figures like the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. The exodus in 1948 of some 700,000 Palestinians—more than half of the population, according to United Nations and British figures—left the Palestinians largely rudderless and in disarray. For a generation, the Palestinian issue was managed by other Arabs. Egypt created the original Palestine Liberation Organization, which was only years later wrested away by Arafat’s Fatah to become the umbrella for many Palestinian factions.

The first power shift began in the mid-1960s, as traditional leaders lost ground to a modern and secular nationalist movement no longer based on class and clan. It took two forms. Exiles in the Diaspora were the most visible. Over the next two decades, the eight factions in the Palestine Liberation Organization mobilized fighters from refugee camps in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon to wage war on Israel.

A second leadership also quietly emerged inside the territories after Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. It was tentative and fragmented. Its focus was local affairs. It deferred to the PLO to pressure Israel. But to fend for themselves, the internal Palestinians developed a vibrant array of institutions more diverse, independent, and active than in any other part of the Arab world.

“In order to work together against Israel, Palestinians had to overlook major differences among themselves,” Shikaki explained. “That created a de facto pluralism. It opened the door for a new civil society that emerged in context of the occupation—and having to respect each other’s role in fighting it.”

Among those who witnessed the shift between 1967 and the mid-1980s was Ghassan Khattib, a tall man with a neat black mustache and a modest deference. He was eleven when Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza Strip. I also visited him during the final campaign week.

“We had a different experience from other Arab countries. The occupation didn’t allow the emergence of an elite powerful enough to dominate the community or prevent elections among us or suppress whole strata of society, as happened elsewhere,” Khattib told me. “But because we didn’t have our own government, we built grassroots nongovernment organizations—charitable societies, trade unions, a women’s movement, youth and sports groups, professional organizations, a lawyers’ bar, a medical association.

“Almost all of them were structured on a democratic basis, with leadership that was elected, most of them annually,” he said. “The student-union elections at universities were very prominent. People all over the country would stay up all night to see the results of the student elections.”

I had occasionally covered those elections, which generated great interest in Israel and the wider Middle East too. They first revealed the takeover of Palestinian politics inside the territories by the nationalists. The student council votes then became the strongest indicator of political trends and effectively the only form of public-opinion polling.

Khattib was one of the early student leaders. He was elected to the Birzeit University council five times.

“So we’ve been living in a society with the beginnings of democratic ambitions for quite some time,” he told me, then added pointedly, “and this did not come from the PLO in Beirut.”

Khattib later held three cabinet posts in the Palestinian government. He was minister of planning, a pivotal post in a nascent state, when we spoke.

The second big power shift followed Israel’s 1982 lightning invasion of Lebanon. Israel routed the Palestinians in one week, then besieged west Beirut for three months, until Arafat was forced to pull out of Lebanon altogether. Only six months after his New Year’s Eve vow that 1982 would mark “the year of the victorious march” to Jerusalem, Arafat was instead dispatched even further away. I watched him sail off from Beirut’s port to distant Tunis in North Africa—not even on the same continent. Palestinian fighters were dispersed as far away as Yemen and Algeria.

It was the biggest defeat for the Palestinians since 1948. Almost three decades after Fatah’s creation and almost two decades after the PLO was founded, the exiled Palestinian leadership had achieved virtually nothing.