Read Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East Online
Authors: Robin Wright
Hundreds of miles from the action, the defeated PLO soon lost its leverage—with Israel, the international community and, most of all, its own people.
“The defeat of the PLO created a vacuum,” Shikaki told me. “Leaders in the territories were quick to take charge, and from 1982 until 1988, the inside leadership became stronger than the leadership outside.”
In 1987, angry young Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza for the first time took action against Israel into their own hands with a grassroots revolt. Tensions with Israel had been compounded by growing unemployment, soaring poverty, and high birth rates in small spaces. The situation was combustible. It took only the spark of a traffic accident in which an Israeli military truck crashed into a van, killing four Palestinians from a Gaza refugee camp, to set it off.
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Rioting erupted and quickly spread across Gaza and into the West Bank. Young Palestinians initially confronted Israeli troops with rocks, but later with Molotov cocktails and barricades of burning tires.
The uprising—popularly called the intifada, literally the “shaking off”—marked the rise of the Palestinian internal leadership. It altered the political dynamics too.
“The intifada,” Shikaki explained, “produced two phenomena. It introduced political Islam as a mobilizing force. It also produced a new young guard of nationalists who posed a challenge to the dominance of the PLO’s old guard in exile.”
The PLO in Tunis tried to claim credit for the intifada and manipulate its activities from afar. But the heart of the uprising was really run by local leaders. In the West Bank, Ramallah was the center for the intifada’s Unified Command, a new umbrella for young leftist, nationalist, and religious activists who banded together. Every week, its leadership passed out bulletins on Ramallah’s streets with schedules of protests or strikes. The intifada raged on year after year in sporadic angry bursts.
Overtaken and increasingly irrelevant, Arafat was forced to cede to the internal leaders—and, more importantly, their quite different agenda.
The PLO Covenant formulated in 1968 had pledged “armed struggle” until all of old Palestine was “liberated.” Articles Twenty and Twenty-one in the covenant ruled out Jewish rights to a country.
Jewish claims of historical or religious ties with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history and the true conception of what constitutes statehood. Judaism, being a religion, is not an independent nationality. Nor do Jews constitute a single nation with an identity of its own; they are citizens of the states to which they belong.
The Arab Palestinian people, expressing themselves by the armed Palestinian revolution, reject all solutions which are substitutes for the total liberation of Palestine and reject all proposals aiming at the liquidation of the Palestinian problem.
But the Palestinians inside the territories had moved in a different direction. Thousands worked in Israel. Many spoke Hebrew. And significant numbers appeared willing, albeit begrudgingly, to accept Israel’s right to exist and a two-state solution in which Israel and a Palestinian state would coexist.
“The occupation was by Israel, a democratic country, not a dictatorship. Palestinians worked in Israel, watched Israeli television, read Israeli newspapers, and what they saw was that Israel had the kind of democracy that they wanted,” Shikaki explained to me.
“This was very different from the PLO elite, who lived in countries that were dictatorships—Syria, Iraq, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, Yemen, or Syrian-controlled Lebanon—that weren’t tolerant. These were societies with guns that were used to enforce views.
“The outside leadership was made up of refugees whose solution was the return of all of Israel. The leadership inside had only one goal: to create a Palestinian state,” Shikaki said. “Every time the inside leadership gained prominence, the PLO had to moderate its positions.”
In 1988, to avoid becoming irrelevant as the intifada raged on, Arafat was forced to take the two steps he had long avoided—renouncing terrorism and recognizing Israel’s right to exist. He had little choice. It was the only way to get back in the game. His concessions opened the way for the PLO to become a player in diplomatic efforts. In exchange, Arafat won diplomatic recognition of the PLO by the United States, the primary broker of peace.
The uprising did not wind down completely until peace talks began in Madrid in 1991 and led, on a circuitous and initially secret route, to talks in Oslo and the first phase of a peace agreement. The formal pact was signed in 1993 by Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on the south lawn of the White House. The Oslo Accords established the Palestinian Authority, a tiny new pre-state, with powers limited to policing and municipal services in parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The Shikaki brothers were among the new internal leaders.
Khalil Shikaki was part of back-channel contacts between Palestinians and Israelis in London in 1992. It was a parallel process to the secret negotiations in Oslo that produced the peace accords. He also conducted the first public-opinion poll to test whether Palestinians would embrace peace after more than four decades of war. The process took nine months. The idea of getting Palestinians to say what they really thought—which had never been done before, and was complicated by the Israeli occupation—proved far harder than anticipated.
“During the initial tests, four out of ten homes refused to talk to us. We had to take dozens of tests just to find out what was preventing people from allowing us into their homes,” Shikaki said. With little basic data to work from, field teams had to draw their own maps of some areas and figure out from scratch the local demographics to ensure a representative sampling. They eventually got rejections down to two percent.
“On the day that the Oslo agreement was signed on the White House lawn, we released our first survey. We asked whether people supported or opposed the plan,” he recalled.
“Two thirds supported it,” he said, cracking a small smile. Shikaki usually speaks with a professor’s serious precision. “It was very exciting.”
Over the same period, however, his older brother was committed to undermining peace. Often described as a charismatic man, Fathi Shikaki was twice jailed by the Israelis, for a year in 1983 and for three years beginning in 1986. In 1988, he was deported to Lebanon. By 1992, he was headquartered in Syria, and Iran had become Islamic Jihad’s main source of funds, arms, and training.
“We reject a negotiation process, because it legitimizes the occupation of our land and neglects the Palestinians who are without a country or identity,” Fathi Shikaki told an interviewer in 1992, the same year his brother was negotiating with Israelis. “I do not know how the Palestinian is described as a terrorist when he screams from his pain and suffering and is defending his land against Jewish Russian soldiers, who never—neither he nor his forefathers—set foot in any inch of Palestine.”
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Islam, he added, “is the ideology that must be adhered to in achieving liberation and independence as well as development and progress. This is what the PLO lacked from the very beginning.”
After the 1993 Oslo Accords were signed, the older Shikaki helped launch the National Alliance, a coalition of ten hard-line Palestinian groups that rejected the peace plan. It, too, was headquartered in Syria.
On October 26, 1995, Shikaki was in Malta, reportedly in transit between Libya and Syria. All Islamic Jihad activities are clandestine. All its members operate in covert cells. Shikaki’s movements were all secret. According to accounts from the time, Shikaki walked out of his hotel and was approached by two men on a motorcycle. One pulled out a gun with a silencer and shot Shikaki five times. The Maltese government described the assassination as a professional hit. The motorcycle was later found abandoned. It had false license plates. The gunmen were never identified or caught.
The assassination was widely attributed to, but never acknowledged by, Israeli intelligence. Fathi Shikaki’s funeral in Damascus was reportedly attended by some 40,000 people.
The third shift in power followed the breakdown of peace efforts in 2000.
The 1993 Oslo Accords called for a final peace agreement within five years. Its Declaration of Principles tackled the thorny issues of statehood and borders, Jerusalem, refugees, and Jewish settlements. But the Oslo goal proved elusive. And a last-ditch effort by the United States to negotiate in 2000 broke down when Arafat balked at terms offered by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.
With the death of the Oslo process, tensions again reached breaking point. Another intifada erupted within weeks.
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The second uprising was far more sophisticated, down to the onions and perfume handed out by teenage girls as antidotes to Israeli tear gas. It was also deadlier.
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Rock-throwing escalated into low-intensity warfare after two Israeli soldiers were captured and taken to Ramallah’s police station. A mob stormed the facility, beat the two Israelis to death, then mutilated their bodies. Israeli helicopter gunships retaliated by demolishing the police station. It was the first Israeli air strike on the Palestinian territories in thirty-three years, since the 1967 war.
The second intifada featured the bloodiest cycle of violence ever between Israelis and Palestinians. Suicide bombings soared against Israeli civilian targets, including hotels, discos, a bustling café, a pizzeria, a pub, a shopping mall, and several bus stations.
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Israel struck back hard against both Palestinian street fighters and government sites. In 2002, Israeli troops reoccupied big chunks of the Palestinian territories and began construction of a controversial wall to cordon off the West Bank. Arafat came under siege in the Muqata.
The Palestinian Authority, unable to deliver either stability or basic governance, started to disintegrate. Its legislature had to meet by videoconference because Gazan lawmakers were unable to travel to headquarters in Ramallah. The United States orchestrated a new “road map” for peace, which stalled when Arafat did not end the violence against Israel. Temporary cease-fires were organized but frequently violated. Much of daily life came to a standstill. Unemployment, lawlessness, and despair became rampant.
Fatah also increasingly fragmented. Arafat, ailing and stubborn, refused to leave the Muqata for fear he would not be allowed back. Bitter and sometimes bloody power struggles erupted within Fatah. Its young guard—which included both moderates and militants, both rising politicians and armed thugs—increasingly went out on their own. Younger Fatah politicians like Marwan Barghouti, almost by default, took the political initiative away from Arafat and his cronies. And young thugs in the security forces effectively became militias that initiated their own attacks against Israel and ruled the Palestinian streets by intimidation, racketeering, and gangsterism.
As order broke down, Hamas increasingly filled the political space. During this third shift in power, the Islamic party moved from the margins to the mainstream.
Hamas differed significantly from Islamic Jihad, the first militant movement. Islamic Jihad had remained tiny, totally underground, engaged only in violence, with leaders either forced into exile or eliminated in Israel’s “targeted assassinations.” Hamas was not clandestine. It was also dual-purpose. Created in 1987 during the first intifada, its well-armed al Qassam Brigade became notorious for some of the most brazen suicide and rocket attacks against Israel.
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But Hamas also used the 1990s to establish a huge network of social services, schools, clinics, welfare organizations, and women’s groups—a parallel civil society. Up to ninety percent of its resources and staff were devoted to public-service enterprises.
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When the Palestinian Authority failed to deliver, Hamas institutions increasingly did.
“Hamas emerged as a credible political and security alternative to Fatah and a challenge to its long-standing dominance,” Shikaki explained.
“The shift did not mean a greater religiosity in society. Hamas responded to the perception of a heightened threat more than anyone else. Palestinians were subject to collective punishment, so there was a great deal of public anger. Suicide attacks became very popular. The Palestinian public wanted it in the same way Ariel Sharon’s brutality against the Palestinians was popular among Israelis.”
Support for Hamas more than doubled between the outbreak of the intifada in 2000 and 2004, Shikaki’s surveys found. Support for Fatah had meanwhile tumbled, with Arafat’s personal standing cut in half, from a high of sixty-five percent support in 1996, when he won the presidency in the first Palestinian election, to thirty-five percent in 2004.
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And then Arafat suddenly died, opening the way for long-deferred elections—and even more dramatic change.
Voters, when offered real choices for the first time, often go to the polls to get revenge for the past. Early victors are not always long-term winners. They are simply the ones not rejected.
The day before the election, I drove to Hebron. Twenty miles south of Jerusalem, it is now the West Bank’s largest city. While Ramallah is the most liberal town, dusty Hebron is the most conservative. It is rich with religious history, centered around the Tomb of the Patriarchs, where Abraham is buried, along with Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah, the patriarchs and matriarchs of Judaism. The tomb is a venerated place for Jewish pilgrimages; 500 Jewish settlers reestablished a presence in Hebron, under the protection of 2,000 Israeli troops, to be near it. But Muslims also revere Abraham. Religious tradition holds that he fathered the Arabs through his son Ismail and the Israelites through his son Isaac. He is mentioned more than two dozen times in the Koran. In Arabic, Hebron is called al-Khalil, short for
Ibrahim al-Khalil al-Rahman,
or “City of Abraham, the Friend of God.” Muslims also pray at the tomb.