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November
17, 2006
Fateh's Unholy Alliance
Pinochet
in Palestine
By JOSEPH MASSAD
Before the United States government
subcontracted the Chilean military to overthrow the democratically
elected government of Salvador Allende in 1973, it carried out
a number of important missions in the country in preparation
for the coup of 11 September. These included major strikes, especially
by truck owners, which crippled the economy, massive demonstrations
that included middle-class housewives and children carrying pots
and pans demanding food, purging the Chilean military of officers
who would oppose the suspension of democracy and the introduction
of US-supported fascist rule, and a major media campaign against
the regime with the CIA planting stories in newspapers like El
Mercurio and others. This was in a context where also the
Communist Party and the Leftist Revolutionary Movement (MIR)
criticised and sometimes attacked the Allende regime from varying
leftist positions.
The Chilean example is important
to keep in mind when one looks at the Palestinian situation today,
as it functions as a sort of training video for US-planned anti-democratic
coups elsewhere in the world. Not only are the US and Israel
financially backing the open preparation for a coup to be staged
by the top leadership of Fateh (and in the case of Israel allowing
weapons' transfers to Palestinian Authority [PA] President Mahmoud
Abbas's Praetorian Guard), but so are the intelligence services
of a number of Israel-and US-friendly Arab countries whose intelligence
services have set up shop openly in Ramallah more recently, making
their longstanding and major, though understated, involvement
in running the Palestinian territories more open and shameless.
Indeed the intelligence "delegation" of one such Arab
country has rented out a multi-story building in Ramallah to
conduct their operations there.
Israel has helped this effort
all along by kidnapping and arresting Fateh members who resist
the collaborationist policies of the top leadership. As for the
leadership itself, it has periodically purged members of Fateh
who oppose its policies, and marginalised those in the Diaspora
who continue to resist them. The Fateh/PA coup leaders consist
of Abbas and the ruling triumvirate of Mohamed Dahlan, Yasser
Abd Rabbo, and Nabil Amr. The profiles of these three make them
well suited for the tasks ahead. Dahlan is universally known
as America's and Israel's main corrupt military man on the ground.
Abd Rabbo (aka Yasser Abd Yasser, literally "Yasser worshipper
of Yasser" on account of his subservience to Arafat) is
the architect of the Geneva accords, which recognise Israel's
right to be a racist Jewish state as legitimate and reject the
right of Palestinian refugees to return as illegitimate. He recently
upheld the Israeli position when fighting with the Qatari foreign
minister and his staff during the latter's visit to the occupied
territories. Amr is the former PA information minister, and a
former visiting fellow at the Israel lobby think tank the Washington
Institute for Near East Policy. He is also the speechwriter for
Abbas and Dahlan.
Abbas and these three have
undertaken not only to launch massive strikes by the Fateh security
thugs that they have armed to police the territories on behalf
of Israel, and strikes by the bureaucracy that staffs the PA
ministries, but also have coerced large numbers of Palestinians,
including teachers and professors, under the force of guns, to
uphold a strike against Hamas, when most of them had voted for
Hamas in the first place and refuse to strike. Palestinians who
have fought for decades to keep their schools and universities
open against Israeli draconian closures and suspension of Palestinian
education, are now forced by Fateh and its armed thugs to stop
the Palestinian educational process with strikes against Hamas,
and threaten to shoot people if they refuse to follow Fateh's
coup directives.
In addition, Abbas and the
Fateh/PA triumvirate have organised demonstrations in Ramallah
by middle-class Palestinians, including housewives, who brought
out their pots and pans, in a scene borrowed from 1973 Santiago,
in demonstrations against Hamas. The Fateh-controlled press,
especially Al-Ayyam is fomenting major anti-Hamas propaganda
campaign in preparation for the coup and is thus playing the
same role as El Mercurio did in Chile. Al-Ayyam
is aided in its efforts by the anti-Hamas secular Palestinian
intelligentsia, most of whose members are on the payroll of the
bankrollers of the Oslo process and its NGOs. These old leftist
Palestinians, like their counterparts in Lebanon, are better
known today as the right-wing left, as they take up right-wing
positions while insisting that they are still leftists based
on positions they had held in the 1980s or earlier.
The plan is that the Fateh/PA
rulers would do their utmost to provoke Hamas to start the war
at which point Fateh, with the aid of the intelligence services
of friendly Arab countries, as well as assistance from Israel
and the US, would crush Hamas and take over. Indeed, the first
unsuccessful round took place when the Israeli government kidnapped
a third of the Hamas government, both cabinet ministers and parliament
members, and placed them in Israeli jails. This was not sufficient
to bring Hamas down, and not for lack of help that Fateh rendered
the Israeli occupiers. Aside from the initial burning of the
Legislative Council building, Fateh thugs have also burned the
prime minister's office, shot at his car, burned offices in different
ministries several times, harassed and threatened Hamas ministers
and parliamentarians whom Israel failed to kidnap and arrest,
refused to allow the government ministries to operate, and so
forth. Hamas however, is wisely adamant that it will respond
by force only when Fateh launches an all-out war to bring about
its planned coup, but not before.
Fateh's planned coup is not
only based on the popularity of Hamas and its electoral victory
but also on Hamas's increased ability to defend itself against
Fateh forces. If the US and Israel armed Fateh thugs under Arafat's
leadership to crush the first Palestinian Intifada and any remaining
resistance to the occupation since 1994, today, Hamas is almost
as well- armed as Fateh forces and can defend the rights of the
Palestinians to resist the Israeli occupation and the well-armed
Palestinian collaborators that help to enforce it. This is where
the situation today differs measurably from that of the mid-1990s.
To offset this new balance of forces, the United States government,
according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, has been training
Abbas's Praetorian Guard in Jericho for over a month with American,
British, Egyptian, and Jordanian military instructors, and is
providing arms to them in preparation for the confrontation with
Hamas. The Israeli cabinet in turn has recently approved the
transfer of thousands of rifles from Egypt and Jordan to Abbas's
forces. The Israelis also approved a US request that Israel allow
the Badr Brigade -- part of the Palestine Liberation Army currently
stationed in Jordan -- to deploy in Gaza. These steps have been
conceived by General Keith Dayton, the American security coordinator
in the occupied territories, who wants the Badr Brigade to function
as Abbas's "rapid reaction force in Gaza". As a possible
step to increase its security and military roles in the occupied
territories, the Jordanian government recently established a
legal committee to review the provisions of Jordan's decision
to "disengage" from the West Bank announced on 31 July
1988, effectively suggesting the possibility of a reversal of
part or all of these provisions. More recently, the Israelis
intensified their bombings and killings in Gaza, most recently
in Beit Hanoun murdering over 50 Palestinians in a few days.
Mahmoud Abbas and his ruling
triumvirate are reticent at the moment to start an open war for
fear of a public backlash. They prefer to remove Hamas through
imposing a "national unity" government that would undercut
Hamas gradually and peacefully. However, Abbas and his triumvirate
are quickly losing patience. Indeed, in a hastily-arranged meeting
of the Diaspora-based Fateh Central Committee set to convene
in Amman three weeks ago to ratify the coup plans, members of
the committee opposed Abbas's US and Israel-supported coup, which
forced Abbas to cancel the meeting altogether claiming falsely
lack of quorum as the reason. This speaks to Abbas's desperation
in engineering the coup without adequate preparation. Indeed,
rumour has it across the occupied territories that the desperate
attacks committed recently against Palestinian Christian churches
were the work of undercover thugs. Those who sent them want Palestinian
Christians and the world at large to think that these were Hamas
acts in response to the pope's racist pronouncements against
Islam. Hamas duly condemned the attacks. Few in the occupied
territories believe that Hamas was behind them and most know
that they were the work of undercover agents.
The Fateh plan is simple: where
Israel and its Lebanese allies failed to crush Hizbullah in the
Sixth war, Fateh and its Israeli allies will succeed in crushing
Hamas, even if the ongoing Israeli war against Hamas and the
Palestinian people becomes an all-out Seventh war. The flurry
of visits by Condoleezza Rice to the area in the last few weeks
hoped to put the final touches on this plan. If Hamas, like Hizbullah,
could be provoked into a military response, the coup planners
believe, then Fateh's and Israel's wrath (backed by the US, Jordan,
Egypt, and Saudi Arabia) would be unleashed to finish Hamas off.
The Fateh leadership and its thugs are sharpening their knives
for the showdown. Hamas has remained calm despite the pressure.
In the meantime, Ramallah proper
(excluding the surrounding villages), continues to be what many
now refer to as the Palestinian Green Zone, sheltering, in addition
to the intelligence staff of Israel and Israel-friendly Arab
countries, those Palestinians who are paid and protected by the
Oslo process, whether the Oslo bureaucracy, its technicians,
and hired intellectuals, or the business and middle classes recently
habituated to the new name-brand consumerism that the Green Zone
can offer. This opulent life contrasts with the life of the rest
of the Palestinians outside Ramallah who live in misery, hunger,
and under the bombardment of the Israelis and the attacks of
savage Jewish colonial settlers, not to mention the harassment
by Fateh thugs. In Ramallah itself, the trigger-happy thugs shoot
at random during their demonstrations, injuring and sometimes
killing passers by "in error". Even the few secular
intellectuals who deign to oppose Fateh inside Ramallah are harassed
in different ways. Some of them experience mysterious robberies
that are repeated every time they make anti-Fateh statements.
The preservation of Ramallah as the Green Zone is paramount to
Abbas and the Fateh/PA triumvirate, whose fear of any reform
introduced by Hamas would strip the elite of the benefits of
corruption and the dolce vita that Fateh-rule has ensured
for them.
Meanwhile, Abbas and his triumvirate
will continue to treat Hamas the way Israel has treated the PLO
and other Arab countries all along. In the interminable negotiations
that Hamas held with Fateh to avert a showdown, whenever Hamas
would agree to a Fateh demand, Fateh would up the ante and insist
on another concession or claim that its initial demands always
included the now expanded terms, even though they did not. Moreover,
Fateh would also publicly interpret Hamas's concessions as having
included things that Hamas had not agreed to at all. If this
is reminiscent of the post-Oslo negotiating strategy that the
Israelis used successfully with Arafat, this is because it is
the same strategy. Abbas has gone so far as to walk away from
negotiations, and refuse to speak to Hamas leaders, just as the
Israelis have done often with the PA. Moreover, if the Israelis
would often carry undercover attacks against Western interests
to implicate Arab governments, the clearest example being the
infamous Lavon Affair of the mid-1950s targeting Egypt, similar
operations are being committed to implicate Hamas by undercover
agents, like the recent example of the attacks on the churches
illustrates. There may be many more such operations being planned.
Whatever fig leaf still covered
the Fateh leadership's complete collaboration and subservience
to Israeli interests has now fallen off. As a result, there is
very little left that can restrain Fateh's actions. The next
few weeks will be decided by how much Fateh leaders are itching
for a fight to save their skins and fortunes, and how much patience
Hamas can muster in the face of so much thuggery. In the meantime,
what has been unfolding in the Palestinian territories is nothing
short of the Chilean script.
Pinochet is in Palestine. His
success however remains far from certain.
Joseph Massad is associate professor of modern Arab
politics and intellectual history at Columbia University. His
recent book The
Persistence of the Palestinian Question was published by
Routledge.
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