For decades, governments around the world and Middle East "experts" alike argued that any conceivable political solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict had to involve Yasser Arafat. But the landscape changed dramatically this spring; first, with Israel's reentry into the Palestinian territories in March 2002, followed by President Bush's June 24 speech calling for a new Palestinian leadership untainted by terror and corruption. Suddenly, the world of Arab Israeli relations was turned on its head: Arafat was fingered as the problem and his removal — not his empowerment — became the path to its solution.
President Bush's call for new Palestinian leadership immediately threw Arafat and his regime into crisis, emboldening those Palestinians seeking greater freedom. In recent months, Arafat's regime has been transformed from swaggering and indispensable to besieged. At the same time, a camp of Palestinians who seek democracy has emerged. By early September, Arafat's corrupt and loathed cabinet was forced to take the humiliating act of preemptively resigning to avert being ousted. It was a moment to savor: The traditional American policy of fawningly dealing with the region's corrupt elites was in this instance discarded, and, rather than the sky crumbling, Palestinians began to answer Bush's call.
Nevertheless, efforts to reform Palestinian politics — led by the PLO and other foreign governments which still consider President's Bush challenge to have been ill-conceived — are institutionalizing, not exorcizing, the PLO's stranglehold on Palestinian politics.
ENSHRINING THE ROLE OF THE PLO
The PLO is a conglomerate of terrorist organizations. Its core, Fatah, monopolizes the claim to represent Palestinian national aspirations. Even after the Oslo agreements were signed in 1993 — in essence establishing a government, the Palestinian Authority (PA) — the PLO was not dissolved. In fact, the PA remains subordinate to the more powerful PLO.
The PLO is an unelected body governed by primary documents enshrining violence and the destruction of Israel. One man, Yasser Arafat, is both the president of the P.A. and the chairman of the PLO. The role of the PLO in Palestinian politics mirrors the distorted condition of the Soviet Union, where state institutions were subordinate to an omnipotent Communist Party. Arafat's extra-constitutional role could be compared to the role of powerful party chairmen for whom the law was a mere tool.
Neither Bush's call, nor the efforts of some Palestinian legislators to bring propriety to Palestinian governance, have tempered Arafat's and the PLO's ambitions. These days, Arafat masks his attempt to further consolidate his absolute power in the language of reform.
A member of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), Husam Khadhr, recently unmasked Arafat's pro-reform rhetoric: "All the reform decisions issued by President Arafat are opposed to the constitution." Khadhr noted that "in 1998, the Legislative Council's Political Committee met with President Arafat to discuss the internal Palestinian situation...In that meeting I asked President Arafat to sign and ratify the Basic Law so it would become binding and could be followed. The President got angry as usual and told me: 'Are you asking me to sign the Basic Law?' I replied: 'yes, Abu 'Amar' because he is the father of the laws and without him we can speak of no law or regulation. He said: 'well, then you are going to have to wait for my death, participate in my funeral, and after they lay me in my grave you could hold my thumb, dip it in ink, and sign the Basic Law."
The basic law was designed to create a interim constitutional framework governing the transitional Palestinian entity, scheduled to end on May 4, 1999. It defined the character of Palestine as a parliamentary democracy, delineated its branches of government and determined its capital, flag, citizenship requirements, and the role of religion.
After being adopted by the PLC, Arafat had 30 days to approve the law. But for five years Arafat ignored its existence, largely because it limited his powers. Eventually, under mounting pressure to reform, Arafat approved the 1997 Basic Law on May 29, 2002. It went into effect on July 7, 2002.
But even this basic law — seemingly democratic yet opposed by Arafat — enshrined undemocratic principles: it defined the PLO as "the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people" — an untenable claim in a supposedly pluralistic democracy.
This episode highlights the major obstacle blocking any serious attempt to reform Palestinian politics: the party and its leader still own the republic.
It is, therefore, not surprising that the PLO, rather than any other elected body of the Palestinian people, tasked itself to undertake reform. Not only has the wolf become the shepherd, but it sets the rules of shepherding. In 1999, the PLO's executive committee established a committee to draft a constitution. The chairman of the constitution committee was Minister of Planning and Regional Cooperation Nabil Shaath. Shaath is not elected — he was appointed by Arafat directly. He is also known for being corrupt; he was one of the nine ministers whose resignation recently was demanded by the legislature.
The constitutional committee published various drafts. Particularly noteworthy is the draft written with the assistance of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in 2001. This constitution attempted to create a Palestinian system of government reminiscent of Germany's. It defined the branches of government and their powers, as well as the rights and duties of the citizens. Although generous in terms of the rights granted citizens, this constitution also guaranteed the PLO's domination of Palestinian politics.
For instance, it established a parliament divided into upper and lower houses. The first, the Legislative Council represents the Palestinian people in the state of Palestine. It is meant to be the political heir to the current PLC, which is a part of the PA. The second, the Palestinian National Council, represents "Palestinian refugees abroad." It is the successor of the current Palestinian National Council — a part of the PLO's, not the PA's, structure. Establishing the new Palestinian parliament in such a way guarantees the domination of old PLO dictatorship.
ENSHRINING CONFLICT
These efforts also perpetuate the prevalence of violence in Palestinian politics. Breaking the PLO's domination is the key component for building a democratic, peaceful society among Palestinians. It is also essential for containing Palestinian aspirations within parameters that fall short of destroying Israel.
Like the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which from the outset claimed to represent the interest of the international proletariat, the PLO claims to represent the interest of all Palestinians, not only in the West Bank and Gaza, but everywhere.
In its preface, the basic law calls for the right of return. The right of return represents the claims of the refugees of 1948. In Palestinian lexicon, it means the return of millions of Palestinian refugees and all their descendants into Israel. These Palestinians are not interested in living in a delimited Palestinian state but in returning to homes they or their relatives either chose or were forced to leave during wars with Israel. Israeli governments have consistently opposed this Palestinian demand because it implies the end of Israel as a Jewish state. This issue and the status of Jerusalem derailed the 2000 Camp David talks, resulting in two years of terror and violence. Israel and a future Palestinian state cannot coexist as long as the PLO claims a "right of return" in its basic law.
Likewise, Nabil Shaath's Palestinian constitution envisions the right of return. It grants citizenship to all expatriate Palestinians, even if they were born and reside outside of Palestine and show no interest in ever returning. This definition of citizenship is problematic not only from Israel's perspective, but also for Jordan and other Arab states, since a very large portion of their citizens could automatically become the citizens of another state. And this exposes the persistence of yet another, this time regionally, destabilizing feature of the PLO: The PLO's aims not only to enshrine conflict with Israel in its constitution, but also to preserve the traditional role of expatriate Palestinians as tentacles of the PLO's power and revolutionary agenda in other Arab nations.
As such, reform has become the language in which the battle to shape Palestinian identity is being waged. It is a clash of two conceptions of Palestinian nationhood. One is the extreme nationalism of the PLO: violent and inherently hostile to the concepts of good governance and freedom. Indeed, the PLO's vision is but one manifestation of the broader crisis of Arab politics gripping the region, propelling its tyrannical leaders to escape the looming upheaval arising from their failures by diverting its energy outward into violent attacks against the West and Israel. The second idea, represented by local-oriented elites, is more moderately nationalist. It dreams of a democratic, liberal Palestine, rooted in Western traditions. The PLO, though its reform efforts, seeks to consolidate its role as vanguard of regional revolution. But other Palestinians understand that the region suffers an epidemic of tyranny. Rather than lifting the plague, these Palestinians see conflict with the West as a drenching rain to chill their recovery.
Many Palestinians see Arafat and the PLO for who they are: corrupt and violent plunderers. It is reported that Palestinians have nicknamed Arafat's minister of supplies as "minister of thieves." Humor aside, complaints and accusations are now frequently leveled at Arafat by Palestinian human rights organizations. A recent report of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, for example, shows how Palestinians are frustrated by Arafat's decision to ignore the Judicial Authority Law. The law, drafted with input from diverse sectors of society, established an independent and accountable Palestinian judiciary, including regular courts, appeals courts and a high court, as well as an office of attorney general. Under pressure, Arafat signed the law on May 18, 2002 — nearly four years after the Palestinian Legislative Council passed it. But even after Arafat signed the bill into law, the P.A. continued to undermine the independence of the judiciary and the rule of law. Arafat, for example, sought to unlawfully alter it, reportedly asking then-Justice Minister Freih Abu Meidan to unilaterally amend several of its articles before publishing it, in an attempt to circumvent the legislative process. Abu Meidan refused, only to be replaced by Arafat in early June.
WHAT THE U.S. CAN DO
Many Palestinians oppose Arafat, Fatah, and the other terrorist organizations. They rankle at the lack of freedom and harken back to the days of a democratic civil society, with its tradition of free municipal elections. The majority of local Palestinians hold freedom in higher regard than the PLO "outsiders" who followed Arafat from Tunis with the Oslo agreements. These activists and ordinary citizens took great solace in President Bush's June 24, 2002 speech. By living in close proximity to Israel and at times under its control, these Palestinians gained extensive knowledge of and appreciation for its democracy. Numerous intellectuals and human-rights activists have already spoken courageously against the PLO. Hence the rapid decline of Arafat's fortunes and the rise of a growing democratic opposition.
The U.S. must encourage these dynamics. It will not be easy. Arafat declared elections for January 2003, an idea endorsed by his European apologists. But these elections will not yield democratic results without a prior, fundamental constitutional reform which gives a fair chance to emerging moderate political voices. Arafat will dress himself in the garb of legitimacy accorded by elections, but the cause of freedom will be no more served than it is by elections held regularly in dark dictatorships such as Syria. Moreover, Arafat's reelection is designed both to make a mockery of democracy and humiliate the Bush administration which called for his removal.
In the battle for the Palestinian soul, the U.S. must answer Arafat's challenge to Bush and remain unequivocal and unwavering. If America is to help put an end to Arab-Israeli violence and bring responsible politics to this unfortunate region it must continue to follow its most cherished principle, freedom — and choose its allies within Palestinian society accordingly. And that effort begins with the rejection of the fundamentally anti-democratic current leadership. U.S. policymakers should cease meeting PA's ministers and PLO's delegates and instead endorse and pin their hopes for reform on Palestinian voices that are genuinely interested in creating a Palestinian democracy. Only then will American policies on the Arab-Israeli conflict compliment and reinforce rather than contradict its broad efforts to bring about a fundamental change in Arab politics as a whole — the real objective of our current war.
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