Abbas' campaign foreshadows further incompetence

We seem to see that incompetence at work again this week in the campaign of the leading candidate for the Palestinian presidency, Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen). He is repeating the weaknesses and mistakes that have plagued the Palestinian leadership in recent decades - an inability to define a clear policy or a credible middle ground that reconciles between apparently irreconcilable forces. If Abbas is elected, as seems likely, and he and his colleagues lead the Palestinian national movement in the same manner that he is conducting his presidential campaign, then we are in for many more years of conflict and suffering.

Abbas' campaign foreshadows further incompetence

By Rami G. Khouri
Publisher and editor-in-chief
Wednesday January 5 2005

The Palestinian presidential elections that take place on Sunday have been seen as an important potential turning point in the diplomatic stalemate and low-intensity war that define Israeli-Palestinian relations. Many Israelis, Palestinians, Americans and others hoped that the elections would generate a new Palestinian leadership with clearer and more flexible policies that would open the way for a resumption of peace negotiations with Israel. The signs this week during the presidential campaign are not encouraging.

It serves nobody's interests to let the situation drift along, hoping that the election will somehow, almost miraculously, create new opportunities for a negotiated peace. Palestinians everywhere should use this democratic process to demand better leadership so that Palestinians and Arabs do not have to endure another three generations of exile, occupation, widespread human suffering and tension in many places where Palestinian refugee issues clash with the interests of sovereign Arab states.

Israelis and Americans for their part should wake up to the obvious signs that nothing much is changing on the ground or in their governments' basic diplomatic positions, and if this situation persists so will the modern legacy of violent warfare and mutual terror.

I am only addressing here the conduct of the Palestinian leadership, because they are the weaker, occupied party; and they are the ones going through a transition that allows them to fundamentally re-assess and change their policies if they wish to do so. For the past four years since the failed Camp David summit in 2000, the Palestinian leadership has proved inept at engaging the four principal parties that define its universe: the Palestinian people and especially the refugee community around the Middle East; the Israelis; the American government; and Arab governments and societies.

We seem to see that incompetence at work again this week in the campaign of the leading candidate for the Palestinian presidency, Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen). He is repeating the weaknesses and mistakes that have plagued the Palestinian leadership in recent decades - an inability to define a clear policy or a credible middle ground that reconciles between apparently irreconcilable forces. If Abbas is elected, as seems likely, and he and his colleagues lead the Palestinian national movement in the same manner that he is conducting his presidential campaign, then we are in for many more years of conflict and suffering.

The basic problem is that Abbas is trying to appeal to his several different constituencies by advocating patently contradictory positions on critical core issues, such as the refugees' right of return to their homes and lands in Israel/Palestine, and the right of the Palestinians to resist Israeli occupation. In the past week of campaigning he has pledged to the Palestinian refugees that he will secure their "right to return" to their lands and homes in pre-1948 Palestine, now the state of Israel, and has said clearly that he will not crack down militarily on the Palestinians who resist Israeli occupation by firing rockets or attacking its soldiers, settlements and civilians. At the same time he has called for an end to the armed resistance, arguing instead that nonviolent means are more likely to achieve Palestinian goals of liberation and statehood.

Abu Mazen is staking out the same ambiguous diplomatic landscape that the late Palestinian President Yasser Arafat occupied for so many decades, speaking of negotiating peace with Israel while also promising his own people eternal resistance and a return to their homes one day. The Palestinian people deserve better than merely perpetuating failed policies based on contradictory positions, empty rhetoric and hesitant leadership. It is yet another cruel irony that in their moment of democratic rebirth and resurgence, the Palestinian people should be rewarded with the promise of leaders who cling to the failed ambiguities of the past.

This is one of the weaknesses of democratic elections, to be sure, as we also recently witnessed in the United States: Candidates will often find it politically easier and more advantageous to pander to the fears and emotions of their constituents rather than provide courageous, honest leadership that mobilizes the citizenry behind positions that demand change and sacrifice in order to achieve meaningful results.

In this case, the new Palestinian leadership will have to make tough decisions on issues that it has avoided for decades, at a very high cost to its people and to the entire region. There are no easy answers or options, and certainly none that can be unilaterally implemented by the Palestinians alone, given the dominant impact of American-backed Israeli actions in Palestine. But the Palestinians have to come up with a more coherent and effective policy response to their dilemma of occupation, exile and statelessness than Abu Mazen's contradictory pledges to his own refugee community, the Palestinian armed resistance and the Israeli government.

He and others in the Palestinian leadership must finally decide their positions on the most fundamental issues that they have avoided addressing for years: Should the Palestinians resist occupation militarily or nonviolently? Do they wish to make peace or wage war with Israel? Is the United States a diplomatic partner and ally, or foe? Are the Arab governments and people assets to be mobilized in the struggle for Palestinian statehood and national rights, or obstacles to be avoided? Will the Palestinian refugees hold out indefinitely for the recognition and implementation of their right of return to what is now Israel (which the Israelis adamantly refuse), or will they devise a realistic, honorable compromise that also challenges Israel and the U.S. to meet them halfway?

Abu Mazen's campaign suggests that he and his generation seem unable or unwilling to address these basic issues, which is bad news for the Palestinian people. At the same time, Israel and the United States also persist in their aggressive and rigid policies that ensure chronic warfare in Palestine/Israel. Changes in policies must occur all around if hopes for a negotiated peace are to materialize. But no such signs of change are visible - only increasingly romantic expressions of hope, and vague expectations not rooted in any changing reality among the three main protagonists in Palestine, Israel or the United States.

Rami G. Khouri is the executive editor of the Daily Star

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