If you had the opportunity to wander the streets of the West Bank in 2003, that is, three years after the start of the second intifada, you would certainly not miss the walls that were written on them;
“No to Karzai, Palestine,” a slogan drawn up by the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the military wing of the Fatah movement.
Hamid Karzai was coming on the back of an American tank to assume the presidency of Afghanistan in 2001, while “Karzai of Palestine” - in the words of the cadres of Al-Aqsa martyrs - was none other than the one who came following the assassination of Yasser Arafat in 2004. He is Mahmoud Abbas Abu Mazen, the sheikh who holds Today, he holds the reins of three authorities at once: the presidency of the Palestinian Authority, the leadership of the PLO, and the leadership of the Fatah movement.
Over the past two decades, Abu Mazen has worked to empty the three authorities of any political effectiveness, and he is now impatiently awaiting the defeat of the resistance in Gaza in order to present himself again as an alternative to the armed resistance, as he did after the end of the second intifada.
There is nothing new in this, as the international system led by the United States did not bother to introduce new wine or even new vessels for that wine. What is being proposed today is the same as what was proposed yesterday: accepting the idea of a “two-state path,” and not “two states” as is rumored, and the difference between them. Great, the process is a process whose goal is not to achieve its goals but to postpone them, and its importance lies in giving it an imaginary sense of “solution,” and it also gives political actors a political language that the international ear can hear.
Nearly thirty years have passed since the birth of the Palestinian Authority, but the idea of a state haunted faction leaders in the past, until it became an obsession that affects goals and changes them along the way.
The idea of the state has always blocked the idea of liberation, and instead of the state being a natural result of liberation, it has become a fundamental obstacle to it, as if the intense fear of losing something was the main reason for its loss.
Instead of reviewing the path in its entirety, it was constantly presented as the only way for the Palestinian political field to function, while everything outside of it seemed to be nothing more than revolutionary romanticism that had not yet realized what “political realism” meant.
As for the Palestinian Authority, it assumed the definition of “realism” after making it synonymous with accepting the path of concessions.
The state project was presented as an obstacle to the expansion of the first intifada, and it was presented again as an obstacle to the expansion of the second intifada, and here it is presented again today in the wake of the Al-Aqsa flood, so what about the believer being stung several times from the same hole!
The history of desire in the "state path"
The founding of the Fatah movement in 1957 was a landmark political event. After the Nakba of 1948, the Palestinians realized that their fate was being left to them little by little.
The setback of 1967 was the final explosion of this truth that had become impossible for national self-consciousness, and it was the moment that Fatah captured, thus separating from the path of the Arab parties, and benefiting from the method of work of the “Muslim Brotherhood” in establishing broad movements.
At a time when this attempt came as an expression of the failure of the Arab regimes to test the Palestinian issue, these regimes were imitated inch by inch and arm by arm.
The "Battle of Karama" in 1968 was a military event that transformed Fatah from being a viewpoint into a "mother of the masses."
Although the event itself was not a significant victory, it was a symbolic intensification of the possibility of fighting "Israel" and breaking its prestige.
It is good for us to pay attention to this as we watch the event of the Flood, for which a political language has not yet been born. The results of the Flood look with anticipation to the political mind, which will unleash its imagination in response to the unbridled will and its expression.
The Palestinian identity was formulated primarily by the Fatah movement, carrying a kind of schizophrenic coexistence between two sayings: “liberation through armed struggle,” and the other seeks “the path of the state” as a basis for political action and its goal.
The idea of liberation lived alongside the idea of the state, without being mutually exclusive.
Essentially, this was precisely Fatah's invention, which will remain with the national movement to this day.
But the obsession with the state gradually crept into the place of the goal of liberation, after it had tightened its noose around it, and this history of obsession was documented by Yazid Sayigh in his book “Armed Struggle and the Search for the State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949-1993.”
The juxtaposition between the ideas of the state and liberation made the descent into the abyss smooth. From the first Palestinian National Charter in 1964 (which later became the National Charter), until the presence of US President Bill Clinton in amending the Charter in 1998, there were 34 years that were sufficient to divert the course. From “restoring all of Palestine” to “a democratic Palestinian state in which Arabs and Jews coexist,” to a mere authority that adopted the slogan of “an independent Palestinian state” that can communicate with what it called “progressive Jewish forces,” to accepting “a Palestinian state within the borders of June 4.” “Recognition of the State of Israel” and “solution of the conflict by peaceful means.”
Jumping to days before the Al-Aqsa flood, the prisoner Ibrahim Hamid wrote an important article published in the “Journal of Palestinian Studies,” titled: “On Restoring the Respect for the Liberation of Palestine,” in which it stated: “In this absurd process in which the highest goals were changed and replaced, Three alternative national goals were proposed to replace the comprehensive goal of liberating Palestine, and they are as they were announced in 1974 (the year the Palestinian political leader changed direction): the right of return; the right to establish a state; and the right to self-determination. This “rights discourse” became subject to the logic of rights that It is permitted by the unjust laws of the United Nations against Palestine and its cause.”
Hamed adds: “The irony here is that when the “liberation of Palestine” is actually achieved as a goal, these “three rights” and others will become a final achievement! However, their introduction since 1974 came to replace the goal of liberation that was excluded. Then any right of These rights are of the type that can be negotiated, as experience later demonstrated. Indeed, this top-down logic made even these three goals forgotten.
The Symbol State and the Symbol Leader: Post-Oslo Chronicles
Abu Ammar was very fond of symbolism, and whenever he lost a realistic fact, he replaced it with a symbol.
On August 30, 1982, Abu Ammar left Beirut, the last geographical frontier of the struggle against “Israel.”
Three months after the invasion of Beirut, which ended with an agreement requiring the departure of Palestinian fighters;
The step that will make the liberation project lose the last of its actual tools, and consequently think about accepting what is offered to it.
On board the Greek ship "Atlanti", which was heading towards the port of Piraeus, Abu Ammar did not think long about the answer to those who asked him: Where are you going?
He replied: To Jerusalem.
However, even after more than twenty years, Abu Ammar was not buried in Jerusalem as he wanted. Rather, he was buried in the Muqata’a in Ramallah, and a “laser” was placed over his grave to illuminate the direction of Jerusalem, as the last symbolism he would take.
With their departure from Beirut, the PLO factions lost the last border with the enemy, and became isolated far away in Tunisia, and from there they announced the establishment of the Palestinian state “symbolically.”
The event of the first intifada constituted the last lifeline that, instead of being allowed to roll over and turn into a new horizon for the Palestinian struggle, was made use of for the “state” project.
Thus, it lost its momentum and was put on the path to negotiating Oslo, in preparation for the return of the factions to the country, and the entire experience turned from a liberation experience to an experience of the “state establishment path.”
“I am not Haj Amin al-Husseini... I have to accomplish something,” Abu Ammar said.
It was not yet clear what that “thing” that Abu Ammar was obsessed with was, but the organization’s poet Mahmoud Darwish captured some of its meanings by saying: “How big is the idea, how small is the state.” The “thing” was later revealed in 1993 with the Oslo Accords.
Oslo was a blockade on the horizon of the first intifada that began in 1987, and a rush to put it in the category of “the least possible” as “the best possible.”
Oslo did not stipulate that the Palestinian Authority would transform into a state. Rather, the agreement adhered to the term “self-rule,” with open negotiation on the “final status.” However, the Authority’s leadership considered itself temporary, and that it would transform into a state at the end of the transitional period.
Ironically, the issues that were postponed were the core of the Palestinian issue, such as the refugee issue and Jerusalem, and other issues such as prisoners, borders, and water followed.
Later in 1994, Oslo was annexed to the Paris Agreement;
The economic aspect that will completely link the Palestinian territories to “Israel”, especially in export, import, and tax and customs collection, which has become known as “clearance money,” which constitutes 60-65% of the Palestinian Authority’s budget, with which the Authority pays the salaries of its workers in the sector. Government year.
This money will be constantly used as a pressure tool on the Palestinian Authority, as Israel detains it periodically and for long periods in exchange for political concessions.
The Oslo Accords, which were signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization under American auspices and with Arab support, defined the structure of the nascent Palestinian Authority.
With the Taba Agreement in 1995, the Palestinian areas were divided security-wise and civilly into (A, B, and C);
This division completely prevented communication between the cities of this “prospective state,” and strengthened the position of “Israel” by tightening its noose on any place it wanted.
In addition, the agreement specified the features of security cooperation between the Authority and the occupation. The text of the agreement stated: “The Palestinian Authority is responsible for preventing terrorism and terrorists and taking appropriate measures against them.”
The agreement also stipulated that the authority’s security services should not prosecute those who communicated with the occupation, and that their personal interests should not be harmed, such as expulsion from a job and the like. This is a role that paved the way for the expansion of the authority after the “Gaza - Jericho First” agreement in 1994.
In these circumstances, what is known as “security coordination” was born.
The name is somewhat misleading, as it suggests that there is an exchange of information between two parties, while the reality is that one party, the “Palestinian security services,” provides the other party, the “Israeli army,” with all the security information it needs, but there is no opposite.
For example, the army does not provide the authority with information about settler attacks!
Thus, a large segment of the returning fighters became security personnel distributed among 13 security services, which is Abu Ammar’s way of fragmenting power and ensuring that all parties return to him as the final figure in resolving conflicts.
The Palestinian Authority has created a society around it that depends on it, by building an army of employees, with more than 140,000 employees working in the public sector, whose salaries exceed 200 million dollars per month.
It was responsible for providing education and health services, establishing infrastructure, and managing municipalities, in addition to social affairs activities that finance more than 200,000 marginalized and poor groups, and tens of thousands of families of martyrs, prisoners, the wounded, and freed prisoners who spent more than five years in occupation prisons, through salaries. A monthly allotment is paid to them regularly.
Thus, the authority has a social base, a large part of which is dissatisfied with it, but at the same time is fatefully linked to it.
In the absence of the state itself, the authority itself has transformed into an administrative body that reduces the burdens of the occupation on the occupier, connects the Palestinians to their occupier through the basic aspects of life, such as travel, work, and transportation, and alleviates his security burdens through security coordination.
The authority obeyed Israel in everything it saw as an obstacle to the “path of the state,” until the series of concessions reached the issues that are within the jurisdiction of the state to be established.
It removed the file of the Palestinian interior, which had since become an isolated political field incapable of working outside the borders of the Knesset. It also removed the file of the refugees who submitted themselves to their fate with the host countries awaiting the final liquidation of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), and other files that were It is being postponed, and later killed and forgotten, in the interests of preserving the state's path.
1990s: opponents of the path
Upon its establishment, the Palestinian Authority promised the people of the country the project of establishing a Palestinian state, and for this goal, the Authority justified its suppression of the resistance when it first arrived.
The 1990s witnessed widespread abuse against resistance factions, especially the Hamas and Islamic Jihad movements.
For example, the authorities committed the “Black Friday massacre” against a peaceful march in support of the resistance that came out of the “Palestine Mosque” in Gaza, as a result of which 13 worshipers were martyred and 200 others were injured.
Starting from the mid-nineties until the end (with the launch of the “Holy Revenge” operations led by the prisoner Hassan Salama, leading to the martyrdom of Imad and Adel Awadallah in 1998), the authority directed one blow after another to the resistance factions, and presented the resistance fighters as an offering to “Israel” on the threshold of the holy state. The woman is waiting, unaware that trimming the resistance’s nails takes her away from her goals and does not bring her closer.
During this period of time, Major General Ghazi al-Jabali, former Palestinian police chief, stood up and bragged: “We will control the mosques, the zakat committees, and the Islamic University, and we will uproot Hamas and Islamic Jihad from their roots.”
This is the same period in which the Commander-in-Chief of the Al-Qassam Brigades, Muhammad Al-Deif and his companions, emerged as a minority trying to confront the path of endless concessions. They realized with their common sense that realism, all realism, was in defeating the occupation, and that the state was a mirage.
The Islamic Resistance, represented by Hamas and Jihad, opposed the Oslo path in word and deed, and did not participate in the 1996 elections. The resistance operations were moving in isolation from the path that Oslo had planned for itself, as we had two separate paths: “political operations” and “resistance operations,” without any connection between Between them.
The gap between Hamas and Fatah has widened, as well as between the military and political fields.
The 1990s passed, during which the occupier established more of its facts on the ground: settlement expansion, major issues were postponed, and the principles agreement that was supposed to end after five years turned into established facts.
Thus, as the years passed, the dream of a state became more distant, and the programs of the two trends: those who believed in the path of the state and those who believed in the path of liberation, also became more distant.
The Second Intifada: The moment of discovery of closure
At the beginning of the new millennium, Yasser Arafat (Abu Ammar) and Ehud Barak were smiling in front of a closed track at Camp David.
The entire history of the journey passed through the former’s mind, carrying within him a great disappointment, realizing that the path of self-rule was nothing but a trap, and that the path of the state was nothing but the path of signing defeat, but it was a defeat in stages and installments, so that his fighting pride could swallow it.
Abu Ammar then stood at the last crossroads offered to him, and was tempted by his military uniform, which he had not yet taken off. He thought he could use force to improve the conditions for negotiation, but the force whose limits he knew was no longer terrifying, and things were no longer as they were. The boycott’s borders in Ramallah were It is narrower than the two lanes of Beirut, and the days of the Battle of Karameh are separated from it by the transformation of fighters into employees, the departure of comrades-in-arms, and the lurking of those ready to fill the void and offer the concessions that he was unable to make.
Despite all of this, Abu Ammar tried his last attempt, when he secretly provided support to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, and condemned their operations in public, all the way to the “Karen A” ship incident, which was a transgression of the rules of the game and a transfer of armament to a different level, so he imposed the siege on him alone so that he could see with his own eyes the shrinkage. The idea from the state to the county building.
The late President Yasser Arafat (left of the photo) and President Mahmoud Abbas (European News Agency)
The Americans and Israelis wanted to limit Yasser Arafat and divide his powers between two men: the first;
Mahmoud Abbas, for whom the position of Prime Minister was created, and the second;
Muhammad Dahlan, who took over the Ministry of Interior.
The two men did not succeed in carrying out their mission. It was not easy to limit Al-Khitiyar, who introduced the Governors’ Law, with security and civil powers in the governorates, with a higher authority reporting directly to him, which made the security institution capable of exercising roles outside the framework of the government.
Abbas even resigned from his position after 100 days of work in his government, due to his inability to implement what he came for.
After that, Sharon sat next to his Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz. Did they intentionally leave the microphone on or did they forget it in front of the screens?
It does not matter, the important thing is that they agreed in a clear voice: “We will kill Abu Ammar.”
The polonium poison waited for him somewhere and crept into his body, so we could see him for the first time taking off his military uniform and wearing sick clothes until the hour of his death.
After the second intifada
The US administration called on the Palestinian people to elect “new leaders not disgraced by terrorism,” and the road map (2003) formed a basis for the future, promising a settlement by 2005. The 2006 elections constituted a vote on the return of the “state path” again as the only “rational” option for practicing politics. The new, old question came back at that time: “Is it possible to combine the government and the resistance? In an ancient legacy of living among contradictions.”
The resistance factions gave Abu Mazen the calm he wanted, so he embarked on his project to liquidate them.
The resistance confronted it in Gaza in 2007 due to the Israelis’ withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, which later allowed it to develop its resistance project, while it did not succeed in repeating the decision in the West Bank due to the presence of the Israelis there. This, in short, is a story that constitutes the two different paths for Gaza and the West Bank.
With Abu Mazen coming to power in 2005, the second intifada was breathing its last.
He raised the slogan of “eliminating the militarization of the uprising,” and pledged to do so in his new credentials before the Legislative Council.
The founding generations of the uprising had passed away, between martyr and prisoner following the invasion of the “Defensive Wall,” and for those remaining persecuted, Abu Mazen opened a door for them and made them soldiers in his security services. As for those who refused to replace the security function with struggle, they were assassinated or arrested, just as happened and is happening today. With armed groups in the West Bank, such as “Lions’ Den,” “Jenin Brigade,” and “Tulkarm Brigade.”
American General Keith Dayton was brought in to rebuild the security services again, as the way in which they broke out in the second intifada did not please the sponsors of the “state” path.
“What we did was build new men”;
Dayton declared this proudly during a speech at the Washington Institute for Middle East Policy in 2009, and with it the term “new Palestinian” was born.
Dayton quoted the words of a senior Palestinian officer, at the graduation ceremony of the security class that trained under his supervision: “You are not here to learn how to fight Israel”!
The new Palestinian officer said, and Dayton said proudly: “Officers in the Israeli army asked me: How many of these new men can you make?”
In the annual budget of the Palestinian Authority for 2016, which amounted to $4.25 billion, the security sector alone received 28% of the budget, with 64,000 military employees receiving 3.9 billion shekels from the total salary bill, which is equivalent to the health, agriculture, and education budgets combined.
After the second intifada, security formed the core of the authority’s mission, while the remaining tasks were later reduced.
Abbas enlisted the help of Salam Fayyad to complete “economic reform” similar to “security reform.”
Which meant “cleaning” the financial system of any means in which money could benefit the resistance.
They controlled the methods of transferring money, collecting donations, charitable institutions, and zakat committees, and empowered the banks to prey on people, so the percentage of loans granted during the period between 2007 and 2017 increased by more than 460%.
The illusory feeling of well-being was accompanied by an illusory feeling of closeness to the state.
The post-second intifada period has been portrayed as a state-building phase, and Salam Fayyad even promised that it would happen within two years.
Salam Fayyad is one of the names whose name was mentioned again to take over the administration of the Gaza Strip in the imagined “post-Hamas” stage after the Al-Aqsa flood, even though he did not succeed at the time despite all the enormous propaganda that accompanied him. Many titles were given to him, including: “Marshall.” The Palestinian,” as one Western newspaper described him at the time, and British journalist Roger Cohen said about him: the most important phenomenon in the Middle East, while Israeli President Shimon Peres, known for his exaggeration, described him as “the Palestinian Ben-Gurion.”
Fayyad did not win more than 1.20% of the total votes in the 2006 Legislative Council elections, but this percentage does not mean anything as long as the man is “the most capable of speaking our language,” as described by Danny Ayalon, the former ambassador of “Israel” to the United States.
At the end of the “security and economic reform” phase supervised by Mahmoud Abbas, an opinion poll was conducted in the West Bank settlements about why settlers prefer to live in the settlements. The result was 70% of the settlement residents choose it for welfare purposes, and this is exactly what the essence of the existence of authority today means;
To provide prosperity for the surrounding settler state, which is the opposite of what they were claiming.
What remains for us: the reality of the West Bank, away from the symbols
The reality of the West Bank today clearly speaks of the impossibility of establishing an independent state, as everything has been linked geographically and in life to “Israel”.
Geography
Israel controls 60% of the West Bank militarily, an area known as Area C.
Areas A and B constitute about 40% of the area of the West Bank, and it is officially assumed that they are under the rule of the Palestinian Authority in a partial and varying manner.
We are talking about 165 geographical areas that are crowded, suffocated, and prevented from expansion and communication.
As for the settlers’ streets, they are 49 kilometers long, including 43 tunnels and underground passages. They constantly eat up the area of the West Bank, and are prohibited for Palestinians who constantly take bypass roads around them, which are roads whose length ranges between two and five times the length of direct roads.
The settlers
According to the report of the Wall and Settlement Resistance Commission, the number of settlers in the West Bank exceeded 720 thousand (including East Jerusalem), distributed among more than 170 settlements and more than 180 settlement outposts, in addition to the thousands of settlement units that the occupation government constantly approves. While the number of Israeli settlement sites and military bases in the West Bank reached 435 sites by the end of 2017. Dozens of settlements were also built to form a cordon to protect Jerusalem and to prevent any geographical and human communication between the cities south of Jerusalem (Bethlehem, Beit Jala, Beit Sahour, Hebron, and Halhul) and its north (Ramallah and Al-Bireh). and its villages), which are the settlements known as “Greater Jerusalem.”
Add to all of this the ongoing confiscations and displacement operations in rural areas, the Jordan Valley, Bedouin communities, and others.
The settlers are constantly preparing for the day of judgment in the West Bank, supported by a political movement that sees the West Bank as a continuation of the Zionist project, the land of “Judea and Samaria.”
During 2023, Ben Gvir issued about 38,000 new weapons licenses.
After October 7, settlers’ applications for gun ownership licenses doubled, with 8 to 10 thousand applications being submitted daily.
While the Israeli newspaper "Haaretz" revealed that the Israeli occupation army is considering arming settlement security personnel in the West Bank with anti-armor missiles.
Laborers
The state of the settlers has been established in the West Bank, and they are close to officially declaring it and completing the displacement of the largest number of people in Areas C and B. The Palestinians are crowded on its margins in crowded poverty belts, being transformed - after the foundations of their steadfastness have been undermined - into cheap labor. In the settler state.
The last five years have witnessed the largest and fastest increase in the number of workers working for the Israeli occupation.
In the first quarter of 2022, there were more than 173 thousand workers working in the 48 territories, in addition to 31 thousand working in West Bank settlements, and they constitute more than 18% of the total Palestinian workers in the West Bank and Gaza (if we take the West Bank numbers alone, their percentage of the total Employment is about 25%).
It is the same file that Israel uses today to punish residents and then arrest them in the West Bank.
The consequences of power
The authority abandoned its political component, and its elite became involved in a wide network of corruption and interests, and only the security aspect remained of its role. The de facto ruler of the West Bank became the Israeli army officer called the “coordinator,” in a situation similar to the stage of village associations.
Civil affairs are also included within its security framework and are governed by it. It acts as a security tool for population management, including issues of treatment, licenses, permits, exemptions, travel permits, and so on.
Therefore, the two people who are preparing to inherit Abu Mazen fully express this conclusion: Hussein Al-Sheikh;
Civil Administration Coordinator and Implementer of the Coordinator’s Plans, and Majed Faraj;
Security management coordinator.
The Flood: A New Horizon
The history of confrontations between us and “Israel” is governed by rules of engagement due to the unequal balance of power. Accordingly, the political imagination was narrowing to try to gain something from the real in front of it, which made the real continue to shrink, and “Israel” continued to expand at our expense, and we were gasping. Following the "state's path" will lead to the loss of all our basic issues.
Before October 7, 2023, the Palestinian issue was on the verge of extinction, but the flood catapulted it forward, and the political language assigned to express this event has not yet been born.
Placing this achievement again within the framework of the “state’s path” will undermine its intensity, and we will find ourselves once again facing a long process of negotiating the details and detailing the details, while “Israel” does not care about the treaties and documents, and continues to create its facts on the ground.
The flood is a reminder that the primary mission is to “liberate Palestine,” after the dust of “realistic” policy language, which the facts have proven to be unrealistic, has accumulated over it.
Source: Al Jazeera