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Young Guard Against Old Guard
Between 1967 and 1994 the leadership of the Palestinian national leadership lived in diaspora, moving from Jordan to Lebanon, and since 1983 to Tunisia. Local leadership in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip sought to assert itself from time to time only to be decapitated by the Israelis or to be discouraged by the PLO. The defeat of the PLO during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 lessened the centrality of the PLO in Palestinian politics and weakened its hold on Palestinians in the occupied territories. Indeed, the center for gravity in Palestinian politics began to shift from the outside to the inside, i.e., to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Despite the strong role played by the outside PLO leadership during the first Palestinian intifada, it was the newly emerging leadership in the occupied territories that had initiated and sustained that intifada.
In 1994, the PLO leadership returned home to the West Bank and Gaza to establish the Palestinian Authority (PA) in implementation of the Declaration of Principles negotiated by the PLO and Israel in Oslo in 1993. Since then, the relationship between the two leaderships, the old and the established on one hand and the young and emerging on the other, has not been an easy one. Efforts to co-opt and even accommodate the young leaders of the first intifada did not always succeed due to the authoritarian nature of the PLO leadership. Nonetheless, the euphoria accompanying the partial Israeli withdrawal from occupied Palestinian territory, the holding of the first general national elections in 1996, and the establishment of the first Palestinian government in modern history produced an appearance of harmony between the two groups.
The established PLO leadership is a historic one. It is composed of the founding fathers of the Palestinian national movement along with the leaders of the different guerrilla organizations and the PLO bureaucracy. It has spent most of its life in the outside. Most members of this group tend to be old, over 50 years of age. It dominates all the institutions of the PLO: the Palestinian National Council, the Central Council, and the Executive Committee. It also dominates the highest decision making body of the largest faction of the PLO, the Fateh Central Committee, as well as the PA Cabinet. One third of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) comes from this group, even though elections for this body were held in the West Bank and Gaza only. Members of this group, such as Mahmud Abbas (Abu Mazin) Ahmad Qurie (Abu Ala) and Nabil Sha'ath have led all negotiations with Israel. This essay calls this group the Old Guard.
The Young Guard refers to newly emerging local leaders as well as the former leaders of the first intifada. They tend to be young, below or around 40 years of age. Although some individuals from this group are members of the PA Cabinet and the PLC, and few are heads or senior members of security services, the group as a whole lacks cohesion, leadership, and de jure power. Indeed, to some Palestinians some of the leaders of the Young Guard seem more like gangsters and warlords. Warlords, such as Sami Abu Samhadaneh in Rafah and Aatif Ebiat in Bethlehem have been targeted for assassination by the Israeli army, the latter was killed in October 2001. Other leaders of the Young Guard, such as Marwan Barghouti in Ramallah and Husam Khader in Nablus have more respectability in their communities. While the Young Guard has little voice in the main PLO institutions, it has much more relative power in the different Fateh bodies, namely the Tanzim and Fateh's High Committee and its Revolutionary Council.
The Old Guard derives legitimacy from the PLO legacy as well as the Oslo agreement and its outcome. Its power is also derived from its control over the financial resources of the PLO and the PA, the diplomatic recognition accorded it by the international community, and the control it exercises over the main bodies and institutions of the PLO and the PA, including the bureaucracy and the security services. |
