I found this very interesting analysis printed in Haaretz. Professor Yezid Sayigh, who served as an advisor to the Palestinian negotiating team at Camp David, thinks that Arafat did not actually order the start of the intifada, but quickly gave it a green light and "hitch-hiked a ride" on it to try to escape his tactical difficulties. However, he did this without any real strategy, so now he has torched Oslo without any end goal in sight.
I'm glad to hear another rational voice from the Palestinian side. Unfortunately, these voices are always non-existent in all public Palestinian political discussions, now more than ever.
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Arafat escapes by running forward
By Akiva Eldar
Rarely is a serious Palestinian, such as Professor Yezid Sayigh, willing to write a sentence like the following: "Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat bears much of the responsibility for this precarious state of affairs," and its bitter conclusion:
"New political dynamics on both sides make it virtually impossible to arrive at a durable diplomatic solution in the medium term, say two to four years. It is highly unlikely that a Palestinian state will emerge in this time-frame. The present situation of low-intensity conflict will almost certainly persist for the rest of 2001, and in all likelihood for at least another year beyond that."
But the man who wrote these lines is not merely a Palestinian intellectual, a senior fellow at the Center of International Studies at Cambridge University. Prof. Sayigh also served as a senior advisor to the Palestinian Authority's negotiating team. Since last September he has been living alternately in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
If the article Sayigh has published in Survival, the periodical of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, falls into Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat's hands, Sayigh might well find himself sharing the status of persona non grata with conductor Daniel Barenboim.
The senior adviser points to "a minimal Palestinian understanding of how particular modes of political and military behavior might lead to specific end-results, whether tactical or strategic."
He is not gentle with his criticism, charging his colleagues with conducting a policy based on "untested and confused assumptions about their impact on the intended Israeli target."
He says that "the result has been counter-productive in the short term, causing as much damage as benefit to the PA's standing in international public and government opinion, and is seriously detrimental in the medium-term to the Palestinian national objective of securing a peace deal on terms more conducive to achieving territorial integrity and meaningful sovereignty than the Israeli proposals presented by then prime minister Ehud Barak at the Camp David summit of July 2000..."
He does not hesitate to state that "whatever the material contribution of successive Israeli governments to the collapse of the Oslo framework or Israel's moral and legal responsibility for its own behavior since autumn 2000, Arafat is guilty of strategic misjudgement, with consequences for the Palestinians of potentially historic proportions."
Hitch-hiking on the Intifada
In one sentence in the article, which is callled "Arafat and an Anatomy of a Revolt," Sayigh stings both Arafat and Ehud Barak - the two partners in the devastating collapse of the Camp David summit.
He mocks the theory put forward by Barak and his supporters, who claimed that Arafat planned in advance to sabotage the peace process and get his victory through military means.
"Machiavellian calculations and political use of violence are certainly not beyond Arafat, and his management of events since autumn 2000 is replete with concrete (and often self-defeating) examples."
But Sayigh disagrees with the Israeli view of Arafat's "advanced planning," which made the collapse of the peace process inevitable.
He explains that at the end of Camp David, Arafat continued to support the negotiating process as the only option - but his bargaining hand was considerably weakened with the U.S. refusing to pressure Barak into moving closer to Arafat.
The senior aide to the Palestinian negotiating team confirms former Shin Bet chief Ami Ayalon's assessment, and that of other Israeli Orientalists, that Arafat caught a ride on the Intifada and only later grabbed the steering wheel.
"What is entirely misunderstood or overlooked in this and similar Israeli accounts is both the reality of the strategic dilemma Arafat faced on the eve of the Intifada and the extent to which his subsequent behavior reflected his instinctive attempt to escape that dilemma."
"Contrary to the Israeli account," writes the political scientist, Arafat's behavior "since the start of the Intifada has reflected not the existence of a prior strategy based on the use of force, but the absence of any strategy. His political management has been marked by a high degree of improvisation and short-termism, confirming the absence of an original strategy and of a clear purpose, whether preconceived or otherwise."
Sayigh believes that the outbreak of the Intifada enabled Arafat to employ "a familiar tactic, honed throughout his long political career, of al-huroub ila al-amam (escape by running forward).
Neither an initiator nor a planner, he has instead seized upon the fortuitous eruption of a major crisis or other dramatic event brought about by external agency to obscure and escape a strategic predicament, and then sought to intensify and prolong that event as a means of gaining "crisis dominance" and ultimately of inducing an outcome to his advantage."
Sayigh says that the same tactic characterized the "PLO civil war" of 1983, which enabled Arafat to reconstitute diplomatic cooperation with Jordan.
He did the same in the war of the camps against the Shi'ite Amal in Lebanon in 1985-1988, to isolate the pro-Syrian camp in the PLO.
The Palestinian professor also adds to this rubric the first Intifada, and the Hasmonean Tunnel crisis, which forced Benjamin Netanyahu to hand over some control of some Palestinian neighborhoods in Hebron, a few months later.
Urgent seminar in Spain
That same pattern of behavior, says Sayigh, characterized Arafat's handling of the crisis following Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount.
"The killing of unarmed Palestinian demonstrators, including children, by Israeli fire appeared instantly both to restore his international standing, energize vociferous Arab support and reverse the political tables on Barak ... Arafat's instinctive reaction was to maintain this advantage, which in a crude sense required a daily death toll.
This does not mean that he ordered the initial Palestinian use of firearms against Israeli forces in the West Bank and Gaza, about three days into the Intifada. But it means that once a few local Fatah activists in some cities under PA control had taken this initiative, he needed do no more than denote tacit assent to continued use of firearms, by refraining from issuing internal orders to cease fire.
An implicit "green light" was signaled by Arafat's choice to leave the country at this critical moment - in order to attend events as pressing as a public rally in Tunisia and a seminar in Spain - making him conveniently unavailable to take command responsibility for the situation, while leaving Barak to "stew."
Everyone knows what happened next. Sayigh lives in the territories, and presumably the coming sentence is based on his intimate knowledge of life there:
"The use of military force has moreover reflected implicit tensions and rivalries between key players within Fatah and the PA, particularly in the West Bank. A complex relationship obtains there between Arafat, Fatah's most-televised cadre leader Marwan Barghouti, Barghouti's rivals within Fatah, and PA security agencies, most notably the Preventive Security Services headed by Jibril Rajoub and, to a lesser extent, General Intelligence headed by Tawfik Tirawi. An additional dimension is the role of activists with a refugee background, whose longstanding social, economic and political marginality was compounded by the minimal change in their status that large-scale membership in Fatah and PA security agencies since 1994 had granted them. In addition, the glory of martyrdom is attractive to youths with few other prospects."
Working for the right
The "most serious leadership failing," says Sayigh, "has arguably been the absence of any sustained effort to deliver a specific political message to the Israeli government, parliamentary parties and voting public.
"Without clear enunciation of concrete Palestinian demands, Israeli audiences have been unable to calculate the comparative costs and benefits of pursuing one course of action or another toward the Palestinians (in contrast to the experience with Hezbollah).
"Their fallback has been to assume the worst about Palestinian intentions, leading the Israeli domestic political field to the "default" position of the nationalist right, which sees an opportunity to roll back the Oslo framework and even remove its main consequence, the establishment of the PA as a self-governing political institution.
"A Palestinian strategy combining diplomatic and military means with clear strategic aims, effective leadership and some sense of political end-state would still have entailed high risks, but in its absence the resort to violence has had a hugely negative impact on Israeli perceptions."
The other side of the coin, he notes, is the failure of the Palestinian leadership to address its own constituency with a clear message.
"Arafat has yet to state the strategic and tactical aims of the Intifada directly to his people, or even to the PA and Fatah rank-and-file. Indeed, this is consistent with the PA leadership's reluctance throughout the negotiations (up to, and including the Camp David and Taba peace talks), to engage in debate, whether publicly or even internally, about the substance of what would constitute an acceptable deal .... "The PA leadership's inability to enunciate clear (and realizable) goals has in turn led to palpable ambivalence among various Palestinian audiences toward the violent means and ultimate outcome of the Intifada."
There's no gloating in the Sayigh article, neither over his colleagues' failures, nor over the Israeli right wing's preparations for a celebration of the fall of the Palestinian Authority.
He is worried about Arafat's faulty judgment in the fall of 2000 and how it could cost the Palestinians more than the serious mistakes of the confrontation with Syria in Lebanon in 1976 and the support for Saddam Hussein in 1990.
"The Palestinians, whose right to statehood was acknowledged in the UN Partition Plan of 1947 (General Assembly Resolution 181), would have missed the post-Cold War opportunity to make the transition to statehood, and would find themselves no closer to statehood than the Kurds," he writes, ending his indictment with the words: "Nothing that has happened so far absolves the Palestinian leadership of its own contribution to the current situation, its obligations under international law and its duty to its people to secure an independent state, based on the rule of law, through negotiation with Israel." |
