PA respect for individual rights:
Where Have All The Moderate Palestinians Gone?
By Robert L. Pollock, an assistant editorial features editor at the Journal.
As Israelis debated how to respond to continued suicide bombings, the Palestinian Authority dealt swiftly over the weekend with two perceived enemies. On Saturday, 43-year-old merchant Munzer Hafnawi was sentenced to death in a Nablus courtroom, and on Sunday, in Gaza, Khalid Akka was likewise condemned. Their alleged offense: providing Israel with information used to track and kill Palestinian militants.
That such trials usually occur within a day or so of arrest, are measured in hours or even minutes, and are often conducted without any legal counsel for defendant (lawyers are afraid to represent them), doesn't seem to faze many of those complaining about Israel's policy of "assassinations." But then maybe the six "collaborators" the PA has sentenced to death in recent weeks could be considered lucky to get any kind of trial at all. An indeterminate number of others, including an Israeli Arab shot last week in the West Bank, have also been killed by vigilantes.
In fact, the history of such killings is so long, their number so great, and the definition of collaboration so elastic (often just moderation toward the Jews) that it may not be too much of a stretch to say that the current population of Gaza and the West Bank has been as much radicalized by Arab violence as by Israeli. When Westerners puzzle over why it's so hard for Israel to find moderate interlocutors among the Palestinians -- historically among the best educated, most entrepreneurial, and liberal of Arab societies -- a sad but simple part of the answer is that a great number of the Palestinian elites who might have filled that role were either killed or persuaded to leave long ago. Those now living prosperously in Europe, America or the Gulf states have little interest in returning to fight both Israel and Yasser Arafat for this little patch of dry land.
The creation of such a situation was exactly the intent of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem and foremost Arab political and religious leader in Palestine under the British mandate. During the late 1930s, his forces killed hundreds of Jews. But even more important to him was getting rid of any Arabs who might tolerate a Jewish presence. Many were killed, often in mass executions. Others fled.
Not surprisingly, those remaining a decade later were in no mood to accept a 1947 U.N. partition plan envisaging a small, 45% Arab, state of Israel, and a Palestinian Arab state in what is now the West Bank. The mufti -- who had returned to the Middle East from a war-time exile during which he'd advised Hitler on a final solution for Palestine's Jews -- led them into battle. Some of the Arab refugees who fled Palestine during the war reported fearing not only the Jewish forces, but also being branded collaborators by the mufti if they stayed.
It is telling that the next great Palestinian strongman, Yasser Arafat, should include among several well-documented falsehoods of autobiography a claim of relation to Husseini. When the Fatah leader entered the West Bank in 1967, shortly after it had passed from Jordanian to Israeli control, he found the locals reluctant to join him. "To them their new Israeli masters were no worse than the pre-war Jordanian administration -- in fact the Israeli police treated them better," writes Said K. Aburish, a Palestinian biographer of Mr. Arafat. So Mr. Arafat turned to violence, threatening some "collaborators" and killing about 30, before cooling to the strategy.
The tactic returned with a vengeance during the intifada that began in 1987, in which hundreds of collaborators -- many just Palestinians who had prospered during the Israeli occupation -- were killed. And Mr. Arafat quickly set about criminalizing "collaboration" in the post-Oslo entity he has governed since 1993 -- most notoriously in the form of a law making the sale of land to Jews punishable by death.
The cumulative effect of decades of such killings should not be underestimated. While the bulk of the three million or more Palestinian exiles in the world are -- or are descended from -- simple war refugees, a significant number, especially of the 400,000 or so living in Europe and America, may be political and economic refugees as well. And it is partly their absence from Palestine today, composed largely of the vulnerable poor and Mr. Arafat's privileged elite, that so clouds prospects for peace. Though the term may seem somehow inappropriate in this context, the Palestinian civitas has suffered grievously from brain drain.
During what has now been nearly a year of violence since the failure of the talks at Camp David, a great many observers and policy makers (including former U.S. envoy Dennis Ross) have publicly abandoned hope that Mr. Arafat can ever be a party to a settlement of this conflict. At the same time, few have dared to envisage a peace process without him. There is, it seems, no palatable alternative.
But of course, the appearance of no alternative has too often been the excuse for propping up dictators. It is also the very reason dictators themselves deal so harshly with potential rivals, and fight the emergence of a middle class and other liberalizing institutions of civil society. Many would undoubtedly regard decisive Israeli action against the Arafat regime, should it come, as a recipe for perpetual chaos. But as someone who believes a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza is the only long-term solution to this conflict, I suspect the fall of Mr. Arafat may now be the only hope for creating the kind of free Palestinian society that will allow that to happen.
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