Word: arafats
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While emphasizing looking away from the past and toward the future, he said the death of Palestinian Authority Leader Yasir Arafat last month gives the U.S. government “a golden opportunity” to change the deteriorating view of its policies in the Middle East. He said that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s recent decision to withdraw from the Gaza region provides the U.S. another important opportunity: if Gaza could be portrayed as a model state, Zinni hypothesized, “it could create stability and prosperity for a large number of Palestinians...
...Barghouti, of course, is the public face of the intifadah, a popular West Bank Fatah Secretary General who cut his political teeth in the streets of Ramallah and the prison cells of Israel during first intidafah (1987-1991) while Abbas and the rest of Arafat's inner circle plied the diplomatic circuit from their headquarters in far-off Tunisia. The fact of his imprisonment by Israel after being convicted of terrorism - he didn't bother to defend himself, dismissing not only the charges but the court's right to try him - has done nothing to diminish his allure...
...split in Fatah embodied in the Abbas vs. Barghouti race is not simply a debate over strategic direction; it's also a product of the grassroots backlash against the corruption and cronyism created by Yasser Arafat in his reliance on the politics of patronage to run the Palestinian Authority. It was the first intifadah, which raged from 1987 to 1991, that did more than anything else to ensure Arafat's triumphant return to the West Bank under the Oslo agreements, but the local leadership of Fatah in the West Bank and Gaza, who had risked and sacrificed the most...
...Years of resentment over the corruption of the "Tunisians" and the failure of their Oslo strategy to end the most irksome aspects of the occupation - Israel's settler population in the West Bank actually doubled in the years during which Arafat told Palestinians he was negotiating an end to the Israeli presence - finally exploded in the second intifada in September of 2000. As much as Arafat rode, and encouraged that wave of outrage, hoping - foolishly, as it turned out - that he could exploit a surge of violence to win new concessions at the negotiating table, close observers of Palestinian politics...
...Arafat retreated from the negotiating table, and restored his popularity by aligning himself with the intifadah, ending his days under siege at his bombed-out Ramallah headquarters. The siege allowed him to restore his standing as the symbolic personification of Palestinian nationalism, which put him beyond reproach by the militants pressing for changes in the PA. But his heirs among the "Tunisians" enjoy no such immunity, and widespread resentment over corruption and cronyism in the West Bank and Gaza tends to play to the political advantage of the militants - and even of Hamas, which is viewed as more incorruptible than...