While news about Palestine has been dominated in recent days by an Al Jazeera investigation into Yasir Arafat’s death, the mainstream media has largely ignored another more serious series of events. This is that the Palestinian Authority – the regime that has administered several of small enclaves within the Israeli occupied West Bank since Arafat agreed to the Oslo agreements in the 1990s - is teetering at the edge of a political and financial abyss, and that its reaction to these circumstances is the brutal suppression the general population.
Violence broke out last Saturday and Sunday when protesters - campaigning against prospective negotiations between the PA’s unelected President, Mahmoud Abbas, and Israeli Vice Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz - were confronted by the Palestinian Security Forces and subject to vicious beatings that left several protesters badly injured. When most of the violence took place, on Sunday, approximately 200 protesters were met with a brigade of around 100 PA Security Forces in uniform and some 30-40 Mukhabarat (secret police) and plainclothes police officers that had infiltrated the crowd.
The PA police blocked
the protest on the main street preventing it from heading towards its planned
destination; the Presidential compound (al-Muqata’a). Police attacked
the demonstration, dragged protesters to the ground, kicking them and beating
them with batons. Some 20 protesters were arrested and/or injured by the
security forces, including two journalists. Eventually, perhaps fearful of
further confrontations, Abbas moved to appease the protesters and the meeting
between him and Mofaz was rescheduled to a different time and location.
According to Abbas’ calculation,
it was the symbolism that had sparked public outrage. Indeed the fact that the
meeting was supposed to take place in the Muqata’a where Yasser Arafat had
been besieged for almost two year by the Israeli Military - under the command
of none other than the then General
Shaul Mofaz – Israel’s Chief of Staff (and later Defence Minister) - was deeply
problematic. However, Abbas’ mere reorganisation of the meeting, to a different
time and place, demonstrated either that the PA leadership’s was either intent
on cynically manipulating public opinion or that it simply lacked any real
understanding of public concerns.
Further, in the days since the
protests the PA has attempted to appear more consolatory. Two enquiries were
established, and General Adnan Damiri, of the PA Security Forces, was
interviewed on the PA TV network and appeared apologetic but, again, he did not
back down from the position adopted by the PA - that the rescheduled meeting
would go ahead. However, as analysis elsewhere
demonstrates,
the PA Security Forces actions are in fact no aberration but rather, entirely
consistent with their raison d’etre and the interests of their US,
European backers and the Israeli military.
The PA Security Forces have acted
in a similarly violent way on previous occasions. In 2007, a
partisan crackdown against Hamas in the wake of the unity government’s collapse was carried out with US, Israeli and British support and involved murder, torture
and illegal imprisonment. Though, arguably, such extreme violence was not the primary methodology
of the PA’s rule until it met with crisis. Rather, until that point the PA
leadership had preferred to buy support, sometimes through corruption. This
usually involved handing out lucrative monopoly contracts to domestic and
diaspora elites and employing hundreds of thousands of people in a bloated
public sector.
Yet, where Europe and the US
enabled both this kind of behaviour through making available vast quantities of
aid, it also made this aid conditional on Palestinian acquiescence to a system
of rule that would entrench Israeli dominance even further. Thus, in spite of
the Oslo process’ grand vision of Palestinian statehood, the PA’s real role was
to serve as a fig leaf for a new phase in Israel’s occupation.
The ‘Oslo years’ ended with the
collapse of that status quo in 2000. There followed half a decade of
disorder and when Israel re-invaded the cities of the West Bank. Out of this
disorder, and after the death of Arafat, the PA was (gradually) given another chance
to prove itself as Israel pursued a ‘scorched
earth’
withdrawal to more defensible
military lines.
In this context, what inspired the PA’s shift toward violence against its own
people in 2007 was that it needed to re-establish control of the West Bank in
order to prove its worth to the donors. In short, it had to rescue the
political logic that justified its existence from growing popular
disenchantment, manifest in the form of Hamas’ election victory of 2006. The PA
won that battle in the West Bank (though it lost in Gaza) and returned to
established form as a conduit through which donor aid could be used to buy
general consent.
In the immediate aftermath of the
schism with Hamas the PA road high in the international arena; it offered
international donors a programme of ‘institution-building’ that matched
near-perfectly their fondest desires – becoming a new front line in the ‘war on
terror’ and endorsing a raft of neo-liberal economic reforms that would
integrate with the occupation. At the same time the PA made more bold promises
to its public. It claimed that it would unilaterally bring about a Palestinian
state and to build the underdeveloped private sector. Thus far, it has
evidently failed on both of these fronts.
The PA’s latest violence is also a
symptom of crisis. But, in this case the PA is in a position that is arguably
even more vulnerable than it was in 2007. This time it faces almost certain financial
collapse with a structural
deficit of
around $1.3 billion and no immediate means of plugging the gap. Israel knows
that, if the PA does descent into total disorder as a result of being unable to
meet its financial obligations, then the occupation apparatus will have to take
on more responsibility in the West Bank – something that the, ostensibly
hawkish, Netanyahu government wishes to avoid. This perhaps explains why
Israel approached the IMF for a bridging loan on behalf of the PA last week. Yet, because
this request was denied the PA continues to flounder and pursue austerity
measures that
are deeply unpopular, particularly in combination with the perceived return of
corruption at the highest levels.
But the PA’s current financial concerns
are again a product of its relationship to the West. In fact, when the PA made
all its promises to the international community at the Paris conference in
2007, international donors greeted it with pledges of vast financial support –
coming to some $7.7 billion, far greater than the $5.6 billion that the PA had
originally sought. However, the scale of this promise belies the lack of
political will among donors to fulfil their promises. In 2008, it emerged that
the PA was facing a major fiscal crisis. This was partly because, the
total aid actually paid to the PA was only around ten per cent of that which had been promised at
Paris, at approximately $900 million.
However, the problems for the PA
were not limited to the failure of the donors to fulfil their promises. Also
problematic were the mechanisms employed by donors to make their regular
contributions. The nature of these made it very difficult for the PA to plan
into the medium term. According to UNCTAD:
In addition to this, the PA faces
an uncertain political environment. Mahmoud Abbas
lost a close political ally with the ouster of Hosni Mubarak and the leadership will be viewing the
prospect of the Muslim Brotherhood’s ascendancy with suspicion. It was against
this backdrop that the PA sought to double down on its relationship to Israel
with the meeting between Mofaz and Abbas.
In the final analysis nobody
really knows what killed Arafat, but there is no doubt that back in 2004 his
death was seen as a threshold that allowed different Palestinian leaders to
come to the fore, and it was them that promised a different path to Palestinian
liberation. Yet, what was true of the PA leadership then, is true now. It
remains trapped in a political and financial structure that itself helped to
construct. It is surrounded on all sides by what it sees as the threat of
oblivion and in its desperate efforts to survive it has resorted to brutality attacking
its own people.
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