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Dateline Tunis: PLO R.I.P.

Dateline Tunis: PLO R.I.P.

by Daniel Williams

The pivotal Israeli-Palestinian segment of the Middle East peace talks has consistently encountered slow going. The difficulty stems not only from flare-ups of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but from the less-understood confusion over the course of Palestinian politics. For the talks to succeed, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), a backstage participant, will have to face its own mortality. In the past decade, almost every major event in the Middle East has nudged the PLO toward contemplating the end of a long and dramatic existence, and the peace talks are forcing the organization to focus more than ever on its final hours.

It should not come as any surprise that such a contemplation is progressing at the measured pace of a funeral procession. The PLO has been on the world stage for more than a quarter century; whole lives are wrapped up in its survival. Feared and detested by many, the PLO dates from heady days of a proclaimed world revolution, when new and dangerous faces preached justice in a stroke. Aging baby boomers can remember when PLO chairman Yasir Arafat appeared in public sporting narrow, sinister-looking sunglasses. Compare that with the lawyerly, three-piece-suit image presented by the Palestinian delegates to the peace talks. They are definitely not dressed to frighten. These days a common topic of conversation among the rebels of the sixties is the inevitability of the end. They seemed to have digested the question of whether the PLO will fold up its tents; the new question is how. Will the end come about as part of a smooth transmission of authority to residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, who, under terms laid out for the peace negotiations, are to win a measure of self-rule on their way to some as yet unspecified status, possibly even full independence from Israel? Or will the PLO be swept away by the wave of frustration that is sapping its strength and nourishing its rivals? The new rivals are from a highly motivated Islamic movement named Hamas that is catching fire in the West Bank and Gaza. A series of violent and spectacular armed attacks carried out by Hamas in 1992 so alarmed Israeli politicians that some suggested Israel should rush to open direct talks with the PLO in order to head off the Islamic surge.

Even though the PLO has cast its lot with the peace process, little has been done to prepare the organization for the transformation that is coming. Indications that the PLO is unready for change surfaced dramatically in the spring of 1992 when an airplane carrying the newly married Arafat, president of the phantom Palestinian state, crashed in the Libyan desert. At word of the accident, the PLO's exile headquarters in Tunis fell into disarray. No one knew who was in charge, and should Arafat have died, no one knew who would take over permanently. Even after he was found battered but alive, no one would say definitively who would have succeeded him. A few months later, word spread that Farouk Qaddoumi, PLO foreign minister and the most senior after Arafat in the PLO's large Fatah faction, was designated heir. Yet he himself refuses to confirm the designation. In a recent New York interview, Qaddoumi dismissed as "morbid" inquiries into the succession issue and predicted that Arafat, then 63, would live another 20 years.

In any case, Arafat's near-miraculous escape from death failed to end the questioning of his one-man leadership. Activists wondered openly about money and who, in fact, controls the PLO's $2 billion endowment. Debate erupted over whether Arafat should step down and give way to someone more consistently commited to peace negotiations -- perhaps Nabil Shaath, a leading adviser to Arafat. Shaath has been a principal behind-the-scenes contact between the delegation and the PLO during the negotiations in Washington. Such talk had arisen with vehemence before Arafat's plane crash. An internal PLO memo, circulated by PLO dissidents in 1991 after the Persian Gulf war, criticized Arafat as shortsighted, totalitarian, and potentially a walking diaster. There were calls for new elections to the Palestine National Council, the PLO's hoary parliament-in-exile.

The ever-agile Arafat declined to make fundamental changes. To appease proponents of peace talks, he elevated leaders from the West Bank and Gaza Strip to positions of parity with activists outside the territories. The "insiders," as they are called, had previously been viewed as inferiors, part of a population that was to be rescued by the "outsiders" in the exiled PLO. In effect, Arafat was taking on the role of a Palestinian Gorbachev, burdened with the job of keeping the PLO's place atop Palestinian politics while at the same time ushering the organization into a new era. That would prelude clearing the way for a Palestinian Yeltsin, who might speed compromise with Israel and move the PLO from national liberation to governing. Arafat supporters insist that in time of flux he is needed more that ever -- a symbol of unity and purpose. He is seen as a kind of living Buddha, a demigod who comes around once in a generation to embody the national soul. That mystical side of Palestinian politics reflects its roots in the 1960s. Arafat's checkered kaffiyeh is to the Palestinians what Castro's beard has been to Cuba or Mao's Little Red Book to China.

In addition, supporters claim that Arafat is needed to protect moderates such as Faisal al-Husseni and Hanan Ashrawi from the barbs, or worse, of hardline opponents of the talks. Last year, when Ashrawi was under fire from senior PLO officials for her high-profile media stardom, Arafat stopped the sniping by publicly giving Ashrawi a peck on the cheek when she passed through Amman, Jordan on her way to a round of negotiations.

Palestinians who think Arafat should go, as well as those who think he must stay, share one thing in common: Both are grappling with the disorienting changes of a new world landscape. In the space of a few years, almost the entire culture into which the PLO was born and by which it was nourished has disappeared. The collapse of the Soviet Union was the first blow. It deprived the PLO of a major moral and material patron and a kind of echo chamber for the PLO's old anti-imperialist rhetoric.

Next came the Persian Gulf war, which deprived the PLO of a back-up patron, Saddam Hussein. Many Palestinians inside and outside of leadership fell under Hussein's spell months before his invasion of Kuwait. His pledge to "incinerate half of Israel" with chemical weapons if Israel attacked Iraq reawoke the old Palestinian dream of finding an Arab knight on horseback to liberate historical Palestine from the Zionists. Arafat had also been interwining the fate of the PLO ever more closely with Baghdad by moving offices and personnel to fortress Iraq from security-lax Tunisia.

The Iraqi failure proved a human, financial, and political disaster for the Palestinians and the PLO. After the war, Kuwait expelled approximately 300,000 Palestinians who had labored there many years and whose income helped sustain Palestinian refugees abroad and in the West Bank and Gaza. Taxes from those Palestinian wage earners also contributed to the PLO coffers. The Gulf states, especially Saudi Arabia, also took the opportunity to stop funding the PLO directly. Some Gulf governments even refused to let Arafat land and refuel his airplane on his frequent shuttle diplomacy missions.

Insiders and Outsiders

The cold shoulder of the Gulf states represented a turning point in pan-Arab politics. For the first time, it became possible for Arab governments to turn their backs on the Palestinian problem, and to do so with relish. Palestine had played a part in the modern mythology of a united Araby stretching from the Atlantic to Mesopotamia. Now that dream was dead, killed by the divisions in the Arab would brought on by the Gulf war, and so was the Palestinian place in it.

Yet those calamities did not initiate the PLO's contemplation of its own extinction. Thoughts of mortality had entered the PLO's collective psyche back in 1982 when the Israeli army expelled the organization from Beirut. The Lebanon debacle jolted some in the organization into recognizing that, at best, it could only hope to regain some of historical Palestine. That notion alone undermined the fundamentals of the PLO, which had been created to liberate all of Palestine between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Their horizons reduced, some PLO leaders counseled a focus on the PLO's political and resistance efforts in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. That meant, in effect, putting the rump territory at the center of the Palestinian struggle--yet another blow to PLO pride and prestige. The organization, after all, contains a constituency well beyond the rock-strewn confines of the West Bank and the fetid Gaza Strip.

Aligned against proponents of a struggle centered on the West Bank and Gaza were Palestinians who still believed in terrorism and armed attacks inside and outside of Israel. It was therefore up to the residents of the West Bank and Gaza to keep the focus on themselves. They did so with a hail of stones on December 9, 1987, the beginning of the uprising known as the intifada, or "shaking off" in Arabic.

The shaking off of Israeli rule is only part of the story. The intifada was also aimed at the PLO itself, or at least at its ineffectual efforts to free Palestine by highjacking, terror bombings, and international adventures in distant capitals. The intifada brought the struggle home.

It forced the PLO to accept the West Bank and Gaza as an alternative focus of Palestinian energies and, more significantly, as the locus of Palestinian political life and identity. No claims of ultimate PLO control over the territories can disguise the symbolic and practical meaning of that shift in thinking. The intifada shattered the myth of Palestinian exiles coming to the rescue of a captive population. More likely, it will be the other way around: Palestinians from the occupied territories resuscitating the Palestinian national movement. Gone, too, is the exile dream of a Greater Palestine, a victim of the willingness of West Bank and Gaza leaders to compromise with an Israeli state they accept as permanent. The hallowed "right of return" of Palestinians to their homeland was reduced to a bargaining chip, exchangeable for international aid and resettlement. As the price for entering the peace talks in an off-stage role, the PLO accepted the formula of an interim self-rule before the initiation of talks on the ultimate sovereign status of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Those limited ambitions were not exactly the goals the PLO had been fighting for during 28 tumultuous years.

The PLO is looking to smooth the transition through a kind of people-to-people program. Even before the Middle East peace talks began in October 1991, Palestinian activists from the West Bank and Gaza were trekking to Tunis for hand-holding sessions with PLO officials. They also met at international seminars and secretly in hotels, although the need for secrecy has diminished because of growing Israeli tolerance of such meetings. During the first round of the peace talks in Madrid, the Spanish government arranged for Faisal al-Husseini and Hanan Ashrawi to fly to Tunis for a secret meeting with Arafat. By the time the talks moved to Washington in December 1991, delegates were openly visiting Tunis.

Those meetings focus on the nuts-and-bolts issues of the talks, but they also serve another, more important purpose. They help ward off the temptation of "insiders" to strike a separate peace and give West Bank and Gaza Palestinians a chance to display their loyalty to the PLO. And they are allowing "insiders" and "outsiders" to build relationships and trust after years of being cut off by geography and prohibitions by Israel on open meetings.

Still, the parade of dignitaries upset old-timers in the PLO who were used to dismissing the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza as helpless maidens waiting for deliverance. In a recent interview in Tunis, Bassam Abu Sharif, a top Arafat adviser, bristled at suggestions that the "insiders" were reaching parity, not only by way of their role in diplomacy but also through the sacrifices of the intifada. "In no way," he remarked sternly, "can the experiences of the inside be compared to that of the outside." Another top PLO official asserted that "even the people who live on Faisal al-Husseini's street don't recognize him as a leader."

If the talks succeed, however, people like al-Husseini, Saeb Erakat, Ashrawi, and other so-called New Palestinians will emerge as political leaders of the West Bank and Gaza. They would preside over the dispensing of Palestinian passports, ceremonial flag raisings, and the designing of school curricula. Between the new Palestinian entity and Jordan, about three out of every five Palestinians in the world will be living under some form of self-government. That is what the talks are all about. The New Palestinians, at the center of the Palestinian world, will gain power and legitimacy at the expense of the old warriors.

PLO Evolution

Meanwhile, how to go with the flow? Moderates in the PLO hope for a graceful slide into retirement. Even Arafat pondered his exclusion from a central position. "Maybe I will be like Churchill," he was recently quoted in the Los Angeles Times as saying. "Churchill achieved a victory for the British people and it came to nothing for him."

Zionists may or may not be flattered to know that several PLO leaders call for the creation of a Palestinian Agency, an echo of the Jewish Agency of pre-state Israel, to handle returning exile matters and raise funds. There is talk about economic planning, scaring up finances, and designing curricula for schools. The PLO is also offering itself as a fountain of expertise to guide self-rule government. However, with diplomats in more than 100 countries, the PLO is jealous of its prerogative as the Palestinian presence abroad. When al-Husseini visited the Far East in 1990, he traveled to Japan but was forbidden by Arafat from touring China, which is said to be reserved for the chairman himself. Last fall, Ashrawi was prohibited from meeting with French foreign minister Roland Dumas in Paris on the grounds that her visit might eclipse a later meeting between Dumas and Farouk Qaddoumi.

The PLO undoubtedly will try to control politics by remote control, choosing candidates for the governing assembly and putting loyalists in positions of power. It is not clear that such manipulation, common to West Bank and Gaza politics today, would be welcomed under self-rule. Haidar Abdel-Shafi, the titular head of the Palestinian peace delegation, has suggested that the outside can have little call to meddle in inside affairs until it has held democratic elections for its own legislature, the Palestine National Council.

Although those issues will induce further stress on the PLO, many in the organization consider dropping out of the peace talks a greater threat to its survival than staying in. That judgement reflects another trend that has shaken the foundation of politics across the Middle East: the resurgence of Islamic nationalism. Jordan, Egypt, and, of course, Algeria are grappling with challenges from the mosque. Over the years, other countries--notably Syria--have cruelly put down Muslim militancy. But Islam has never been a passing phase in the Arab world; it is a constant element of the region's political chemistry. Today, Islamic nationalism is on the offensive because secular Arab regimes are in disrepute. The PLO is not immune from the Islamic challenge.

The PLO's main rival, Hamas, which is an acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement, has grown steadily in numbers since the beginning of the intifada. So has its degree of militancy. Hamas preaches the myth of an undivided Muslim Holy Land and rigidly opposes peace talks with Israel or the surrender of any part of historical Palestine. Once considered by Israelis and Palestinians alike as a mystical band of talkers rather than doers, Hamas's growth intensified as the uprising flagged and the frustrations of the Gulf war depressed the Palestinian population.

The group's December 1992 kidnapping and killing of an Israeli policeman prompted Israeli politicians to promote talks with the PLO as a moderate counter to Hamas. The deportation of more than 400 Hamas activists to an unreceptive Lebanon later that month has threatened the peace talks. The PLO wants Israel to take the expellees back; as much as the PLO dislikes Hamas, it dislikes Israel's deportation policies more. The episode forced the PLO to close ranks with Hamas even though Hamas has been attacking the PLO's basic stands for a long timel; no Palestinian organization can sanction expulsion, even of harsh enemies.

Hamas's most fertile field for converts is the crowded and impoverished Gaza Strip, home to 750,000 Palestinians. Its influence in the West Bank, population 1.1 million, is less. Hamas uses a network of mosques to provide both spiritual guidance and material help to the poor. It is widely believed that funding comes from Saudi Arabia, which is permitting Muslims to funnel money to Hamas as punishment of the PLO for having supported Iraq in the Gulf war. Iran, which is critical of the PLO for taking part in the peace talks, is also a contributor.

According to PLO activists, when Hamas's strength became notable two years ago, the PLO tried to keep pace by diverting funds to its Muslim affiliates in the Islamic Jihad movement and authorizing Jihad armed attacks. Islamic Jihad, unlike Hamas, is subordinate to the PLO, although it maintains a separate structure. Genuine Islamic militants are not fooled; Islam is a sideshow for the PLO, which is an overwhelmingly secular organization. Qaddoumi, for instance, dismissed the Islamic rise as a "mystical thing...a distorted dream that says something can be attained in a short time."

Historically, Islam is no stranger to the Palestinian cause as a motivating force. In the 1930s, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the fiery religious leader of Jerusalem, used Islam to fuel hostility toward the British and the Jews in Palestine as well as toward Palestinians who comtemplated compromise or sold land to the enemy. The Israeli triumph of 1948 discredited Haj Amin and the Palestinian cause took on a decidedly more secular color.

The pendulum may be swinging back. Hamas is reviving some of the most destructive practices of Haj Amin by enthusiastically waging war on Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israeli authorities. The PLO has tried to suppress the war among its own followers. Hamas has gone so far as to imply that the PLO is a nest of collaboration with Israel. In Gaza, a Hamas militant who is a member of the execution squad called the Qassam force told me, "There are collaborators everywhere and it will be seen that some of the Palestinians who talk with Israel are collaborators." A few weeks before the interview, he had backed up his talk by tossing the bodies of two suspected collaborators on the doorstep of a pro-PLO leader who had spoken out against the wave of retribution. Throughout Gaza, graffiti blares the message that "Palestine is for Fighters, not Hagglers."

Hamas's operations are meant to compare favorably with the new, softer PLO. For Hamas, the slow pace of the negotiations only highlights the futility of talking to the Israelis.

The Hamas stand has actually helped clarify the position of the PLO in the peace talks. It has made the PLO eager for progress despite the costs to the organization, which has virtually shed its other roles: PLO militias are practically dormant, and activists in the West Bank and Gaza have drifted back to private life for lack of anything to do. The PLO has almost exclusively concentrated on the peace talks. And if there are concerns that a successful conclusion to the talks may eventually sink the PLO, they are tempered by the prospect of positive results. If there is fear that success in the peace talks will place the PLO in the unaccustomed position of second Palestinian fiddle, there is also concern that failure would sink the organization with nothing to show for it. "Hamas feeds off frustration. If we show some progress, its growth will be stunted," Nabil Shaath assured me in November 1992 at the end of a round of peace talks in Washington.

Despite the gummy pace of peace talks last year, negotiations might be poised to take off. Without much fanfare, the two sides began to talk about land, the single issue that has divided Arab and Jew for 70 years. That step was obscured by the usual barrage of negative rhetoric and seemingly buried by the controversy surrounding the Hamas expulsions. (One can ignore the decision by the Palestinians to send a reduced delegation to the December round over human rights violations. They had already decided nothing could go forward until the new Clinton administration took office, so it was an inexpensive protest.)

The focus on land reflected how far the PLO had come in identifying the talks as a domestic issue in which it has a stake. The talks have at least risen above the status of tactic, by which the Palestinian cause could improve both its world stature and its standing with the United States to one that is viewed as the lesser of two evils--success or Hamas. But the pace will remain slow so long as the PLO fails to mobilize itself for the creation of an independent West Bank and Gaza. That means democratizing itself so that Palestinians inside and outside the territories feel they have a stake. They must be told how they will benefit: through passports, travel, and the attainment of an independent, internationally recognized government that stands for their rights and identity--everything Hamas cannot offer. Does that require the ouster of Arafat and his band of aging sixties rebels? Perhaps not, but it does require the creation of institutions that can carry on without the stubble-chinned leader. Some Palestinians have plausibly urged that Arafat become a figurehead, a sort of Palestinian Queen Elizabeth, with authority to set national goals but not to interfere in the means of attaining them.

That may be the best interim solution. The PLO is running against a new clock, and not one set by Israel and its construction of settlements in the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem. Rather, it is running against the clock of resurgent Islam. In Israel, too, fear of Islamic fundamentalism seems to be replacing fear of the PLO. Israel might consider pushing the peace talks along to cement the hold of Palestinian moderates on the Palestinian population.

The Palestinian movement helped fuse Islam and twentieth-century Arab nationalism in the Middle East. The PLO and Israel, by speeding compromise, could defuse the potentially explosive charge of Islam in the twenty-first century.

[DANIEL WILLIAMS, Middle East correspondent for the Los Angeles Times from 1988 until 1992, covers the State Department for the Washington Post.]

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