What Sharon’s demand to ‘restructure’ the Palestinian Authority really means

The Israeli government’s new mantra ­ that the Palestinian Authority (PA) must be “restructured” as a precondition for starting any political negotiations ­ is a recipe for ensuring that the peace process is never revived at all, Rajeh al-Khoury writes in the Beirut daily An-Nahar.
“President George W. Bush can talk as much he likes about negotiations, the ‘international conference’ and suchlike, but meaningful political negotiations will not start at all,” he says. Bush “can serve out the remainder of his term, and perhaps be elected to a second one if he continues performing well in Israel’s eyes, but he will not see the slogan of two states, one Israeli and one Palestinian, realized or become capable of realization.”

Ariel Sharon’s precondition resembles his former demand for seven days of “total calm” before he would implement the cease-fire plan devised by CIA Director George Tenet, says Khoury. He kept restarting the countdown, until the “week” dragged on for over a year and the Tenet plan became inconsequential.
Similarly, the issue of “restructuring” the PA can be used to eat up more time, for what is being demanded here is not just preventing someone from taking a potshot at a Jewish settlement, but finding Palestinians who are willing and able to comply with Sharon’s dictates and political terms, and creating a new authority out of them.

This is a nonstarter. Sharon’s aides knew this when they told journalists accompanying the prime minister on his way back from Washington that Israel and the US had agreed that the present structure of the Palestinian leadership made negotiations impossible, and that it would have to be restructured on a “democratic” and “transparent” basis.
“There is no need to ask how the Palestinians can become democratic in the eyes of Sharon or transparent in Israel’s view, for the answers are clear and well-known,” Khoury remarks.

“Where Sharon is concerned, Palestinians will only become democrats when they do one of two things: become collaborators, guiding Israeli commandos from the home of one wanted Palestinian to another; or when they assume an Israeli mindset which believes that Palestinians were put on this earth not only to live in tin shacks in refugee camps after the theft of their land and homes, but also to be at the service of God’s Chosen People.
“And Palestinians will only be deemed to have become transparent by Israel when they cease to block its line of vision ­ either by disappearing to another world, going into exile, or by being so riddled with bullets that the Israelis are able to see through the holes in their bodies,” says Khoury.

“The week of calm wrecked the Tenet working paper, and the restructuring of the PA will wreck the political negotiations and everything they aim to achieve.”
Khoury says “it might be possible to start political talks once a new PA has been cloned from Sharon’s rib, but no amount of statements by Yasser Arafat condemning ‘terrorism’ will qualify him to comply with Sharon’s list of demands.”
Meantime, the idea of reforming and restructuring the PA has been endorsed by a number of Arafat’s lieutenants in interviews published in Arab newspapers, including West Bank Preventive Security chief Jibril Rajoub and the PLO Executive Committee’s second-in-command Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) ­ though both stress that Israeli or American meddling in any such process is unacceptable, and that the holding of elections should be an integral part of it.

Their remarks also allude to rivalries and disputes between figures within the Palestinian leader’s entourage.
Rajoub, for example, openly accuses his counterpart in the Gaza Strip, Mohammed Dahlan, and Arafat’s controversial “economic advisor” Mohammed Rashid of colluding with Israel ­ particularly when the Israeli Army blitzed the Preventive Security headquarters at Beituniya, in the West Bank, when it invaded Ramallah at the end of March.
In an interview with the Saudi-run pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat, Rajoub implies that the US and Israel were trying to cultivate Dahlan, Rashid and others as “alternative” Palestinian leaders while targeting their potential opponents, and he portrays the Israeli attack on his force’s base as part of that scheme.

Rajoub strongly denies charges that he handed Hamas prisoners who were detained in the Beituniya complex to the Israelis, saying they agreed to give themselves up along with the 400 other people on the premises after the Israelis besieged it for four days and then subjected it to a devastating 18-hour bombardment by tanks and helicopter gunships. The majority of those people were women, children and other civilians who had taken refuge in the complex, he says, adding that when he tried to negotiate their safe evacuation, “the Israelis refused and said either all 400 people inside must leave or they will all die.”

“I accuse Mohammed Dahlan and Mohammed Rashid of having been partners in this offensive against Preventive Security,” Rajoub says, adding that Dahlan and chief negotiator Saeb Erekat had previously conveyed to him an assurance from the Americans that neither Arafat’s compound nor his own headquarters would be shelled or stormed by the Israelis. “I believe that was an ambush for me.”
Asked why the US did not communicate the message to him directly, Rajoub replies: “I am not the Americans’ and Israelis’ channel of contact. They favor those who appear on satellite TV screens to claim to be patriots and try to accuse Preventive Security of cowardice.”

He adds that the US and Israel have been “striving to create an alternative Palestinian leadership” since the Camp David talks in July 2000, “and it is no secret that they have been working on these names. They described them as pragmatic and objective, and have been backing them since then and acting to purge the West Bank to their advantage … Israel has been ‘polishing’ these individuals, strengthening their position, providing them with whatever facilities are possible and seeking to destroy on their behalf everyone who is committed to the (PA as an) institution and to the option of democracy and elections. What happened to Preventive Security was part of that.”

Rajoub also says that Dahlan and Rashid had respectively negotiated the much-criticized deals that led to the lifting of Israel’s sieges on Arafat’s compound in Ramallah and the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Both agreements have been condemned by Palestinians, the former for placing Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine leader Ahmad Saadat and five others under Anglo-American custody in a Jericho jail, and the latter for agreeing to the enforced exile of 13 Fatah and Hamas activists who were among the scores of people taking sanctuary in the church.

The Bethlehem deal is also criticized by Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) in an interview with the London-based pan-Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat.
He says the principle that Palestinians could no longer be deported from their native land had been established in 1994, when hundreds of deportees were allowed to return, “and it is a principle we should uphold.”
Abu Mazen also condemned what he termed the “chaos” that had overcome the PA as a consequence of Israel’s blitz on the West Bank and its arrest of thousands of Fatah activists, saying he is referring to the “political chaos, military chaos, security chaos, and media chaos, with everyone speaking in the name of everyone else and everyone doing whatever they please.”

That experience had underscored the need for thorough and urgent reform of the PA and its institutions, he declared, stressing that “the authority is now in worse shape than it has ever been,” and that the longer reforms are delayed “the more the current situation will take hold.”
“Everything in the PA institutions needs to be reconsidered, starting with the Fatah movement’s institutions and those of the PLO … and extending to the (Cabinet), where many changes need to be made,” Abu Mazen told Asharq al-Awsat.
The PA’s “media situation” also needs to be overhauled, he said, remarking that “it will not do for anyone who wants to act as though they are an official spokesman or talking on behalf of the authority, the leadership or the Palestinian people.”

Abu Mazen added that the number of Palestinian security agencies had to be reduced and their performance improved, warning that “keeping the situation as is” could cause rivalries between the different agencies. He said the public mud-slinging that had taken place between various PA security chiefs “is quite frankly a disgrace and should stop.”
But Abu Mazen stressed that the Palestinians themselves would decide what reforms are needed and how to implement them, and it was unacceptable for outsiders to attempt to dictate changes or define how the security forces should be reorganized, who should lead them and how they should function.

In particular, he emphatically rejected the notion of external powers attempting to impose on the Palestinians an “alternative leadership” to Arafat’s.
“So long as we live, we will never agree to them imposing anything on us,” he vowed.
“We do not listen to what the West demands, but nevertheless it is right that we need to reform, and to do so now rather than tomorrow, despite the fact that we are still in the midst of a battle. Even so, we should start the process immediately so we can achieve what we want and then turn to the world and say: This is our position and this is our condition. But in the current anarchic state, we will get nowhere,” Abu Mazen said.

He stressed that municipal polls and fresh elections to the Palestinian legislature should be held as soon as possible, suggesting local elections could be called in a month or two and parliamentary elections in six months time.
The previous official view, that elections should be deferred until circumstances on the ground are more conducive and the Israelis have pulled out of more Palestinian areas, had been overtaken by events, he said. “If we continue awaiting circumstances, those circumstances might not help,” he remarked.

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