After the Palestinian High Court ordered his release, the jailed PFLP secretary-gGeneral, Ahmed Saadat, says it is only American and Israeli “blackmail” that is keeping him in detention.
In an interview with the Saudi-run pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat from the Jericho prison where he is being held under the supervision of British and American wardens, Saadat called on the Palestinian Authority (PA) to comply with the High Court decision and “liberate itself from this extortion.”
“That would be a measure of its seriousness about respecting the independence of the judiciary and respecting and promoting democracy in Palestinian society,” he said. “The PA has been talking a lot about reform and the separation of powers. This is a test of its credibility.”
Saadat said he had anticipated the court ruling “because there was no justification for my detention other than submitting to Israeli and American blackmail. I still don’t know why I was arrested, and any Palestinian imprisoned without charge is entitled to be released, without having to seek a court order.”
The PA imprisoned Saadat after the PFLP’s military wing killed hard-line Israeli Minister Rehavam Zeevi in retaliation for the assassination of Saadat’s predecessor, Abu-Ali Mustafa. He and five others were transferred to prison in Jericho as part of the deal that led to the lifting of Israel’s siege on Palestinian President Yasser Arafat’s Ramallah headquarters.
Saadat told Al-Hayat that the PA should also uphold the court order as a way of demonstrating its legal sovereignty and authority over its territory.
The pan-Arab daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi agrees. It says the PA made a big mistake by arresting Saadat in the first place, and a bigger one by agreeing to have him transferred to Jericho along with Zeevi’s suspected killers, “as though he were a criminal.”
Saadat committed no crime and was not even wanted by the Israeli authorities when the PA arrested him, the paper writes. “All that happened is that the PA security services acted like their Arab counterparts ­ they arrested Saadat to put pressure on him to reveal the whereabouts of the people suspected of killing Zeevi, whose arrest the Israeli authorities were demanding.”
The Palestinian High Court had no choice but to order Saadat’s release, according to Al-Quds Al-Arabi. For if his detention could be justified on the grounds that members of his organization assassinated an Israeli minister or carried out attacks in Israeli territory, then Arafat and Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin “would have to join him in his cell.”
“Arafat spoke 10 days ago of radically reforming the PA he leads, and stressed the importance of respecting the independence and rulings of the judiciary and the principle of separation of powers. The court order to free Saadat puts him, quicker than expected, to a major test. Arafat must respect the court and free Saadat, or he will lose credibility and come across as a leader who says one thing and does another.”
“This is a predicament by any gauge, but it is President Arafat who put himself in it in the first place by arresting Saadat under Israeli pressure without considering the consequences,” Al-Quds Al-Arabi writes. His “evil counselors” care nothing for the rule of law, and “treat the Palestinian people like a flock of sheep.”
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has made the predicament worse by vowing to do everything to prevent Saadat from being freed, which might mean abducting or killing him, the paper suggests.
“The PA, in our opinion, has two options. It can either respect the judiciary, free the PFLP leader and provide him with all the necessary security and political protection, or it should proclaim its impotence and disband, out of respect for the Palestinian people and their record of struggle,” Al-Quds Al-Arabi says.
In Saudi Arabia’s leading pan-Arab daily Asharq Al-Awsat, Ghassan al-Imam balks at the way the Americans have taken up Israel’s demand for “reform” of the PA and made “democracy, rather than negotiations, the slogan of the times.”
“Everyone is now busy trying to clone a different Arafat to lead a process of change and reform … following which everyone will turn to liberation,” he writes.
“But no one speaks of cloning a different Sharon who believes in peace, or developing a peaceful and civilian ‘Israeli democracy’ rather than one led by warrior generals from left to right.”
Like the calls for an international peace conference in the absence of a peace process and proposals for a Palestinian micro-state, demands for Palestinian democratization are being made cynically, with the intention of diverting attention and losing time.
“Being preoccupied with all these side issues means avoiding the question that has become pivotal ­ that of imposing a decisive solution by international force in the occupied Palestinian territories,” Imam writes.
“If the Bush administration isn’t soon convinced, then accelerated colonization (40 new Jewish settlements) will devour the territory of the Palestinian state … where the number of Jewish settlers more than doubled to half a million during the short life of the Oslo process.
“How can elections be held, institutions be established and the foundations of a democratic, independent Palestinian state be built when Israeli forces have carved it up into squares and invade the towns and refugee camps of the ‘independent state’ whenever they wish?” Imam asks.
The Bush administration believes it can oversee the creation of a new Palestinian security service capable of stifling the intifada on Israel’s behalf, “thus sparing its democratic reputation.” It makes a mockery of democracy when CIA chief George Tenet is sent to lay its foundations by establishing a security service whose job is to suppress it, he remarks.
Nevertheless, says Imam, one cannot help wondering whether it would be possible for a Palestinian regime to be established that differs completely from the existing independent Arab “democracies.”
Democracy has been a Palestinian obsession since Arafat came to power three decades ago, and Palestinian organizations used to boast of their ability to maintain a democratic dialogue with each other while pursuing their struggle, he writes. But that dialogue never evolved into democratic participation in decision-making, “due to Arafat’s amazing ability to monopolize it without losing his popularity among the Palestinians, or at least among his supporters and admirers.”
Indeed, Arafat appeared to be democratic merely because of his independence from undemocratic Arab regimes, which tried to manipulate the Palestinian struggle by fostering organizations loyal to them, or backing others where that democratic dialogue had been “frozen” in deference to the authority of historic leaders.
The democratic dialogue within the PLO proceeded to break down completely when Arafat recognized Israel and opted for political struggle from within, parting ways with the leftist organizations that continued raising the banner of liberation in theory from a distance.
Imam says things worsened with the rise of Palestinian fundamentalist groups that emerged from the undemocratic Arab fundamentalist milieu, as evidenced by the way they refused to participate in the PLO alongside the “secularist” groups, “and proceeded to impose their suicidal methods on them, and on Arafat, as the means to liberation.”
The Palestinians upheld a “modicum of democratic coexistence” between their armed factions in the Occupied Territories and the refugee camps in exile, but they never tried to extend it beyond their “ghettos.” This, according to Imam, greatly contributed to the bloody setbacks they suffered in Jordan and Lebanon.
“Now, the democratic world has suddenly noticed the need for ‘Palestinian democracy’ for Israeli reasons that have nothing to do with concern for the Palestinians,” he writes. But it still may be doing them a favor because the biggest challenge they will face in the future will be to disarm and avoid infighting in post-independence Palestinian society ­ perhaps thereby emulating Israel, whose terrorist organizations turned into political parties after its independence.
In the Arab world, Imam recalls, the bourgeois and aristocratic forces that led the anti-colonial struggle were relatively democratic, and there were freely elected parliaments in Syria, Egypt and Lebanon since the 1920s. What destroyed these bourgeois democracies was, regrettably, the independent state itself. For they failed to understand the aspirations of a younger generation, which was attracted to parties that abandoned political democracy in the supposed pursuit of social equality, and ended up losing political and social justice.
To talk of “cloning a democratic system out of the womb of the current Arab order” is futile, writes Imam, if only because “it is impossible to give birth to a democracy that has no memory, and will not hold to account regimes whose peoples have developed grudges and vendettas against.”
While it would be impossible to “clone a democratic Saddam Hussein,” for example, in Arafat’s case the task would be difficult, for he has spent a lifetime mastering the art of monopolizing decision and outmaneuvering rivals. But it would not be impossible, if only because the Palestinian people do not ­ for all his mistakes ­ want to settle scores with him.
But democratization is not about just one man. It entails building an entire democratic society. And Arafat’s critics ­ who are eager to foil him by joining in the clamor that he re-invent himself ­ would do well “to begin with themselves,” says Imam. “It is time for a democratic Palestinian political party to be born, be it right-wing, left-wing or fundamentalist, as a lesson to the Arab world.”
The Palestinian factions should be transformed into political parties that are “open to a new generation of Palestinians and are not governed by secrecy, undisclosed plans and historic leaders who are products of the age of conspiracies.”
Elias Khoury, in Al-Quds Al-Arabi, writes that the state of democracy in the Arab world ­ be it the recent by-election in Lebanon that confirmed the primacy of clan loyalties, or the preoccupation with Palestinian “reform” that is blinding everyone to the ongoing Israeli blitz on the Palestinian areas ­ is one of the depressing realities which prompted him to seek escapist relief in the World Cup.
Perhaps a good performance by an Arab team, like Senegal’s win against France, would be “symbolic compensation for the daily humiliation,” he thought. Instead, we got Saudi Arabia’s ignominious 8-0 defeat by Germany ­ a “symbolic disaster.”
Khoury says this utter collapse was a metaphor for the contemporary condition of the Arab world. “We understand, put up with, and grow accustomed to the inability of the Arab regimes to build armies, universities, research centers, etc. But to be incapable of even putting together a football team?!”
The only conclusion one can draw, writes Khoury, is that “when societies are negated and their will is confiscated, they lose the ability to even amuse themselves with a ball.”

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