For years the Palestinian leadership procrastinated on the subject of reforms, plunging deeper into the dead-end alleys of dictatorship even as critics fulminated on the necessity of democratizing in order to make an eventual state worth having. Now the process of change has finally begun, but because Yasser Arafat and his cronies waited for so long, they are face to face with the crisis of confidence encountered by every heavy-handed regime that opts too late for liberalization over continued authoritarianism: No one takes them seriously.
For some, Arafat appears to be acting solely to ward off US and Israeli pressure by rounding up Palestinian militants. For others, he cannot be trusted to institute genuine reforms that go beyond what he thinks necessary to shore up his own position. And then there are those who have been convinced by all the arbitrariness and corruption witnessed since the Oslo Accords that the Palestinian Authority cannot be overhauled, only completely torn down and wholly replaced.
And so it is that just when Arafat seems at long last like he might be ready to make the leap from national liberation to statecraft, he has boxed himself into a corner wherein suspicion and derision are the rule ­ and this at a time when he and his people need desperately to develop the kind of trust which alone can provide for proper relations between ruler and ruled.
It would be more comfortable if this state of affairs were attributable to foreign meddling, but that is not the case. The Palestinian Authority (PA) is a mess because the entity from which it sprouted, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), never evolved beyond a loose front for a plethora of revolutionary groups. The very manner in which Arafat entered into Oslo (i.e. without consulting the entities from which he derived his legitimacy as a representative of his people) was a symptom of the disease. But it has been the PA’s comportment since Oslo which has exhibited the telltale signs of wholesale political dysfunction.
Given the Palestinian diaspora’s accomplishments, the PLO should have had no trouble finding the right people to formulate and implement strategy, and the PA should have had an even easier time recruiting everyone from administrators to intellectuals as it set about erecting the outlines of a state. Instead the pre-Oslo leadership was never able to gain the trust of most of the people who should have been its most important assets, and since then it has somehow managed to get even worse: At one point no less a figure than Edward Said, the distinguished Columbia University professor whose advocacy of Palestinian rights has been as effective as it has been indefatigable, was banned from PA-ruled territory after lodging very valid complaints about how it was being run. If someone of Said’s stature can be treated so unjustly, it is easy to see why so many others have stayed away and why the PA has therefore degenerated into a collection of has-beens and never-weres who fear meritocracy because it would allow more capable individuals to take their jobs and loath due process because it might keep them from blocking potential rivals.
For all their faults, the Israelis have always understood two things: The support of international Jewry is essential to their goals, and that support cannot be maintained without a consistent legal system and a welcoming image. This is why, for instance, despite having an unmatchable roster of high-level contacts within the US government, the Jewish state is never without a phalanx of public-relations professionals to help sell its arguments. The PA’s answer is people whose halting English and unfamiliarity with the “rules” of television cause more harm than good whenever they appear in the Western media. These officials are the personification of all that is wrong with the PA. The timing of reform is less important than ensuring that people of their caliber are replaced before the damage cannot be undone.

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