A Very Good Piece
By Tony Karon's Guest Columnist:
Arthur Neslen
"The death of Hamas preacher Majed al-Barghouti in a prison cell last week — apparently after being tortured — momentarily shattered the surface calm of news reports from Ramallah. But neither the subsequent rioting nor the fact that the dead man came from one of the most prominent Palestinian families disrupted the ‘democracy versus terror’ agenda that has distorted most news reporting out of the West Bank since last June (when Hamas took control of Gaza).....
In private, moderate former cabinet ministers now compare the government of PA president Mahmoud Abbas to France’s Vichy regime under German occupation. In public, meanwhile, West Bank trades unions affiliated with Fatah are battening down the hatches in an increasingly bitter dispute with the PA that has already sparked a two-day national strike this month.
Sources in the Fatah grassroots camp aligned with Marwan Barghouti, the movement’s single most popular leader who remains in prison in Israel, warn of a rage building among their supporters that they will be unable to control. They complain that the failure of Mahmoud Abbas’s strategy to produce anything other than an increased expansion of settlements, mass arrests and assassinations, has cost him his authority among the Fatah rank and file.....Where five years ago, Ramallah was at the heart of the intifada, today there almost seems to be an intifada against its heart.
The pavements of the town’s central roundabout, Al Manarah, were recently fenced off with the same metal security barriers used by the Israeli army at Qallandia, a checkpoint that bars most Ramallans from Jerusalem. When that didn’t stop people from taking their traditional route around the roundabout by foot, armed Fatah soldiers assumed positions on a traffic detail. Such Egyptian-style ’security’ might impress visiting Western dignitaries but it also lends weight to an increasingly powerful, if whispered, Hamas critique that the Fatah leadership is a corrupt, disorganised and undemocratic syndicate which speaks to, and governs for, a Western audience.....
....The strings attached to the aid economy – market liberalisation and a crushing of the Intifada’s resistance dynamics – only reinforce the sense that Palestine has become a truncated, failed police state before it is even sovereign.....
....Protests, such as those against Annapolis and Bush’s visit, are routinely suppressed with force. Fatah functionaries stand guard in Hamas mosques to ensure that free religious assembly does not turn into anything more civic-minded....
A friend involved with Fatah’s preventive security unit, relayed an apparently widespread belief among his comrades; that Abbas will sign up to a final status deal giving Israel Ma’ale Adumim and Ariel, while losing most of east Jerusalem and the refugees’ right to return. He would, according to the theory, then be assassinated....."
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