[News] Pinochet in Palestine
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PINOCHET IN PALESTINE
_________________________________________________________________________
AL-AHRAM WEEKLY
Opinion
Issue No. 819, 9-15 November 2006
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/819/op2.htm
Joseph Massad looks at the similarities between regime change in
Chile and Palestine and condemns the collaboration between Fatah and
Palestine's enemies
Before the United States government subcontracted the Chilean
military to overthrow the democratically elected government of
Salvador Allende in 1973, it carried out a number of important
missions in the country in preparation for the coup of 11 September.
These included major strikes, especially by truck owners, which
crippled the economy, massive demonstrations that included
middle-class housewives and children carrying pots and pans demanding
food, purging the Chilean military of officers who would oppose the
suspension of democracy and the introduction of US-supported fascist
rule, and a major media campaign against the regime with the CIA
planting stories in newspapers like El Mercurio and others. This was
in a context where also the Communist Party and the Leftist
Revolutionary Movement (MIR) criticised and sometimes attacked the
Allende regime from varying leftist positions.
The Chilean example is important to keep in mind when one looks at
the Palestinian situation today, as it functions as a sort of
training video for US-planned anti-democratic coups elsewhere in the
world. Not only are the US and Israel financially backing the open
preparation for a coup to be staged by the top leadership of Fateh
(and in the case of Israel allowing weapons' transfers to Palestinian
Authority [PA] President Mahmoud Abbas's Praetorian Guard), but so
are the intelligence services of a number of Israel-and US-friendly
Arab countries whose intelligence services have set up shop openly in
Ramallah more recently, making their longstanding and major, though
understated, involvement in running the Palestinian territories more
open and shameless. Indeed the intelligence "delegation" of one such
Arab country has rented out a multi-story building in Ramallah to
conduct their operations there.
Israel has helped this effort all along by kidnapping and arresting
Fateh members who resist the collaborationist policies of the top
leadership. As for the leadership itself, it has periodically purged
members of Fateh who oppose its policies, and marginalised those in
the Diaspora who continue to resist them. The Fateh/PA coup leaders
consist of Abbas and the ruling triumvirate of Mohamed Dahlan, Yasser
Abd Rabbo, and Nabil Amr. The profiles of these three make them well
suited for the tasks ahead. Dahlan is universally known as America's
and Israel's main corrupt military man on the ground. Abd Rabbo (aka
Yasser Abd Yasser, literally "Yasser worshipper of Yasser" on account
of his subservience to Arafat) is the architect of the Geneva
accords, which recognise Israel's right to be a racist Jewish state
as legitimate and reject the right of Palestinian refugees to return
as illegitimate. He recently upheld the Israeli position when
fighting with the Qatari foreign minister and his staff during the
latter's visit to the occupied territories. Amr is the former PA
information minister, and a former visiting fellow at the Israel
lobby think tank the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He is
also the speechwriter for Abbas and Dahlan.
Abbas and these three have undertaken not only to launch massive
strikes by the Fateh security thugs that they have armed to police
the territories on behalf of Israel, and strikes by the bureaucracy
that staffs the PA ministries, but also have coerced large numbers of
Palestinians, including teachers and professors, under the force of
guns, to uphold a strike against Hamas, when most of them had voted
for Hamas in the first place and refuse to strike. Palestinians who
have fought for decades to keep their schools and universities open
against Israeli draconian closures and suspension of Palestinian
education, are now forced by Fateh and its armed thugs to stop the
Palestinian educational process with strikes against Hamas, and
threaten to shoot people if they refuse to follow Fateh's coup directives.
In addition, Abbas and the Fateh/PA triumvirate have organised
demonstrations in Ramallah by middle-class Palestinians, including
housewives, who brought out their pots and pans, in a scene borrowed
from 1973 Santiago, in demonstrations against Hamas. The
Fateh-controlled press, especially Al-Ayyam is fomenting major
anti-Hamas propaganda campaign in preparation for the coup and is
thus playing the same role as El Mercurio did in Chile. Al-Ayyam is
aided in its efforts by the anti-Hamas secular Palestinian
intelligentsia, most of whose members are on the payroll of the
bankrollers of the Oslo process and its NGOs. These old leftist
Palestinians, like their counterparts in Lebanon, are better known
today as the right-wing left, as they take up right-wing positions
while insisting that they are still leftists based on positions they
had held in the 1980s or earlier.
The plan is that the Fateh/PA rulers would do their utmost to provoke
Hamas to start the war at which point Fateh, with the aid of the
intelligence services of friendly Arab countries, as well as
assistance from Israel and the US, would crush Hamas and take over.
Indeed, the first unsuccessful round took place when the Israeli
government kidnapped a third of the Hamas government, both cabinet
ministers and parliament members, and placed them in Israeli jails.
This was not sufficient to bring Hamas down, and not for lack of help
that Fateh rendered the Israeli occupiers. Aside from the initial
burning of the Legislative Council building, Fateh thugs have also
burned the prime minister's office, shot at his car, burned offices
in different ministries several times, harassed and threatened Hamas
ministers and parliamentarians whom Israel failed to kidnap and
arrest, refused to allow the government ministries to operate, and so
forth. Hamas however, is wisely adamant that it will respond by force
only when Fateh launches an all-out war to bring about its planned
coup, but not before.
Fateh's planned coup is not only based on the popularity of Hamas and
its electoral victory but also on Hamas's increased ability to defend
itself against Fateh forces. If the US and Israel armed Fateh thugs
under Arafat's leadership to crush the first Palestinian Intifada and
any remaining resistance to the occupation since 1994, today, Hamas
is almost as well- armed as Fateh forces and can defend the rights of
the Palestinians to resist the Israeli occupation and the well-armed
Palestinian collaborators that help to enforce it. This is where the
situation today differs measurably from that of the mid-1990s. To
offset this new balance of forces, the United States government,
according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, has been training Abbas's
Praetorian Guard in Jericho for over a month with American, British,
Egyptian, and Jordanian military instructors, and is providing arms
to them in preparation for the confrontation with Hamas. The Israeli
cabinet in turn has recently approved the transfer of thousands of
rifles from Egypt and Jordan to Abbas's forces. The Israelis also
approved a US request that Israel allow the Badr Brigade -- part of
the Palestine Liberation Army currently stationed in Jordan -- to
deploy in Gaza. These steps have been conceived by General Keith
Dayton, the American security coordinator in the occupied
territories, who wants the Badr Brigade to function as Abbas's "rapid
reaction force in Gaza". As a possible step to increase its security
and military roles in the occupied territories, the Jordanian
government recently established a legal committee to review the
provisions of Jordan's decision to "disengage" from the West Bank
announced on 31 July 1988, effectively suggesting the possibility of
a reversal of part or all of these provisions. More recently, the
Israelis intensified their bombings and killings in Gaza, most
recently in Beit Hanoun murdering over 50 Palestinians in a few days.
Mahmoud Abbas and his ruling triumvirate are reticent at the moment
to start an open war for fear of a public backlash. They prefer to
remove Hamas through imposing a "national unity" government that
would undercut Hamas gradually and peacefully. However, Abbas and his
triumvirate are quickly losing patience. Indeed, in a
hastily-arranged meeting of the Diaspora-based Fateh Central
Committee set to convene in Amman three weeks ago to ratify the coup
plans, members of the committee opposed Abbas's US and
Israel-supported coup, which forced Abbas to cancel the meeting
altogether claiming falsely lack of quorum as the reason. This speaks
to Abbas's desperation in engineering the coup without adequate
preparation. Indeed, rumour has it across the occupied territories
that the desperate attacks committed recently against Palestinian
Christian churches were the work of undercover thugs. Those who sent
them want Palestinian Christians and the world at large to think that
these were Hamas acts in response to the pope's racist pronouncements
against Islam. Hamas duly condemned the attacks. Few in the occupied
territories believe that Hamas was behind them and most know that
they were the work of undercover agents.
The Fateh plan is simple: where Israel and its Lebanese allies failed
to crush Hizbullah in the Sixth war, Fateh and its Israeli allies
will succeed in crushing Hamas, even if the ongoing Israeli war
against Hamas and the Palestinian people becomes an all-out Seventh
war. The flurry of visits by Condoleezza Rice to the area in the last
few weeks hoped to put the final touches on this plan. If Hamas, like
Hizbullah, could be provoked into a military response, the coup
planners believe, then Fateh's and Israel's wrath (backed by the US,
Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia) would be unleashed to finish Hamas
off. The Fateh leadership and its thugs are sharpening their knives
for the showdown. Hamas has remained calm despite the pressure.
In the meantime, Ramallah proper (excluding the surrounding
villages), continues to be what many now refer to as the Palestinian
Green Zone, sheltering, in addition to the intelligence staff of
Israel and Israel-friendly Arab countries, those Palestinians who are
paid and protected by the Oslo process, whether the Oslo bureaucracy,
its technicians, and hired intellectuals, or the business and middle
classes recently habituated to the new name-brand consumerism that
the Green Zone can offer. This opulent life contrasts with the life
of the rest of the Palestinians outside Ramallah who live in misery,
hunger, and under the bombardment of the Israelis and the attacks of
savage Jewish colonial settlers, not to mention the harassment by
Fateh thugs. In Ramallah itself, the trigger-happy thugs shoot at
random during their demonstrations, injuring and sometimes killing
passers by "in error". Even the few secular intellectuals who deign
to oppose Fateh inside Ramallah are harassed in different ways. Some
of them experience mysterious robberies that are repeated every time
they make anti-Fateh statements. The preservation of Ramallah as the
Green Zone is paramount to Abbas and the Fateh/PA triumvirate, whose
fear of any reform introduced by Hamas would strip the elite of the
benefits of corruption and the dolce vita that Fateh-rule has ensured for them.
Meanwhile, Abbas and his triumvirate will continue to treat Hamas the
way Israel has treated the PLO and other Arab countries all along. In
the interminable negotiations that Hamas held with Fateh to avert a
showdown, whenever Hamas would agree to a Fateh demand, Fateh would
up the ante and insist on another concession or claim that its
initial demands always included the now expanded terms, even though
they did not. Moreover, Fateh would also publicly interpret Hamas's
concessions as having included things that Hamas had not agreed to at
all. If this is reminiscent of the post-Oslo negotiating strategy
that the Israelis used successfully with Arafat, this is because it
is the same strategy. Abbas has gone so far as to walk away from
negotiations, and refuse to speak to Hamas leaders, just as the
Israelis have done often with the PA. Moreover, if the Israelis would
often carry undercover attacks against Western interests to implicate
Arab governments, the clearest example being the infamous Lavon
Affair of the mid-1950s targeting Egypt, similar operations are being
committed to implicate Hamas by undercover agents, like the recent
example of the attacks on the churches illustrates. There may be many
more such operations being planned.
Whatever fig leaf still covered the Fateh leadership's complete
collaboration and subservience to Israeli interests has now fallen
off. As a result, there is very little left that can restrain Fateh's
actions. The next few weeks will be decided by how much Fateh leaders
are itching for a fight to save their skins and fortunes, and how
much patience Hamas can muster in the face of so much thuggery. In
the meantime, what has been unfolding in the Palestinian territories
is nothing short of the Chilean script.
Pinochet is in Palestine. His success however remains far from certain.
The writer is associate professor of modern Arab politics and
intellectual history at Columbia University. He is the author of The
Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the
Palestinians (Routledge, 2006).
Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved.
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