[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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