Fatah flexes its muscles after the successful deployment of American-trained PA forces in two tough West Bank cities
By LESLIE SUSSER14hanas(photo credit: AP)Cover story in Issue 14, October 27, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report. To subscribe to The Jerusalem Reportclick here.
When heads of the Palestinian Authority security forces met with Israeli officers in mid-September to discuss the deployment of Palestinian police, the focus quickly turned to a looming military showdown in the West Bank between their Fatah forces and their Islamist Hamas rivals. With both sides refusing to recognize the other's legitimacy, military confrontation has become a real possibility Israeli intelligence sources say. Fatah is planning a sweeping preemptive strike and Hamas is preparing a long war of attrition that will trigger a popular uprising.
Although the immediate arena seems to be the West Bank, Fatah officers have declared publicly that the PA also must be ready to use force in Gaza, where Hamas seized control in June 2007, "to reunify the homeland." Israeli experts, however, say the talk of retaking Gaza is pure bluster and the question is whether the PA's organized forces can ward off a challenge in the West Bank from Hamas, which enjoys more popular support.
Tension has been high since the Gaza takeover, and has risen recently because PA President Mahmud Abbas, who is also the Fatah leader, wants to put off presidential elections scheduled for next January and extend his term by a year. Hamas warns that if he does so, it will declare his rule "illegitimate"; Abbas retorts that, in that case, he will declare Gaza a "mutinous" territory, implying that a military attack against Hamas there would be legitimate
Fatah's public bravado comes after the successful deployment of American-trained PA forces in two tough West Bank cities: Nablus and Jenin. In their shiny new uniforms, PA police have been able to create a new atmosphere of law and order, keeping criminals and gunmen off the streets. But whether these forces will be enough to keep Hamas at bay is another story altogether.
In the officers' meeting at the Israeli army's Judea and Samaria Headquarters at Beit-El, outside the PA capital Ramallah, the Fatah generals spoke openly of their fears that Hamas would try to organize mass demonstrations against Abbas, assassinate Fatah leaders and fan the flames of insurrection in the West Bank. They made a number of requests: That Israel allow the free movement of their forces to deal with Hamas-instigated local uprisings; that it approve the supply of more weapons and ammunition from Jordan; and that the American general, Keith Dayton, who has been training PA forces, be authorized to train more people at more sites.
The Fatah commanders used harsh language against Hamas and openly made an unprecedented appeal for help from Israelis against other Palestinians (even though they knew there was an Israeli journalist, Yedioth Ahronoth commentator Nahum Barnea, in the room). "We have a common enemy!" declared the PA chief of staff, General Dhiab al-Ali.
General Ali and the others knew Hamas would jump at the chance to use the meeting and their comments in it to denounce them as "collaborators." But that was a knock they were prepared to take for the chance to rally their troops. Their fighting talk was intended to reflect confidence in their ability to defeat Hamas and to send an unmistakable message that, in a showdown, the Israelis would side with them. Indeed, the Israeli officers promised to set up a joint committee to consider all the Fatah requests.
The widening of the Fatah-Hamas breach raises a number of testing questions for Israeli policy-makers: In the event of an armed confrontation, to what extent should the IDF help Fatah? Should Israel see the new PA forces as the harbinger of an orderly Palestinian state, providing a basis for a two-state solution? Can the new forces guarantee a peaceful Israeli handover of the West Bank to Palestinian rule or should they be seen merely as a means to help contain a potentially explosive situation on the ground? Does the rift between Fatah and Hamas serve Israel's interests, or should Israel encourage dialogue between them for a unified Palestinian position that might make the implementation of an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal more feasible? In other words, how should Israel handle the struggle between Fatah and Hamas for control of the Palestinian national movement?
The gradual disappearance of armed gangs roaming the streets of the West Bank began after Israel offered Palestinian gunmen an amnesty in July last year. About 300 handed in their weapons, and were taken off the list of wanted men. Others, who kept their weapons, lay low to evade arrest. American-trained Palestinian forces took over from Israeli forces the policing of Nablus in November 2007, and Jenin in May 2008, consolidating the process. Both Nablus and Jenin had been notorious for their lawlessness and the transition to Palestinian-imposed law and order was striking.
The training of the new forces is part of a U.S.-European master plan for transforming the security and economic situations in the West Bank. If Palestinians are able to demonstrate a capacity for law and order, Israelis will feel more confident about handing over territory, and Palestinians with a higher standard of living will be more amenable to making peace, the thinking goes. The driving force behind the security program is Gen. Dayton, who has already trained 1,000 Palestinian police at a base in Jordan, and is currently training 500 more there. He is also running courses in Jericho for the elite PA presidential guard, and has helped establish a strategic planning department in Ramallah. The next step will be to put Palestinian forces into other West Bank cities, starting with Hebron or Tulkarm. A force is already patrolling the Hebron environs.
Israel is also doing its bit. It has pulled back its forces from around Palestinian cities and is allowing greater freedom of movement by removing dozens of roadblocks and checkpoints. Israeli commanders say they are conducting fewer night incursions into the cities to arrest fugitive militiamen so as not to undermine the authority of the PA forces. They are also leaving work against Hamas social welfare organizations, the "Dawa," which funnel large amounts of money to the Islamist militias, to the PA. Of a list of around 60 such organizations handed them by the Israelis, the PA claims to have closed down more than 50.
The big question, though, is how the PA forces will perform in the event of a more serious showdown with Hamas. In the fighting in Gaza in June 2007, well-armed PA units crumbled against smaller Hamas forces because they lacked motivation and leadership. Commanders fled to hotels in Ramallah, leaving badly paid troops to face well-ordered, zealous Islamist forces. Many ran away, others switched sides and the rest were routed. Within days Hamas was in control of Gaza, taking the Israelis and the Americans, who had started training PA forces in Gaza, completely by surprise.
Dayton expects the PA units will acquit themselves far better in the future. They are better trained, the commanders will be fighting with their backs against the wall and the men will have much stronger motivation, especially if they believe they are fighting for a well-ordered Palestinian state.
Israeli security experts are skeptical. Although they believe the military balance of power in the West Bank is tilted heavily in favor of the PA, they are not sure that when it comes to the crunch, its troops will fight any better than they did in Gaza.
Talking to The Report, Brig. Gen. (res.) Shalom Harari, a former adviser to the Defense Ministry on Palestinian affairs, goes further. He totally rejects the idyllic security picture painted by the Americans and picked up in some of the Israeli press.
In his view, falatan - the lawlessness of guns in hands other than the central authority - is still widespread. All that has happened, he says, is that the guns and the private armies have gone underground. "The new police don't dare tackle the militias head-on. There is no 'assembly line' for dealing with militia fighters or money men: that is, no process of arrest, trial and jail. At best, people are detained and released a few days later," he says.
Harari, now a senior researcher at the Institute for Counterterrorism at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, acknowledges that on the face of it, the balance of power in the West Bank favors the PA and Fatah. "In the West Bank, they have about 40,000 armed men, whereas Hamas has not been able to build a significant counter-force under their noses, the way it did in Gaza. It doesn't have the 7,000-strong militia, which was the backbone for the coup in Gaza," he observes. "But the reason they don't have it is because we have been making arrests almost every night for the past three years. The PA forces help here and there, but we do most of the work."
Still, Harari acknowledges that the PA has learned from its mistakes in Gaza. "One of the lessons was that their forces there were infiltrated by Hamas. They have set up a special vetting unit to ensure that this is not the case today," he says.
But all that is on the surface. Underground, all over the West Bank, geysers of resistance are bubbling. According to Harari, the militias, including Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front (PFLP) and Democratic Front (DFLP) have an estimated 120,000 weapons - rifles, grenades and explosive charges - "under the floorboards waiting to come out. And if there is a confrontation, bear in mind that groups like PFLP and DFLP which, although secular, were against Oslo, might side with Hamas and Islamic Jihad."
In Harari's view, the PA will be able to hold on against Hamas and the others only as long as Israeli forces remain in the West Bank. If they were to withdraw, he reckons it would take Hamas at most six months to take over. Israel, he says, must therefore stay in the West Bank and back Fatah. "We have no choice. We can't just leave 250,000 settlers open to the attacks of Hamas armed gangs and suicide bombers. Moreover, if we left, within six months Hamas would build up terrorist infrastructures capable of reaching Tel Aviv. And if the PA is ready to help us keep a lid on this terror, why not?" he declares.
As for Gaza, Harari dismisses as absurd any idea of the PA overthrowing Hamas there. "First let them take Tulkarm, Bethlehem and Hebron," he scoffs. But looking at the overall Palestinian-Israeli balance, Harari argues that sooner or later Israel will have to go into Gaza to deal with the Hamas military machine there. "In my view, what will happen is that after some major terrorist attack from Gaza, Israel will go in and smash Hamas. It will be very costly, but there is no choice," he asserts.
Not all Israeli experts share Harari's unflattering assessment of the changes on the Palestinian street. Left-wingers like Ron Pundak, director general of the Tel Aviv-based Peres Center for Peace and one of the early negotiators in the Oslo process, see in the new deployment of Palestinian police a highly significant step towards Palestinian statehood. According to Pundak, it is having a powerful "ripple effect" on Israelis, Palestinians and the militia groups as they all begin to see the emergence of a new reality that could usher in a period of peace and quiet. For Israelis, says Pundak in an interview with The Report, the main message is that they can at last confidently withdraw from the West Bank, because there is someone on the Palestinian side to take over.
The question is can the PA be trusted not to turn its guns on Israel once it withdraws.
In Pundak's view, it can. "The PA's main goals today are to maintain internal security and reach a peace agreement with Israel. And if Israel were to withdraw under the terms of an agreement, they would have no reason to turn their weapons on it. Moreover, it would be a phased withdrawal, with strict monitoring of each stage, and foreign forces could be introduced to take over from the retreating Israelis to ensure the peace," he declares.
As to the looming showdown in the West Bank, Pundak dismisses any chance of a Hamas victory. "On the West Bank, the Hamas and Jihad forces are very weak. So I don't take all this talk about what's going to happen in January [if Abbas defers the presidential election] seriously. What will happen is whatever Abbas wants to happen. If he decides he wants to stay on as president, he'll stay. And if he wants to step down, he will," he insists.
But Pundak adds a significant rider: Over time, he says, Fatah will only be able to stand up to Hamas if there is a credible peace process. He argues that in the absence of a peace process, chaos will return to the West Bank, and that, in a state of anarchy, the radicals always get stronger. "Since Oslo in 1993, history shows that whenever there was a political process, the moderates gained the upper hand, and whenever the political process got stuck, the extremists set the tone, until in Gaza Hamas eventually won control. Without a peace process, the same thing could happen in the West Bank," he maintains.
Although the PA is reportedly planning a large-scale preemptive strike against Hamas in the West Bank, Israeli experts, who know the situation on the ground well, do not expect them to be able to deliver a knockout blow. Moshe Elad, a former military governor of Jenin and Bethlehem, tells The Report that Fatah commanders themselves recognize this. "Hamas could start a drawn-out, low-intensity rebellion and that's precisely what the Fatah people fear: A war of attrition they can only win if the Israel Defense Forces [IDF] helps them where necessary. They didn't come to the IDF and ask for help for nothing. They are really worried," he says.
According to Elad, now a researcher on Palestinian society at the Haifa Technion's Shmuel Neeman Institute, what worries Fatah most is the fact that Hamas enjoys far more public support. "Fatah may have the weapons, but Hamas has the people behind it, and the great fear of the Fatah forces is that, in a showdown, the Palestinian public will side with Hamas," he asserts.
To illustrate what this means on the ground, Elad maintains that Abbas can't even move around freely on the West Bank. "Abbas has not made any visits on the West Bank outside his Muqata'ah headquarters in Ramallah. People say he hasn't got time. Nonsense, Arafat used to visit West Bank communities every week. I think Abbas has a problem going into most places, because his people are not in control," Elad contends. His bottom line: Although Fatah has a long score to settle over June 2007 and wants revenge, it will not able to destroy Hamas resistance at a stroke.
The fact that its forces are being trained by Americans and supported by Israel is not helping Fatah's cause on the ground, says Yohanan Tzoreff, a researcher on Palestinian government and society at the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies. Indeed, he tells The Report, Hamas is exploiting this to depict the new PA police force as anti-Palestinian. "They call it the 'Dayton force,' which enters mosques and clamps down on the public in a way that serves foreign interests, not the Palestinian people. They depict it as part of a foreign plot in which the PA is a partner. And there are lots of people out there ready to take this at face value."
But Tzoreff, a former adviser to Israel's military government in Gaza, does not think the growing Fatah-Hamas tension will lead to violent clashes. They, and the Arab world as whole, he argues, have too much to lose. "I think as we get closer to January you will see increasing mobilization of the Arab world to prevent a blowup. Because of the potential implications of a Fatah-Hamas showdown for Arab regimes, who fear a backlash, they will do everything possible to create some sort of dialogue between them," he predicts.
The result of this dialogue could be an agreement in which Abbas's term remains valid for an agreed period, and in return the Hamas government in Gaza is not defined as mutinous. "That is basically what each side wants: to be recognized by the other as legitimate. That doesn't mean that it will be possible to go ahead with a serious political process, but it does mean that each side will be able to live unmolested in its own backyard," says Tzoreff.
If the efforts to prevent it fail and there is a confrontation, Tzoreff says the Palestinians will quickly stop it themselves by drawing Israel into the fighting.
"When they shoot at each other, they almost invariably shoot at Israel to draw it in, and once that happens, both sides turn against Israel and the domestic Palestinian violence stops," he observes.
In Tzoreff's view, not only the Arab world, but Israel too should be pressing for dialogue between Fatah and Hamas. This, he argues, is the only way to take a genuine process forward. Current Israeli policy is to warn Abbas that if he talks to Hamas, Israel will break off all ties with him. This approach, says Tzoreff, should be reversed.
"We should be saying to Abbas: 'We want to reach a deal, and, as the elected president, your job is to create a Palestinian consensus around the agreement.' And for that he must be encouraged to talk to all the relevant powerbrokers," Tzoreff argues.
The growing Fatah-Hamas rift coincided with a changing of the guard in Israel.
As tensions mounted on the West Bank, Prime Minister designate Tzipi Livni was holding intensive talks on the formation of a new government. If she succeeds, the Fatah-Hamas standoff will almost certainly be one of the first big issues to cross her desk. She will have to decide how much to help Fatah and how best to take the peace process forward. And the first decisions of a new, untried Israeli prime minister could have major local and regional ramifications. •
Cover story in Issue 14, October 27, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report. To subscribe to The Jerusalem Reportclick here.
if(catID != 151){
var cont = `Take Israel home with the new Jerusalem Post Store
