Abbas'
Village League
By Arjan El Fassed
11 September, 2007
The
Electronic Intifada
For as long Palestinians have
resisted violent Israeli policies against them, successive Israeli governments
have tried to undermine Palestinian unity and foment divisions. A principal
strategy has been to try to foster alternative leaders willing to abandon
fundamental Palestinian demands for justice and focus on an agenda with
which Israel is comfortable.
This is taking place now
as Israel shuns the elected Hamas movement, and tries to prop up the
discredited Fatah leadership headed by Mahmoud Abbas. Following the
elections, Israel kidnapped dozens of elected officials belonging to
Hamas and is still holding them in its prisons.
There is a great deal of
continuity here; a key component of Israeli policy has been to refuse
to recognize legitimate Palestinian leadership. While it now embraces
the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and shuns Hamas, until 1993
Israel refused to consider the PLO as a possible negotiating partner.
Israel could always produce internationally acceptable reasons for such
a position. After all, one would not expect a "respectable"
country to negotiate with "terrorists," as Israel always did
and still does refer to Palestinian leaders. Even after the PLO's historic
concessions in 1988 when the Palestinian National Council, the parliament-in-exile,
accepted the two-state solution -- without receiving any reciprocal
recognition from Israel -- Israel refused to deal with the PLO directly.
The policy goes back even further.
In 1976, in an attempt to
forge an alternative leadership to the PLO, Israel allowed elections
to be held for municipalities in the occupied West Bank. Contrary to
Israel's hopes and expectations, PLO-aligned mayors and councillors
swept the board. They called for a complete end to the occupation and
opposed talks on Palestinian "autonomy" between Israel and
Egypt at Camp David. In 1978 the leaders of this new movement formed
the National Guidance Committee, which comprised of a wide spectrum
of Palestinian national political orientations and included elected
mayors (like Bassam Shaka'a and Karim Khalaf who were maimed when Gush
Emunim settlers aided by the Israeli military planted bombs in their
cars in 1980) and representatives of trade unions, societies and associations.
Just as it has done with
Hamas leaders more recently, Israel dismissed the PLO mayors, expelling
many of them into exile. In 1980 the mayors of Hebron and Halhoul were
deported and the mayors of Nablus and Ramallah were severely maimed
by car bombs planted by Israeli death squads. In March 1982, Israel
occupation authorities dismissed all elected Palestinian mayors and
city councils.
In the early 1990s, Israel
was pressured by Washington to negotiate directly with the Palestinians,
though it still refused to talk to the PLO. Instead, the negotiations
that started in Madrid and continued in Washington, were conducted with
respected independent personalities such as Haidar Abdel Shafi -- with
the backing of the PLO. It quickly became clear, to Israel's frustration,
that these negotiators would stick to basic Palestinian principles and
not sell out Palestinian rights. Simultaneously, Israel began a secret
back channel with the PLO leadership that had been weakened and bankrupted
because its embrace of Saddam Hussein following his invasion of Kuwait.
Those talks led to the disastrous Oslo Accords that transformed the
PLO into a security subcontractor in the still-occupied West Bank and
Gaza Strip.
In December 2001, a year
into the second intifada, and after the failure of the Camp David summit
in July 2000 to impose a bantustan solution on the Palestinians, then-Israeli
prime minister Ariel Sharon decided that PLO leader Yasser Arafat had
outlived his usefulness to Israel. Sharon declared Arafat "irrelevant"
and cut off relations with the Palestinian Authority. So began a slow
decline until Arafat died under mysterious circumstances in November
2004. Arafat was replaced by the current Palestinian Authority President
Mahmoud Abbas, who had long enjoyed explicit backing from Washington
and who was the key Palestinian figure in the secret channel that led
to Oslo.
Abbas is now explicitly armed
and backed by Israel and the United States and has declared war on the
Hamas movement. We can reach back to another precedent to understand
his current role. Following the debacle (from Israel's perspective)
of the 1976 municipal elections, it set up the Village Leagues in the
1980s. These were bodies staffed by Palestinian collaborators appointed
by Israel.
Unlike the National Guidance
Committee and many of the officials elected in 1976, the Village Leagues
did not struggle against the occupation. While Israel attempted to suppress
an authentic Palestinian national movement and uproot the influence
of the PLO, the Village Leagues were an attempt to impose an Israeli
form of limited autonomy. The Village League of the Hebron district
was established in 1979, headed by former Jordanian Cabinet Minister
Mustafa Dudin. In 1981, two more leagues were established in Ramallah
and Bethlehem districts. Some members of the Village Leagues had criminal
histories.
Because of their willingness
to collaborate, Village League leaders were given a facilitator role
by Israel; money was channeled through them and they received various
benefits from the Israeli rulers. Through a series of military orders,
the Leagues were authorized by Israel to arrest and detain political
activists and establish armed militias, as well as carry out administrative
and bureaucratic tasks such as issuing drivers' licenses. Palestinians
living in rural areas had to turn to the Village Leagues for everything
from work permits to family reunification permits.
Palestinians responded to
the forming of the Village Leagues with demonstrations and strikes,
coordinated by the National Guidance Committee. After the deportation
of the mayors of Hebron and Halhoul and the maiming of the mayors of
Nablus and Ramallah, Ariel Sharon (at that time defense minister) outlawed
the National Guidance Committee. The elected mayors and the municipal
councils were dismissed.
Israel hoped that the Village
Leagues would create and empower a "moderate" Palestinian
leadership that would then to agree to negotiate with Israel on the
subject of "autonomy" -- a code word for limited self-rule
under continued Israeli occupation and colonization. The leagues were
designed to provide a "moderate" Palestinian leadership that
would be prepared to negotiate with Israel on the subject of autonomy
for the West Bank. For that same purpose the Palestinian Authority was
established and it is for this reason that Abbas is currently allowed
to talk with Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
There is a disturbing parallel
with current Israeli policy: just as Israel now uses the Abbas-dominated
militias of the Palestinian Authority to crack down on those who resist
the occupation, Israel attempted to do the same with the Village Leagues.
Members of the Village Leagues had little hesitation when it came to
the use of force: they manned roadblocks, carried out checks on identity
cards and broke up meetings and demonstrations against the occupation.
It is not known how many
members the Leagues had and how much support it received. What is known
is that Village League leaders were widely viewed as corrupt, dishonest
and having accepted an Israeli definition of the problem. The aims of
the Leagues were, in the words of the Hebron district Village League
leader Mohammad Nasser: "to improve relations with Israel, to prevent
terrorism, to combat communism and to work for the establishment of
peace and democracy."
If one replaces the words
"communism" with "Islamic extremism" then one has
a description that matches almost exactly the stated goals of the Abbas
leadership even as it cracks down on civil liberties, gerrymanders election
laws, and shuts down over one hundred civil society organizations.
Yet despite Israeli efforts
to invigorate the Leagues with massive support, by 1983 they had begun
to disintegrate, unable to operate in the face of public resistance.
Many Palestinians already consider the players in Abbas' regime as little
more than criminals and collaborators. It is only a matter of time before
today's Village League, headquartered in Ramallah, headed by Abbas and
his unelected prime minister Salam Fayyad, and armed and funded by Israel,
the European Union and the United States, is also disbanded by the people.
Arjan El Fassed is cofounder
of The Electronic Intifada.
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