The PLO is rising - and the PA is sinking
As the Palestinian Authority gasps for breath, the vacuum is again
being filled by PLO organizations
By Danny Rubinstein
Ha'aretz
February 20, 2001

After the signing of the Oslo agreement, over seven years ago, the activity of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as the leading organization in the Palestinian national movement dwindled considerably. Its place was taken by the Palestinian regime that was established in the territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Now, after the Oslo process has collapsed and as the Palestinian regime is crumbling, there are signs indicating that the PLO and its various subsidiary organizations have come to life again. "The rule now in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is by the local leadership, whose people call themselves ministers and who deal with internal matters only," Farouk Kadoumi, the person responsible for external matters in the PLO, said scornfully in a newspaper interview last week. Kadoumi, who opposed the peace process from the outset, is now taking pride in having been right in his criticism of the Oslo agreement.

The Intifada that is continuing in the Palestinian territories is bringing about profound changes in Palestinian politics. The essence of the change: a return to the 1970s and 1980s, to the days before the peace process during which Palestinian national activity was concentrated in the PLO institutions and in the hands of various groups that for the most part operated under its umbrella.

In recent years, the PLO was neglected. After the return of Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Yasser Arafat to Gaza and the West Bank in 1994, the Palestinians had no interest in the veteran movement. They
were busy building up the mechanisms of the new governing authority. A year after Arafat came to the territories Ghasan Al-Hatib of the Bir- Zeit University said that the PLO "has become a mummified body -
outwardly it looks fine, more or less, but in fact there is no breath of life in it."

What he meant was that the PLO institutions had ceased to convene. The Palestinian National Council (PNC), which was the PLO parliament that had met annually or every two years since 1964, ceased to function almost entirely. Arafat did not want to convene the hundreds of delegates, many of whom in the Palestinian diaspora had reservations about the Oslo agreement. He was forced to convene the PNC once in 1996, in Gaza, in order to keep his commitment to change the Palestinian National Charter, and again at the end of 1998, for an informal assembly, that had also been forced upon him, with the participation of former U.S. president Bill Clinton - again because of the Israeli demand (by Benjamin Netanyahu's government) to ratify the change in the Charter.

The PLO Steering Committee, which for many years had served as the government of the Palestinian movement, also ceased, in effect, to exist. Arafat co-opted the members of the Committee who lived in the
West Bank and the Gaza Strip into the cabinet of the Palestinian Authority and set up a new body - "the Palestinian leadership." Its more than 30 members met weekly on a regular basis. The problem was that about half the members of the Steering Committee did not participate in these meetings; some of them were not there because they lived outside the territories, and others boycotted the meetings because of their opposition to the Oslo agreement.

The decline of the PLO was also manifested in Palestinian policy. The idea of "the armed struggle" against Israel, which had guided the Palestinian national movement for decades, seemed to have vanished from
the world. It was replaced by security cooperation with the Israelis, in accordance with the Oslo agreement. More important than this was the neglect in recent years of the refugees, and of the Palestinian diaspora in general. For seven years and more, after the Oslo agreement, Arafat spoke repeatedly of the establishment of the Palestinian state with its capital in Jerusalem and about the Al-Aqsa Mosque. He did not explicitly mention the right of return.

In recent weeks everything has changed. The circumstances of the Intifada have brought the armed conflict back into the arena. "The Sharon-Barak government of generals means war," declared headlines in the Palestinian media over the past few days. Thus, anyone in the West Bank and Gaza who dares to mention the possibility of security coordination with the Israelis is immediately branded a traitor. At demonstrations and rallies, as well as in a series of broadsides and other Palestinian publications, the heads of Arafat's security organizations are warned not to have any contact with Israelis on security matters.

The refugee problem and the right of return are back in the headlines. These are dealt with daily in rallies and processions, and newspaper articles in all the concentrations of refugees in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, in Jordan, and mainly in Syria and Lebanon. In several places what is happening in the territories has begun to be called the "Intifada of return," and the refugees are once again playing the central role they played in the past in the Palestinian national movement.

For example, there are daily reports in the territories of the activities of refugees from the Ain Al-Hilwa Camp in Lebanon near Sidon, as if they were part of the Intifada. Last weekend, footage was shown on many of the Arab television stations of the young men in the camp parading with their weapons and bearing large portraits of Halil Abu Alba, the terrorist bus driver of the attack at the Azor junction.

Residents of Bethlehem relate that during almost the entire period of firing on Gilo, on Rachel's Tomb and on the Tunnel Road and its continuation, the road to Hebron and at the Israel Defense Forces camp at Beit Sahur, the shooting has been done by members of families of refugees from Ein Karem and Malha, which are inside the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem, and from the Jerusalem corridor - the areas of Beit Shemesh and Beit Guvrin.

They live in the poorer neighborhoods of the cities and towns and in a series of camps from Al-Fawar and Ein Arub near Hebron to Deheishe and Aida on the outskirts of Bethlehem. Many of them see every day the
houses that had once been the homes of their forebears and their family's estates. On the last Nakba Day (Palestinian commemoration of the events of 1948) on May 15, 2000, some of them could be heard saying: "With all due respect to Al-Aqsa and the Palestinian state, what is truly sacred to us is the right to return to our homes." Now they are forcing the armed struggle on the entire region.

After the Oslo agreement died and was buried (as the Palestinian spokesmen often say), the Palestinian regime is also gasping for breath. It was established according to the format of the Oslo agreement and the peace process. When these no longer exist, it too has no place. The vacuum left by the PA regime is being filled by the various PLO organizations once again. These are headed by the Fatah, with its various divisions: the organization's veterans, the Tanzim, the Shabiba, the youth groups, the students, the released prisoners.
Together with the other political movements (the Muslim fundamentalists), they are setting up joint headquarters, popular committees and coordinating committees.

The movement's institutions of days gone by are now gathering force at the expense of the PA institutions that are dwindling away. Arafat, too, is no longer functioning as a head of state. He does not visit the West Bank, where about two-thirds of the inhabitants of the PA live, nor does he go to his office in Ramallah, the temporary capital where the governing institutions are concentrated. Instead of dealing with problems of governing, he is dealing only with external matters - as during the days of exile in Tunis.

Most of the senior people of the PA also no loner go to Ramallah. In the past the Israeli administration reported about 3,000 trips a month by PA officials between Ramallah and Gaza. Today - nothing. In most
cases, the Israeli authorities prevent such trips.

But even when they were allowed transit, most of the senior PA people preferred not to travel and to remain in their familiar and protected neighborhoods. They look like people who have lost the authority to govern, and this authority is now returning to the format of the past, to the PLO days.