Exploiting Abbas' difficulties, Netanyahu called on him to stop paying salaries to "terrorists" in Israeli jails shortly before the Palestinian leader met U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House in early May. Republicans in the U.S. Congress, meanwhile, were reported to be drafting legislation to condition American aid -- worth roughly $500 million annually -- on the PA halting payments to political prisoners, and possibly their families too.
In Abbas' view, he needs both to prove to Israel and Washington that he is a "responsible" leader who can maintain order and deserves the chance to lead a state, and to dissipate popular anger against the occupation in case it quickly turns against the Palestinian Authority and its complicity in Israel's repression.
A Palestinian icon emerges
Barghouti alone among the Palestinian leadership has not been tarnished by the national liberation movement's catastrophic failures of the past 15 years. First, the vision of Palestinian statehood -- either in its truncated Oslo form, or its much less accommodating Islamic version -- floundered on the rocks of the armed intifada. Then it slowly sank into the dark waters of international indifference. Uniquely, Barghouti, locked away in an Israeli cell, could not be blamed for any of this. It is worth briefly plotting the dramatic changes to the Palestinian landscape since Barghouti disappeared from view.
Yasser Arafat, the man who did more than anyone to create a united Palestinian struggle for nationhood, died in mysterious circumstances in 2004. Many assumed he was assassinated by Israel, with Washington's blessing. Both had grown frustrated by his failure to deliver their goal: autocratic rule over a series of Palestinian Bantustans that guaranteed quiet for Israel and its colonizing population in the settlements.
Arafat's successor, Mahmoud Abbas, looked more to their liking. He not only forswore the armed resistance of the second intifada that Barghouti was so closely associated with, but then refused to replace it with any other form of popular struggle. In fact, quite the contrary. Abbas' primary commitment has been not to resistance but to security coordination with Israel -- effectively allowing Israel to co-opt the Palestinian security services as a subcontracted police force. Abbas has described that role as "sacred."
Whatever his failings, Arafat understood the precarious nature of Palestinian struggle -- and most especially the need to maintain a loose balance and consensus between the various Palestinian factions to prevent tensions reaching dangerously explosive levels. But the consensus prioritized by Abbas was one forged in Washington -- and thereby implicitly in Israel. The change of strategy to near-absolute accommodation with the occupying power quickly brought long-standing grievances to the surface, particularly from Hamas.
Strains between Fatah and Hamas surfaced most strongly in Gaza because that was the one place in historic Palestine where Israel briefly gave the Palestinian movement a little room to breathe. The so-called disengagement of 2005, Israel's withdrawal of its soldiers and settlers from Gaza, was followed a short time later by a Palestinian general election -- one that, to the consternation of Israel and Washington, was decisively won by Hamas. Abbas continued to rule in the West Bank, now with a deeply compromised mandate, and paid little attention to Hamas' political demands. In Gaza, the friction exploded into violence in 2007, as Hamas swept to power.
The consequence was a central fissure in Palestinian strategy and territory that remains to this day. Aided by Israel, Abbas' Fatah movement entrenched its rule in the West Bank against Hamas, becoming more obviously authoritarian and repressive. And in Gaza, Hamas created a tiny Islamic fiefdom, a toehold from which it aspired to much greater things. A vision of Palestinian statehood -- either of the diminished (Fatah) or comprehensive (Hamas) variety -- faded as the two factions greedily protected what little they had, both from each other and from Israel.
Fatah sought to disband its armed groups and invested its energies instead in the diplomatic arena. Both the popular and armed struggles were renounced in favor of lobbying western states at the U.N. over statehood and issuing threats to pursue Israel for war crimes at the International Criminal Court. Western governments -- those that had allowed Palestine's colonization over many decades -- were treated as though they could now be trusted to act as honest brokers between the Palestinians and Israel.
Gaza, meanwhile, suffered under a double hammer blow. On the one hand, it faced a long-term war of attrition through an Israeli-enforced siege of the enclave to starve the population into submission. And on the other, it endured a succession of vicious Israeli attacks that devastated Gaza's infrastructure and killed and maimed thousands of Palestinians in each round.
Israel's combined policy of isolating and intermittently pulverizing Gaza was more successful than is often acknowledged. Hamas' fiery rhetoric became more hollow, then largely evaporated. It fired fewer rockets itself and then became more repressive in preventing other groups from firing them. Its problems only intensified as Egypt's generals restored their rule in 2014, and blamed Hamas for aiding the Islamic opposition. Gaza lost its only partial access to the world through its border with Sinai.
As a result, Hamas in many ways came to mirror the compromises of Abbas' Fatah movement in the West Bank. It sought quiet from Israel by enforcing quiet in its own territory on Israel's behalf.
The Palestinian leaderships have not been entirely insensitive to the damaging effect of these changes on their credibility. But their efforts at unity have repeatedly failed for the simple reason that the structural conditions engineered by Israel and the U.S. encourage discord and feuding between the two factions, not compromise or unity.
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