A Return to the "Fire"?

Violence has subsided in Israel and the Palestinian territories lately, but is the calm just a passing phase? In the latest Jerusalem Report political analyst Ehud Ya'ari points out that there are compelling reasons to consider this violent possibility entirely likely.

While the Israeli political world is now fixated on the Sharon government's disengagement effort, the Palestinians are occupied by something else entirely. There is not nearly enough coordination with Israel on the disengagement or a serious discussion on how a post-pullout Gaza would look precisely because the Palestinian Authority is spending a great deal of their energies worrying about the upcoming Palestinian legislative elections.

Most of the Palestinian opinion polls and conventional Palestinian political wisdom point to a major Hamas victory over Fatah in the upcoming elections. A Hamas victory would not be surprising, given the Palestinian Authority's reputation for corruption and Hamas's success in establishing local social services. This has led to a great deal of worry among Abu Mazen and his camp and has even led to some Fatah activists calling for Abu Mazen to postpone the election. The fact that the Sharon government's efforts to bolster Abu Mazen by removal of roadblocks and release of prisoners has been meager and insufficient does not help the situation. Some Palestinians have even been comparing Abu Mazen to Shadhli Ben Jedid, a reference to the unlucky Algerian president who called the elections that ended up in a landslide victory for the fundamentalist Islamic FIS, the equivalent of Hamas in the territories.

In order to avoid this scenario Abu Mazen and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs brigade may go to a plan B. This would include cancelling the elections and returning to violence, not against Hamas, as this would cause a fitna or civil war, but rather against Israel in what would constitute a third intifada and take the focus off of internal Palestinian political problems.

The second possibility, one also being contemplated and prepared for by Fatah, is that if Abu Mazen postpones the election or somehow undercuts Hamas' seemingly inevitable rise in political power, Hamas will see itself as free from the obligations it made in Cairo to refrain from violence and will "blow up" the political capital earned by Abu Mazen with the Israelis and Americans by "starting the fire" again in the form of new and improved longer range Kassem Rockets (still being prepared and held in reserve at this very moment) on Israeli towns and other forms of violence. Hamas has always kept this option as a "card up its sleeve" and it is for precisely this reason that they refused to sign a Hudna in Cairo which translates into a cease-fire, but rather agreed on a Tahadiyya which more accurately translates as a "lull in violence," often used as a period to regroup and strengthen. If anyone doubts this consider the statements of the head of the Hamas political bureau, Khaled Mash'al at a recent conference organized by the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram in Cairo:

"... Every term has a special meaning, and our choice [of the term] Tahdiah is not incidental. A Hudna [cease fire] is an agreement whose terms are acceptable to both sides, but in the current situation there are no such terms. The Palestinian side is the weak one... we treat this Tahdiah as a Palestinian initiative conditional to the other side fulfilling the terms...

"Tahdiah means Tahdiah [and when you talk of] escalation, there is escalation. There is a commitment and it is honored... In the eyes of Hamas, Tahdiah is a trick within the resistance plans, [but] in the eyes of the [Palestinian] Authority, Tahdiah is a step on the way out of the resistance plan... but we still give it a chance... we can be patient and suffer, but not from the perspective of those who want to be free of the Intifada..."

Is it any wonder that Abu Mazen has refrained from causing a Palestinian civil war by dismantling the terror infrastructure of Hamas as required of him by the roadmap? Even his baby step efforts of requiring militants to register their weapons have not been entirely successful. With this kind of internal Palestinian tension it is doubtful that law and order or a successful united Palestinian security forces (prerequisites for a successful Palestinian state) will be established in the Palestinian territories in the near future.