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Palestinians Lacking a Coherent Body Politic

[Daily Star-Lebanon] Shlomo Avineri - Palestinians see their history as one of struggle against Zionism and Israel. But the reality is more complicated, and marked by repeated failures to create a coherent body politic, even when historical opportunities beckoned. In the 1920s, the British Mandatory government in Palestine encouraged the two national communities - Jewish and Arab - to establish communal institutions of self-government to look after education, welfare, housing, and local administration. The Jews set up a National Committee, based on an elected body, the Representative Assembly of Palestinian Jews. Regular elections took place, sometimes with more than a dozen parties competing. The Palestinians, however, never created similar embryonic state structures: an Arab Higher Committee was established, made up of regional and tribal notables, but no elections ever took place. It never succeeded in creating a generally accepted national leadership or in providing the Arab community the panoply of educational and welfare services offered to the Jewish community by its elected institutions. In 1947-1948, Palestinian Arabs rejected the UN partition plan, which envisaged separate Arab and Jewish states after the departure of the British. While Jews accepted this compromise, the Palestinian Arabs, supported by the Arab League countries, rejected it and went to war against the emerging state of Israel. What sometimes gets lost in this narrative is that the Palestinians were unable to devise coherent political institutions and a unified military command with which to confront the much smaller Jewish community. By contrast, the besieged Jewish community was able to mobilize the resources needed for a successful military campaign. Indeed, many Palestinian political leaders absconded to Beirut or Cairo once violence broke out. When the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization set up the autonomous Palestinian Authority under Arafat, instead of creating the infrastructure of the future Palestinian state, Arafat created a security state. He established a dozen competing security services - sometimes indistinguishable from clan-based militias - which consumed more than 60% of the PA budget, at the expense of education, housing, welfare, and refugee rehabilitation. Into this vacuum burst Hamas, with its network of schools, welfare services, community centers, and support organizations. The writer is a professor of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a former director-general of Israel's Foreign Ministry.
2007-07-18 01:00:00
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