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Void of Leadership, Palestinian Movement Loses Momentum

[Washington Times] Joshua Mitnick - Sixty years after Israel's birth, the Palestinian national movement finds itself in a deteriorating state of paralysis. "There's almost no Palestinian leadership," said Kadoura Fares, a former Palestinian cabinet minister and member of Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party. "When [the Palestinians] shoot rockets, it's not a sign of strengthening. It's a sign of weakness." Fatah, the political party founded by Arafat as the core of the PLO, remains paralyzed by internal fighting. It has been unable to shake the image of corruption rooted in years of cronyism and patronage that became the hallmark of the PA. Eyad Sarraj, the director of the Gaza Community Mental Health Program, notes, "We have a serious structural problem in the national movement. The control all the time was by the gun, and militants, who are largely uneducated and ignorant, caused most of the disasters we are in today." A final mistake, says Fares, was the failure to build an effective government in the 1990s when the Palestinians were offered autonomy under the Oslo peace accords. "It's like you demand a palace but get three rooms as a test before you get the palace," he said. "The world gave us a chance to establish an authority. We could have used the authority as a good model to show we are a modern people, an educated people. We failed."
2008-05-15 01:00:00
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