Pinochet in Palestine

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/819/op2.htm

Pinochet in Palestine

Joseph Massad* looks at the similarities between regime change in
Chile and Palestine and condemns the collaboration between Fatah
and Palestine's enemies


Before the United States government subcontracted the Chilean
military to overthrow the democratically elected government of
Salvador Allende in 1973, it carried out a number of important
missions in the country in preparation for the coup of 11
September. These included major strikes, especially by truck
owners, which crippled the economy, massive demonstrations that
included middle-class housewives and children carrying pots and
pans demanding food, purging the Chilean military of officers who
would oppose the suspension of democracy and the introduction of
US-supported fascist rule, and a major media campaign against the
regime with the CIA planting stories in newspapers like El Mercurio
and others. This was in a context where also the Communist Party and
the Leftist Revolutionary Movement (MIR) criticised and sometimes
attacked the Allende regime from varying leftist positions.

The Chilean example is important to keep in mind when one looks at
the Palestinian situation today, as it functions as a sort of
training video for US-planned anti-democratic coups elsewhere in
the world. Not only are the US and Israel financially backing the
open preparation for a coup to be staged by the top leadership of
Fateh (and in the case of Israel allowing weapons' transfers to
Palestinian Authority [PA] President Mahmoud Abbas's Praetorian
Guard), but so are the intelligence services of a number of
Israel-and US-friendly Arab countries whose intelligence services
have set up shop openly in Ramallah more recently, making their
longstanding and major, though understated, involvement in running
the Palestinian territories more open and shameless. Indeed the
intelligence "delegation" of one such Arab country has rented out a
multi-story building in Ramallah to conduct their operations there.

Israel has helped this effort all along by kidnapping and arresting
Fateh members who resist the collaborationist policies of the top
leadership. As for the leadership itself, it has periodically
purged members of Fateh who oppose its policies, and marginalised
those in the Diaspora who continue to resist them. The Fateh/PA
coup leaders consist of Abbas and the ruling triumvirate of Mohamed
Dahlan, Yasser Abd Rabbo, and Nabil Amr. The profiles of these three
make them well suited for the tasks ahead. Dahlan is universally
known as America's and Israel's main corrupt military man on the
ground. Abd Rabbo (aka Yasser Abd Yasser, literally "Yasser
worshipper of Yasser" on account of his subservience to Arafat) is
the architect of the Geneva accords, which recognise Israel's right
to be a racist Jewish state as legitimate and reject the right of
Palestinian refugees to return as illegitimate. He recently upheld
the Israeli position when fighting with the Qatari foreign minister
and his staff during the latter's visit to the occupied territories.
Amr is the former PA information minister, and a former visiting
fellow at the Israel lobby think tank the Washington Institute for
Near East Policy. He is also the speechwriter for Abbas and Dahlan.

Abbas and these three have undertaken not only to launch massive
strikes by the Fateh security thugs that they have armed to police
the territories on behalf of Israel, and strikes by the bureaucracy
that staffs the PA ministries, but also have coerced large numbers
of Palestinians, including teachers and professors, under the force
of guns, to uphold a strike against Hamas, when most of them had
voted for Hamas in the first place and refuse to strike.
Palestinians who have fought for decades to keep their schools and
universities open against Israeli draconian closures and suspension
of Palestinian education, are now forced by Fateh and its armed
thugs to stop the Palestinian educational process with strikes
against Hamas, and threaten to shoot people if they refuse to
follow Fateh's coup directives.

In addition, Abbas and the Fateh/PA triumvirate have organised
demonstrations in Ramallah by middle-class Palestinians, including
housewives, who brought out their pots and pans, in a scene
borrowed from 1973 Santiago, in demonstrations against Hamas. The
Fateh-controlled press, especially Al-Ayyam is fomenting major
anti-Hamas propaganda campaign in preparation for the coup and is
thus playing the same role as El Mercurio did in Chile. Al-Ayyam is
aided in its efforts by the anti-Hamas secular Palestinian
intelligentsia, most of whose members are on the payroll of the
bankrollers of the Oslo process and its NGOs. These old leftist
Palestinians, like their counterparts in Lebanon, are better known
today as the right-wing left, as they take up right-wing positions
while insisting that they are still leftists based on positions
they had held in the 1980s or earlier.

The plan is that the Fateh/PA rulers would do their utmost to
provoke Hamas to start the war at which point Fateh, with the aid
of the intelligence services of friendly Arab countries, as well as
assistance from Israel and the US, would crush Hamas and take over.
Indeed, the first unsuccessful round took place when the Israeli
government kidnapped a third of the Hamas government, both cabinet
ministers and parliament members, and placed them in Israeli jails.
This was not sufficient to bring Hamas down, and not for lack of
help that Fateh rendered the Israeli occupiers. Aside from the
initial burning of the Legislative Council building, Fateh thugs
have also burned the prime minister's office, shot at his car,
burned offices in different ministries several times, harassed and
threatened Hamas ministers and parliamentarians whom Israel failed
to kidnap and arrest, refused to allow the government ministries to
operate, and so forth. Hamas however, is wisely adamant that it will
respond by force only when Fateh launches an all-out war to bring
about its planned coup, but not before.

Fateh's planned coup is not only based on the popularity of Hamas
and its electoral victory but also on Hamas's increased ability to
defend itself against Fateh forces. If the US and Israel armed
Fateh thugs under Arafat's leadership to crush the first
Palestinian Intifada and any remaining resistance to the occupation
since 1994, today, Hamas is almost as well- armed as Fateh forces
and can defend the rights of the Palestinians to resist the Israeli
occupation and the well-armed Palestinian collaborators that help to
enforce it. This is where the situation today differs measurably
from that of the mid-1990s. To offset this new balance of forces,
the United States government, according to the Israeli newspaper
Haaretz, has been training Abbas's Praetorian Guard in Jericho for
over a month with American, British, Egyptian, and Jordanian
military instructors, and is providing arms to them in preparation
for the confrontation with Hamas. The Israeli cabinet in turn has
recently approved the transfer of thousands of rifles from Egypt
and Jordan to Abbas's forces. The Israelis also approved a US
request that Israel allow the Badr Brigade -- part of the Palestine
Liberation Army currently stationed in Jordan -- to deploy in Gaza.
These steps have been conceived by General Keith Dayton, the
American security coordinator in the occupied territories, who
wants the Badr Brigade to function as Abbas's "rapid reaction force
in Gaza". As a possible step to increase its security and military
roles in the occupied territories, the Jordanian government
recently established a legal committee to review the provisions of
Jordan's decision to "disengage" from the West Bank announced on 31
July 1988, effectively suggesting the possibility of a reversal of
part or all of these provisions. More recently, the Israelis
intensified their bombings and killings in Gaza, most recently in
Beit Hanoun murdering over 50 Palestinians in a few days.

Mahmoud Abbas and his ruling triumvirate are reticent at the moment
to start an open war for fear of a public backlash. They prefer to
remove Hamas through imposing a "national unity" government that
would undercut Hamas gradually and peacefully. However, Abbas and
his triumvirate are quickly losing patience. Indeed, in a
hastily-arranged meeting of the Diaspora-based Fateh Central
Committee set to convene in Amman three weeks ago to ratify the
coup plans, members of the committee opposed Abbas's US and
Israel-supported coup, which forced Abbas to cancel the meeting
altogether claiming falsely lack of quorum as the reason. This
speaks to Abbas's desperation in engineering the coup without
adequate preparation. Indeed, rumour has it across the occupied
territories that the desperate attacks committed recently against
Palestinian Christian churches were the work of undercover thugs.
Those who sent them want Palestinian Christians and the world at
large to think that these were Hamas acts in response to the pope's
racist pronouncements against Islam. Hamas duly condemned the
attacks. Few in the occupied territories believe that Hamas was
behind them and most know that they were the work of undercover
agents.

The Fateh plan is simple: where Israel and its Lebanese allies
failed to crush Hizbullah in the Sixth war, Fateh and its Israeli
allies will succeed in crushing Hamas, even if the ongoing Israeli
war against Hamas and the Palestinian people becomes an all-out
Seventh war. The flurry of visits by Condoleezza Rice to the area
in the last few weeks hoped to put the final touches on this plan.
If Hamas, like Hizbullah, could be provoked into a military
response, the coup planners believe, then Fateh's and Israel's
wrath (backed by the US, Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia) would be
unleashed to finish Hamas off. The Fateh leadership and its thugs
are sharpening their knives for the showdown. Hamas has remained
calm despite the pressure.

In the meantime, Ramallah proper (excluding the surrounding
villages), continues to be what many now refer to as the
Palestinian Green Zone, sheltering, in addition to the intelligence
staff of Israel and Israel-friendly Arab countries, those
Palestinians who are paid and protected by the Oslo process,
whether the Oslo bureaucracy, its technicians, and hired
intellectuals, or the business and middle classes recently
habituated to the new name-brand consumerism that the Green Zone
can offer. This opulent life contrasts with the life of the rest of
the Palestinians outside Ramallah who live in misery, hunger, and
under the bombardment of the Israelis and the attacks of savage
Jewish colonial settlers, not to mention the harassment by Fateh
thugs. In Ramallah itself, the trigger-happy thugs shoot at random
during their demonstrations, injuring and sometimes killing passers
by "in error". Even the few secular intellectuals who deign to
oppose Fateh inside Ramallah are harassed in different ways. Some
of them experience mysterious robberies that are repeated every
time they make anti-Fateh statements. The preservation of Ramallah
as the Green Zone is paramount to Abbas and the Fateh/PA
triumvirate, whose fear of any reform introduced by Hamas would
strip the elite of the benefits of corruption and the dolce vita
that Fateh-rule has ensured for them.

Meanwhile, Abbas and his triumvirate will continue to treat Hamas
the way Israel has treated the PLO and other Arab countries all
along. In the interminable negotiations that Hamas held with Fateh
to avert a showdown, whenever Hamas would agree to a Fateh demand,
Fateh would up the ante and insist on another concession or claim
that its initial demands always included the now expanded terms,
even though they did not. Moreover, Fateh would also publicly
interpret Hamas's concessions as having included things that Hamas
had not agreed to at all. If this is reminiscent of the post-Oslo
negotiating strategy that the Israelis used successfully with
Arafat, this is because it is the same strategy. Abbas has gone so
far as to walk away from negotiations, and refuse to speak to Hamas
leaders, just as the Israelis have done often with the PA. Moreover,
if the Israelis would often carry undercover attacks against Western
interests to implicate Arab governments, the clearest example being
the infamous Lavon Affair of the mid-1950s targeting Egypt, similar
operations are being committed to implicate Hamas by undercover
agents, like the recent example of the attacks on the churches
illustrates. There may be many more such operations being planned.

Whatever fig leaf still covered the Fateh leadership's complete
collaboration and subservience to Israeli interests has now fallen
off. As a result, there is very little left that can restrain
Fateh's actions. The next few weeks will be decided by how much
Fateh leaders are itching for a fight to save their skins and
fortunes, and how much patience Hamas can muster in the face of so
much thuggery. In the meantime, what has been unfolding in the
Palestinian territories is nothing short of the Chilean script.

Pinochet is in Palestine. His success however remains far from
certain.

* The writer is associate professor of modern Arab politics and
intellectual history at Columbia University. He is the author of
The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and
the Palestinians (Routledge, 2006).