[spectre] Pinochet in Palestine (?)

[Louise Desrenards]

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

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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. 


 
Source http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/

* 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).
 

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