In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

3. War, Peace, Civil War A Pattern? Tamim Al-Barghouti since 1974, there has been a pattern of war, peace or appeasement , and then civil war or dissent in the ranks of the Palestinian national movement. after the wars of 1971 in jordan and 1973 between the arabs and Israel, the PLO adopted the step-by-step Program, which opened the door for a two-state solution. This was followed by the establishment of the rejection Front within the PLO.1 after the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the Fatah leadership of the PLO accepted the saudi-sponsored arab Peace Initiative, which was followed by the first Palestinian civil war in tripoli, Lebanon. after the 1987 Intifada and the 1990–1991 regional war in which the PLO sided with Iraq, the Palestinian leadership openly accepted the two-state solution. This was followed by the creation and the consolidation of the Islamic resistance Movement—Hamas—as an alternative manifestation of the Palestinian struggle against Israel. The Israeli reoccupation of the West Bank in 2002 was followed by the election of a moderate Palestinian leadership, one that was openly endorsed by both Israel and the United states. This move toward appeasing Israel triggered a chain of events that included a Hamas electoral victory in 2006 and a short military confrontation with Fatah forces in Gaza that left Hamas in control of the strip. This pattern is a result of the structural contradictions in the Palestinian national movement; though the movement is antisystemic, it is born out of and dependent on the very system it seeks to change. The Palestinian national movement is in constant need of international recognition and domestic legitimacy, and recognition and legitimacy are at once interdependent and mutually exclusive. to gain recognition, the Palestinian movement must have some support among the Palestinians, but it also must accept War, Peace, Civil War 61 some aspects of the system it was created to fight; this causes it to lose its legitimacy and, consequently, its recognition. every move toward a deal with the colonizer causes the national movement to lose legitimacy, and every loss of legitimacy prevents the national movement from living up to its commitments under any deal with the colonizer, hence rendering such a deal worthless. This contradiction between legitimacy and recognition, and the Palestinian national movement’s desperate need for both, might allow it to reach a peace settlement—but it makes such a settlement unlikely to last. This situation is not unique to Palestine, but rather is characteristic of the colonially created states in the Middle east and the arab national liberation movements therein. as such, the failure of the peace process is part of the larger failure of the colonially created state system in the region as a whole. nonstate actors performing the functions of the state—sometimes even more efficiently than the state—present themselves as the heir apparent to that system.2 The Pattern: War, Peace, Civil War In 2005 Helga Baumgarten published a comparative study discussing the rise and fall of three incarnations of the Palestinian national movement.3 The first was the Movement of arab nationalists (Man);4 the second, the Fatahled Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO); and the third, the Islamic resistance Movement (Hamas). The first two dominated the Palestinian political arena successively for almost twenty years before each started to lose its legitimacy among Palestinians and eventually its recognition by the international community as the main representative of the Palestinian people. Baumgarten argues that Hamas is on the same route as its two predecessors. The move from arab nationalism, the main doctrine of Man, to Palestinian nationalism, to Islamism, according to Baumgarten, results from the military and political failures of the first two ideologies in achieving their declared goal of liberating Palestine. It remains to be seen what the fate of the third movement will be. Baumgarten argues that all three movements began with the uncompromising demand for the liberation of all of Palestine from the Mediterranean sea to the river jordan, and eventually they had to accept the existence of the state of Israel and modify their goal to be the establishment of a Palestinian entity in the West Bank and Gaza. This pattern predicts that Hamas will eventually come to terms with Israel’s existence as well. 16.190.167] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 01:06 GMT) 62 tamim al-barghouti according to Baumgarten, the Palestinian national movement seems to be stuck in a vicious circle of denial: when...

Share