The Palace Politics of a Failed Authority |
Palestinians have gone through another electoral exercise that was not, in any democratic sense, an election.
They have not chosen a president since 2005, nor held parliamentary elections since 2006, when the terrorist organization Hamas won at the polls and, the following year, threw Fatah out of Gaza in a violent rupture that has defined Palestinian politics ever since.
Local elections were held in the West Bank and, symbolically, in Deir al-Balah in Gaza. In addition, Fatah’s Eighth Congress in Ramallah elected a new Central Committee and Revolutionary Council.
The municipal votes offered only a limited indication of public sentiment. The Fatah congress revealed something deeper: where power still lies, how it is shifting, and why the post-Abbas transition remains uncertain.
Fatah, PLO, and the embattled PA
Fatah is the dominant Palestinian nationalist movement, historically associated with Yasser Arafat. The PLO is the umbrella organization recognized as the Palestinians’ political representative, with Fatah as its central force. The Palestinian Authority was established under Oslo to administer limited self-rule. In practice, Fatah controls the PA in the West Bank, while Hamas has ruled Gaza since its 2007 coup.
That made the Fatah congress the real contest. Turnout reached 94.64%, with congress members voting in Ramallah, Gaza, Lebanon and Cairo. In practice it was an internal redistribution of power inside Fatah.
The results revealed three major things. Mahmoud Abbas, at 90, remains formally in control. He was re-elected Fatah chairman and still commands the machinery. But his preferred successor, Hussein al-Sheik, emerged weaker than Abbas had hoped. The figure who captured the political imagination was Marwan Barghouti, the imprisoned Fatah leader convicted in Israel of terrorist........