Arafat's new PM nominee brings little promise

MIDEAST: New PM Nominee Brings Little Promise
Peter Hirschberg - IPS 9/8/03

JERUSALEM, Sep 8 (IPS) - Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat on Sunday picked a moderate and one of the architects of the Oslo peace accords with Israel as the next Palestinian prime minister. But it is not clear that his choice, Palestinian Legislative Council Speaker Ahmed Qureia, will enjoy any greater success than the battered Mahmoud Abbas who handed in his resignation Saturday.

Arafat, whose prolonged power struggle with Abbas was a key reason for his resignation, might hope that Qureia's moderate credentials will make him acceptable to the United States. The U.S. had warned last week it would withdraw support for the road map peace plan if Abbas was ousted.

The European Union (EU) immediately endorsed the nomination Sunday night, even though Qureia (also known as Abu Ala) still has to formally accept the offer. The appointment has then to be endorsed by parliament. It helps that Qureia has had long experience of negotiating with the Israelis.

"We are going to do our utmost to overcome this difficult moment...and to ensure that the road map is implemented," EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana said. "We will defend (the road map) day and night."

There may not be much left to defend. In the space of just four hours Saturday, the latest initiative to bring peace to the Middle East, mortally wounded by a resurgence of violence, appeared to have been administered its last rites.

First Abbas, who had embraced the road map and tried to convince Palestinians to abandon the armed Intifadah for dialogue with Israel, handed in his resignation. Then, Israeli fighter planes dropped a quarter-tonne bomb on a building in Gaza in a failed attempt to wipe out the leadership of Hamas. The spiritual leader of the militant Islamic group, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who was lightly injured, vowed swift revenge.

Few were left open-mouthed when Abbas (also known as Abu Mazen) announced he was quitting. He had staked his political future on extracting concessions from Israel within the framework of the road map peace plan, and had come up empty-handed. When a truce declared by militant groups disintegrated last month after Israel assassinated a senior Hamas leader in Gaza following a suicide attack that killed 21 people in Jerusalem, his demise and that of the road map appeared imminent.

But Abbas also succumbed to a prolonged power struggle with Arafat, who had created the post of prime minister only under international pressure. Arafat correctly understood the move as an attempt to dilute his powers.

"Abu Mazen was manoeuvred into a dead end by a number of factors," Menachem Klein, an Israeli expert on Palestinian politics at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv told IPS. "One is Arafat. But it is also his rivals in the Palestinian elite, along with Arafat."

There are some fears that this group may place obstacles now in Qureia's way. Like Abbas, Qureia has little independent support among the Palestinian public, and will also draw his legitimacy from his anointer. But Qureia, number three in the ruling Fatah party after Arafat and Abbas, is considered a more astute political operator than his predecessor.

Qureia will also be dependent on the generosity of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who played a part in Abbas's demise. The concessions Sharon made were miserly. When it came to dismantling dozens of illegal outposts in the West Bank, as the first phase of the road map requires Israel to do, Sharon removed only 15. Settlers rebuilt them as quickly as they came down. When it came to releasing Palestinian prisoners, Sharon freed those whose sentences were due up within a few weeks or months.

At the same time Sharon kept up the mantra that Abbas order Palestinian security forces to crush armed groups as a precondition to political progress.

Without concrete diplomatic gains, Abbas had no chance of winning the support of ordinary Palestinians. Without that support, he had no chance of taking on the Islamic groups. "Israel also pushed Abu Mazen into a corner by continuing its assassinations and special operations (during the ceasefire by militants) and by not being prepared to go further than the very limited concessions it made," says Klein.

The main stumbling block was Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. "The existence of settlements means that the Israeli army is in the territories," he says. "Once the settlements are removed, then army roadblocks can be removed and you have less occupation."

The U.S. also contributed to Abbas's departure. It applied minimal pressure on Sharon, adopting his anti-terror paradigm that there cannot be substantial progress until the Palestinian Authority forcibly confronts Hamas.

The U.S. also does not appear to be on the verge of intervening in a meaningful way in the conflict. Increasingly bogged down in Iraq, and with President George Bush about to embark on his re-election campaign, it is not clear how much attention Qureia, Arafat and Sharon will get from the White House in coming months. That could be a recipe for escalating violence.

Having observed Abbas's brief, tortuous term in office, Qureia will know that U.S. backing is no guarantee of success. The U.S. efforts to transform Abbas into a legitimate representative of the Palestinian people had the opposite effect: the more it embraced Abbas, the more he was seen as a U.S. stooge, and the more Arafat enjoyed domestic resurgence.

The U.S. stuck to its anti-terror message Sunday. Secretary of State Colin Powell said that the next Palestinian prime minister had to be given the power to fight militant groups for there to be progress on the road map, which envisions an independent Palestinian state by 2005. Speaking on NBC's 'Meet the Press' prior to Qureia's nomination, Powell said he hoped the Palestinian parliament would "give the new prime minister the political power he needs, the political authority he needs and the resources that he needs to go after Hamas."

All that may not be enough. No Palestinian prime minister can confront militant groups without widespread public support. That support cannot be garnered, says Klein, "in the absence of major Israeli concessions and the lessening of occupation."