Transcript of Remarks by Nathan Brown
'For the Record' No. 259 (21 July 2006)

At a recent Palestine Center briefing, Nathan Brown, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, explained how Hamas' electoral victory in the January 2006 legislative elections put the organization in a position of governance that it was not fully prepared to assume. The reorganization of power has left both Hamas and Fateh in a position where they can act on this opportunity and demonstrate their commitment to Palestinian governance by strengthening their respective political parties. Should this not occur, the international community will be faced with a greater crisis than currently exists, he said.

The Palestine Center
Washington, DC
18 July 2006

Nathan Brown:

Thank you very much. Let me begin by saying that I did come back about a week ago from the region and, usually, what that allows you to do is to pontificate with greater authority. In this case, it may have the exact opposite effect. I was in Ramallah trying to conduct interviews with some members of the Palestinian government and a couple of days before my arrival many of them were arrested. I went on to Jordan where I have started a project on the Islamic Action Front only to find that shortly before my arrival some of the people I had wanted to talk to were arrested. From Jordan I traveled to Beirut for a short conference and managed to get out about 48 hours early [referring to Israel's invasion of Lebanon on Wednesday 12 July, 2006]. The conclusion I have come to is that you are all very brave for showing up in the same room as me today. I will try not to jinx anybody here.

I think that the changing political landscape sounds like a fairly broad topic; however, given recent events, it is also a depressing one. What we have seen is a series of events, which indicate to me that the landscape is not particularly changing for the better and that there does not seem to be anyone on any side involved in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or anyone amongst the outside actors, with a clear strategy for dealing with such an incredibly difficult situation. Rather than focus on an extremely broad and pessimistic picture, I thought I would go immediately into detail and then try to take a step back and figure out why the situation is such a mess.

First, I will talk from the internal Palestinian perspective about who the main actors are, what is going on, what is going on with Hamas, what is going on with Fateh, what is going on with other political forces, civil society institutions and so on to provide a sort of review each of those actors. Subsequently, I would like to switch from a perspective on where things are to look at where things might go and what might be various ways out, both domestically and internationally, that various actors might be pursuing.

First, let me sketch the landscape right now as I see it. This is based on a series of my visits this year, the first of which I took during the elections, the second of which was, by coincidence, for the swearing in of the new cabinet in March, and the third of which was a couple of weeks ago.

The first actor and the one that is perhaps the most dramatic is Hamas. What I see there is a series of snapshots where the movement has really showed its full energy, discipline and ability to put forward a campaign that almost everybody involved agreed was an impressive effort. It was impressive on all kinds of different levels: organizationally and in terms of its message. The decision to enter the Legislative Council elections was one that was extremely difficult for Hamas. The idea of participating in elections first came up in the early- to mid-1990s. It was not until 2005 that they finally decided to take the plunge, but having made the decision to do it, they did so with gusto. Again, anybody who was there and saw that campaign was very impressed by Hamas. It was an impressive campaign, in terms of how Hamas presented itself to the Palestinian population, because Hamas did what many of the Islamist parties have been able to do in the area but even better. That was, fully capture the reform issue. In terms of its stance on the Israeli-Palestinian issues, it managed to dodge and avoid answering the tough questions that people were putting forward.

The second snapshot was when its elected officials took office. It was a movement at that point that was still extremely self-confident and aware of the reasons it won the election. Therefore, it was extremely anxious to ensure that this reputation that it had earned for being willing to talk about issues of corruption and reform was one it was not going to lose. The phrase that kept coming up, not only among people in Hamas but also other Islamist movements in the region that looked to Hamas, was 'clean hands' an odd phrase considering that the international reputation of the movement is one with extremely bloody hands. However, from a Palestinian perspective this was a movement that was clean.

There was a jarring moment when I was interviewing a Palestinian parliamentarian from Hamas who was press spokesman the day that the new government was sworn in. I was interviewing him and asked him what I thought would be a nice softball question to begin the interview. I said, 'So now that you have the majority of the Legislative Council, what are the first two or three laws that you would like to see passed?' There was an awkward silence and it went on for about half a minute. I am shifting in my seat, thinking that I didn't mean to ask anything embarrassing or anything, and it became clear that there was no answer. Finally he said, 'Well, the President sent us a draft law to look at, but I forget what it was about. Maybe that's what we will work on first.' I don't want to read too much into a badly answered question, but it seemed to me that this was a movement that had put together an extremely good campaign, but was simply not yet prepared for governing.

The third snapshot took place a couple weeks ago. Hamas is a movement now that, in my mind, has been badly split internally. It is a movement that has historically gone to great lengths to hash out any internal differences and then manages to come up with a position that unifies the organization. It is really remarkable for an organization that has grown this quickly to have survived without developing any serious schisms or fractures or anything like that. It is clear now that the reason they were able to do so is by hammering out positions which, in a sense, did not make decisions or that offered something to various factions within. The minute they had to make decisions with consequences, they were unprepared to do so.

Hamas is a movement that faces a current crisis - a crisis that, in a sense, some parts of the organization had a hand in precipitating. Certainly not alone, but certain parts of the organization embraced the crisis without a real strategy for dealing with it. It is a movement that is split between the urge to govern and the urge to continue resistance, without a real formula for combining those two positions. And those who would wish to govern and to take advantage of the electoral victory are basically all now being held by Israel, or at least a very good share of them.

During my interviews I asked someone from the Legislative Council - one of the few Hamas parliamentarians in the West Bank who was not arrested, 'Are you going to be able to get a quorum? How do you plan to continue governing while half your ministers or a quarter of your parliament is in jail?' Again, there was a long silence and then finally somebody handed him a piece of paper. He said, 'Ah, we are having a session Monday to discuss it.' Sure enough they did have a session on Monday to discuss it; it was a week ago. They denounced Israeli actions and Israel took absolutely no notice of the session and, as far as I can see, the parts of the Palestinian Authority that Hamas still controls are now basically not functioning. I will get onto that a little bit more in a second when I talk about Palestinian institutions.

Fateh is not in much better shape. For every way Hamas impressed people with its confidence, Fateh impressed people with its incompetence and divisions. After the election, when Hamas actually took office, there did seem to be a little bit of a change in the organization. Suddenly, it rediscovered ways to make a case to the Palestinian public. It rediscovered its strong hold on nationalist symbols. It rediscovered its institutions, like the PLO, which it had basically left to whither for over a decade. For a moment, it looked like Fateh was beginning to take advantage of its time in the opposition to articulate a different vision for Palestinian society.

Oddly enough, besides nationalism, the other card they felt they had to play against Hamas was competence. Given Fateh's time in governance, that may seem to be an odd card to play, but essentially the message was 'These guys who just won the election have not the slightest idea of what they are doing. We are used to dealing with these situations. We are used to exercising political power. We are used to dealing with the Americans and the Israeli's. Yes, we may not do a perfect job in those areas - nobody could do a perfect job in those areas - but at least we know what we are doing.' Or, as a second generation Fateh leader said to me a couple of weeks ago, 'My dad negotiated prisoner exchanges with the Israelis all the time. He knew how to do this. We wouldn't be in this mess if we had competent negotiators there.'

The problem was that what Fateh managed to do was play a fairly good game of embarrassing Hamas and trying to outflank it with short term tactics. It seemed to have no long-term vision except to wait for Hamas to fail and hope to be begged to return to political power. When I look at the situation now, I am even more convinced that this is the case.

Fateh is supposed to take stock after the election, after its humiliating defeat, and that's a process which has some limited signs of life on paper. As far as I can tell, that is not happening. They are supposed to be moving toward a Party-based congress, which they haven't had since 1989. This is something that is considerably overdue. They are supposed to be going through the membership process to weed out those who are not real members of the organization. They have actually been asking people to pay their membership dues - not very much but simply to get them to show some dedication to the organization. Subsequently, they are to follow a series of organizational steps and internal Party elections that will culminate in this Party-based congress. Again, some Fateh branches are going through the motions, but others are not. There is no expectation on anybody's part, including from those people who are involved in it, that this will lead to anything like a real reform of the Party.

Let me go over the other political forces in Palestinian society as well, in terms of the possibility of a third force emerging, perhaps on the left. Palestinian Party life has certainly been rich and diverse, far beyond Fateh and Hamas, and yet what strikes me as an observer looking at those alternative forces who tried to put together effective campaigns back in January, is the problem - not unique to Palestine or, in fact, uncommon in the Arab World - of finding impressive individual leaders and the difficulty of getting those leaders to work together, and the almost impossibility of getting them to put any real organization on the ground. You find all kinds of individuals who are individually impressive but, as far as I can tell, there is no real movement to organize or found any third-force in Palestinian society. Or, as soon as there is a third-force, it will split and there will be a fourth-force and then a fourth-force A and then a fourth force B, then a fifth-force. . .very few people actually manning the bottoms of the organizational chart.

What about civil society? Palestinian society, both during the first intifada and during the Oslo period, saw the emergence of impressive organizations arising on a local level and, especially during the Oslo period, on a national level. There was a real professionalization of civil society, especially during the Oslo period, and especially within some organization which, in some ways, demonstrated to the Arab World a different kind of way of organizing a society. It is still the case that if Palestine were a virtual country, existing only on the Internet, it would probably be the most impressive member of the Arab League, because of the existence of very capable and fairly sophisticated civil society organizations.

The problem now is that that period, in essence, led to - and I believe people were complaining about this at the time - a divorce between civil society and its constituency. So, what you have right now is a collection of extremely effective organizations that subsist primarily on donor funding, which is extremely threatened and in some cases has been cut off, and Hamas, the only civil society organization that has some grassroots resistance because they never stopped delivering fundamental services. There is not a lot out there in between. Civil society is caught between being a part of the Hamas social movement or an elite set of civil society organizations that are threatened by the current crisis.

What about Palestinian political institutions? The 1990s saw an impressive institutional development effort throughout Palestinian society, embodied in the Palestinian Authority. The problem is that an awful lot of those achievements are threatened. You have, for instance, Palestinian security services whose partisanship and professionalism has, if anything, declined even further since the election. You have a Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) that had an awful lot of critics while it was operating and, in my mind, a lot of those criticisms were justified. But, if you look at what they produced on paper, it was actually one of the most impressive Arab parliamentary efforts I have ever seen. They produced a body of legislation that would serve an independent state very well in all kinds of spheres and would serve a liberal society fairly well in all kinds of spheres. That effort still exists on paper; those laws remain binding, but the Legislative Council itself has, basically, as far as I can see, gone to sleep.

When I was over there, I asked somebody who works as a staffer in the Parliament's research arm, 'How many requests for research do you get?' 'Well,' they said. 'None really. We used to get a lot right after the election, but in the last two months, nothing.'

In essence, a total captivation with the national circumstances has ensued. The Legislative Council has basically followed the same route as Fateh in the post-Oslo period. People complained about the PLC under Fateh, especially within its first couple of years, because rather than actually trying to build Palestinian institutions they would satisfy themselves with passing resolutions demanding that Israel release Palestinian prisoners, or implement a part of the Oslo agreements that they thought Israel was in violation of only to discover the Israeli government did not believe it was governed by PLC resolutions. They felt that they had to address the nationalist issue, but they had no tools for doing so. In a sense, the current PLC is fulfilling that pattern as well. When they meet, they do address the fundamental political issues but they have no tools to pass resolutions.

The civil service and the bureaucracy have been hit extremely hard by the current crisis. They have not been paid in months and are beginning to decay. The estimate I heard from several people is about half the employee base shows up for work, which, given the fact that they haven't been paid in several months is impressive, but essentially you have a civil service with only key parts still functioning, which are beginning to grind to a halt under the economic crisis.

Even without the economic crisis, there is still the Hamas-Fateh battle. Even if they were getting their salaries, there would still be real disputes. In some ministries there is a state of civil war between the Hamas minister and the bureaucracy that surrounds him. In other ministries, there is no such civil war because the Hamas minister is in Gaza and they don't deal with the bureaucracy in Ramallah. So, where there isn't civil war there are basically dysfunctional communications.

I would like to put this picture in a historical perspective. What I worry about is Palestinian society slowly reverting back to a period resembling for Palestinians the 1940s and 1950s; a period in which Palestinians had some sort of rudimentary organization and leadership, but that leadership was not unable to act effectively or to support the Palestinian population. What I am worried about is that we are moving slowly backwards toward that kind of situation, with a slow decay of the Palestinian institutions under harsh external pressure, and a decay of Palestinian political parties and forces.

The accomplishments of the Palestinian nationalist movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which include things like building up the PLO, making diplomatic gains and establishing an infrastructure, have not collapsed. They still exist, but I believe that they are beginning to show some signs of stress and decay. These accomplishments, which I would say are the construction of Palestinian institutions and the Palestinian Authority and the emergence of a strong Palestinian civil society, are also similarly not going to collapse overnight. They are becoming increasingly relevant and weaker.

Is there a way out of this? No, I don't see one right now. Rather, the ways out that various actors are pursuing, internally and externally, are not all that promising. Let me briefly go through them and, having ruined your day with this pessimistic talk I will open the floor for questions or discussion.

Internally, there is some movement. I don't want to seem completely pessimistic. The 'Prisoner's Document' was a real accomplishment in terms of getting Palestinian political forces to actually work together. When you look at the final document, however, I believe that what you see is a document that has more loopholes than text. It fulfills the purpose of getting the Palestinian political forces to talk to each other, but it doesn't get anywhere in meeting the Quartet's conditions. Therefore, I don't think it will, in and of itself, serve as a basis for any exit to the current international crisis.

What it might do, and what Palestinians expect it to do, is to form the basis for a national unity government and for Fateh to rejoin the government and give some veneer of international respectability that will enable funds to flow in. This will allow, perhaps, under the agency of the PLO, some restoration of negotiations. Before the current crisis about the Palestinian prisoners and the Israeli prisoner, I would have said that is unlikely but not impossible. It seems to me that in the current environment, it is very difficult to be optimistic about that kind of scenario moving forward or being anything other than a recipe for paralysis. My other worry is that by allowing Fateh back into the government, it will remove the pressure that should be felt within the Party to reform itself. In my mind, any exit from the Palestinian political crisis has to involve some kind of rejuvenation of Fateh and that's much less likely to happen when they are in the government.

There are other possibilities that people talk about. A technocratic government is an idea that some have put forward; or, early elections. It seems to me that these are solutions that are probably even less promising. Early elections would be, quite simply, illegal. I have noticed that in an awful lot of the press accounts for this and the referendum, journalists who don't like to issue legal judgments say things like, 'The legality of such a move is highly questionable,' 'highly debatable,' or 'controversial.' In my mind, I don't have a problem or hesitation giving pronouncements or edicts or fatwas on Palestinian laws. It is clear that it would be illegal. The referendum would be illegal and early elections for the PLC would be illegal, unless the Legislative Council agrees.

Is it a possible way out? Yes, but I am not sure that it will lead to any different result. Yes, you can do illegal things, but it doesn't seem to me that if the elections were held right now they would lead to all that different of an outcome. If they are done over Hamas opposition, they would probably deepen the crisis rather than form a way out of it.

In terms of a technocratic government, I believe that would rest on Hamas being willing to give up the political power that it rested in the January elections, something I see as very unlikely. People keep hoping that Hamas will say, 'Okay, we have had enough of governing. We had more fun in the opposition,' or 'We had more fun as a resistance movement.' There are probably people within the organization who did worry that going into government would make it much less of a resistance movement, but I don't see any signs of willingness to actually resign, or I haven't in any of the public statements that members within Hamas have issued.

Is there a way out that the international community can offer? It seems to me that what we are seeing right now with the cut-off of funds is something that is absolutely devastating to the Palestinian political system and fairly devastating for Palestinian society. I don't see much interest in dealing with anything more than the immediate consequences of that. There is talk of putting together this mechanism by which external funding could continue for certain Palestinian services. What is striking to me is that it is now mid-July; the elections were in late January. This is a solution that people are finding at such a slow speed and with such important restrictions placed upon it, in terms of paying salaries and restricting it to certain sectors, that at best what you will get, at least in the short term, is some way of keeping the Palestinian health system intact and perhaps the Palestinian educational system intact. However, there is certainly no way of doing anything other than turning Palestine into an international charity case where people are kept alive at a minimal level of social services, without a political solution. As far as I can see, nobody is offering any.

Israel seems to me partly devoid of any strategy. In the current crisis, it is moving not simply against Hamas as a military organization, but Hamas' social structure as well with raids on Hamas-affiliated non-governmental organizations, arresting ministers from Hamas. The message is, 'We are not going to allow you to govern and we are not going to allow you to operate these sorts of social services that give you this sort of network of support. We don't have very much to hold over you, but we know that you do like these things so, therefore, we will hit those.' That is what Israel is doing. Exactly what comes after that, what the end game is, or what the Israeli strategy is, it is certainly not full re-occupation. Essentially, they are undermining the current Palestinian Authority and trying to undermine Hamas in a way that will detract from Hamas' ability to govern, without undermining the organization as a whole, in service of no particular strategy at all.

In a sense, the current crisis over the prisoners does extenuate all of the trends that I have been talking about, but it doesn't create any of them. What has happened over the last couple of weeks is that issues and processes that have been slowly emerging have simply sped up. A situation that we would have had to be dealing with sometime in the fall, we are dealing with right now instead.

What is going to be the outcome of this? I think that there was another approach that could have been tried, both by the international community and the Palestinian's themselves, and I have written about it so I won't go into much detail, but essentially it was to treat this as a democratic transition, one that needed a little bit of space in order to operate so that the region, Israelis and Palestinians could digest it fully. I think that the time for that strategy has passed and I do not think that strategy work right now. What we are likely to see is essentially more of the same. It is striking to me that most of the Palestinians I have talked to have been waiting for somebody to do something, but have absolutely no idea of what to do themselves.
The result is that we will have Palestinian institutions kept on life support to prevent a catastrophic humanitarian situation. That's not to say that there is not a difficult humanitarian situation at present, but this will keep it from the point of starvation and absolute political and social collapse. Beyond that, no Palestinian political actor has the ability or vision to get out of the situation, and nobody is acting effectively in order to deliver an international solution.

I will close up my spoken remarks on that cheerless note, and leave it to you to point the way out of the crisis.

This transcript is a record of remarks made by Dr. Nathan Brown, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on 18 July 2006. Dr. Brown is a distinguished scholar and the author of four books on Arab politics including Palestinian Politics after the Oslo Accords: Resuming Arab Palestine (2003). His research interests include Palestinian politics, legal reform in the modern Middle East and democratization.

This 'For the Record' transcript may be used without permission but with proper attribution to The Palestine Center. The speaker's views are his alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Jerusalem Fund.