by Robin Wright
In 1988, to avoid becoming irrelevant as the intifada raged on, Arafat was forced to take the two steps he had long avoided—renouncing terrorism and recognizing Israel’s right to exist. He had little choice. It was the only way to get back in the game. His concessions opened the way for the PLO to become a player in diplomatic efforts. In exchange, Arafat won diplomatic recognition of the PLO by the United States, the primary broker of peace.
The uprising did not wind down completely until peace talks began in Madrid in 1991 and led, on a circuitous and initially secret route, to talks in Oslo and the first phase of a peace agreement. The formal pact was signed in 1993 by Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on the south lawn of the White House. The Oslo Accords established the Palestinian Authority, a tiny new pre-state, with powers limited to policing and municipal services in parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The Shikaki brothers were among the new internal leaders.
Khalil Shikaki was part of back-channel contacts between Palestinians and Israelis in London in 1992. It was a parallel process to the secret negotiations in Oslo that produced the peace accords. He also conducted the first public-opinion poll to test whether Palestinians would embrace peace after more than four decades of war. The process took nine months. The idea of getting Palestinians to say what they really thought—which had never been done before, and was complicated by the Israeli occupation—proved far harder than anticipated.
“During the initial tests, four out of ten homes refused to talk to us. We had to take dozens of tests just to find out what was preventing people from allowing us into their homes,” Shikaki said. With little basic data to work from, field teams had to draw their own maps of some areas and figure out from scratch the local demographics to ensure a representative sampling. They eventually got rejections down to two percent.
“On the day that the Oslo agreement was signed on the White House lawn, we released our first survey. We asked whether people supported or opposed the plan,” he recalled.
“Two thirds supported it,” he said, cracking a small smile. Shikaki usually speaks with a professor’s serious precision. “It was very exciting.”
Over the same period, however, his older brother was committed to undermining peace. Often described as a charismatic man, Fathi Shikaki was twice jailed by the Israelis, for a year in 1983 and for three years beginning in 1986. In 1988, he was deported to Lebanon. By 1992, he was headquartered in Syria, and Iran had become Islamic Jihad’s main source of funds, arms, and training.
“We reject a negotiation process, because it legitimizes the occupation of our land and neglects the Palestinians who are without a country or identity,” Fathi Shikaki told an interviewer in 1992, the same year his brother was negotiating with Israelis. “I do not know how the Palestinian is described as a terrorist when he screams from his pain and suffering and is defending his land against Jewish Russian soldiers, who never—neither he nor his forefathers—set foot in any inch of Palestine.”9
Islam, he added, “is the ideology that must be adhered to in achieving liberation and independence as well as development and progress. This is what the PLO lacked from the very beginning.”
After the 1993 Oslo Accords were signed, the older Shikaki helped launch the National Alliance, a coalition of ten hard-line Palestinian groups that rejected the peace plan. It, too, was headquartered in Syria.
On October 26, 1995, Shikaki was in Malta, reportedly in transit between Libya and Syria. All Islamic Jihad activities are clandestine. All its members operate in covert cells. Shikaki’s movements were all secret. According to accounts from the time, Shikaki walked out of his hotel and was approached by two men on a motorcycle. One pulled out a gun with a silencer and shot Shikaki five times. The Maltese government described the assassination as a professional hit. The motorcycle was later found abandoned. It had false license plates. The gunmen were never identified or caught.
The assassination was widely attributed to, but never acknowledged by, Israeli intelligence. Fathi Shikaki’s funeral in Damascus was reportedly attended by some 40,000 people.
The third shift in power followed the breakdown of peace efforts in 2000.
The 1993 Oslo Accords called for a final peace agreement within five years. Its Declaration of Principles tackled the thorny issues of statehood and borders, Jerusalem, refugees, and Jewish settlements. But the Oslo goal proved elusive. And a last-ditch effort by the United States to negotiate in 2000 broke down when Arafat balked at terms offered by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.
With the death of the Oslo process, tensions again reached breaking point. Another intifada erupted within weeks.10
The second uprising was far more sophisticated, down to the onions and perfume handed out by teenage girls as antidotes to Israeli tear gas. It was also deadlier.11 Rock-throwing escalated into low-intensity warfare after two Israeli soldiers were captured and taken to Ramallah’s police station. A mob stormed the facility, beat the two Israelis to death, then mutilated their bodies. Israeli helicopter gunships retaliated by demolishing the police station. It was the first Israeli air strike on the Palestinian territories in thirty-three years, since the 1967 war.
The second intifada featured the bloodiest cycle of violence ever between Israelis and Palestinians. Suicide bombings soared against Israeli civilian targets, including hotels, discos, a bustling café, a pizzeria, a pub, a shopping mall, and several bus stations.12 Israel struck back hard against both Palestinian street fighters and government sites. In 2002, Israeli troops reoccupied big chunks of the Palestinian territories and began construction of a controversial wall to cordon off the West Bank. Arafat came under siege in the Muqata.
The Palestinian Authority, unable to deliver either stability or basic governance, started to disintegrate. Its legislature had to meet by videoconference because Gazan lawmakers were unable to travel to headquarters in Ramallah. The United States orchestrated a new “road map” for peace, which stalled when Arafat did not end the violence against Israel. Temporary cease-fires were organized but frequently violated. Much of daily life came to a standstill. Unemployment, lawlessness, and despair became rampant.
Fatah also increasingly fragmented. Arafat, ailing and stubborn, refused to leave the Muqata for fear he would not be allowed back. Bitter and sometimes bloody power struggles erupted within Fatah. Its young guard—which included both moderates and militants, both rising politicians and armed thugs—increasingly went out on their own. Younger Fatah politicians like Marwan Barghouti, almost by default, took the political initiative away from Arafat and his cronies. And young thugs in the security forces effectively became militias that initiated their own attacks against Israel and ruled the Palestinian streets by intimidation, racketeering, and gangsterism.
As order broke down, Hamas increasingly filled the political space. During this third shift in power, the Islamic party moved from the margins to the mainstream.
Hamas differed significantly from Islamic Jihad, the first militant movement. Islamic Jihad had remained tiny, totally underground, engaged only in violence, with leaders either forced into exile or eliminated in Israel’s “targeted assassinations.” Hamas was not clandestine. It was also dual-purpose. Created in 1987 during the first intifada, its well-armed al Qassam Brigade became notorious for some of the most brazen suicide and rocket attacks against Israel.13 But Hamas also used the 1990s to establish a huge network of social services, schools, clinics, welfare organizations, and women’s groups—a parallel civil society. Up to ninety percent of its resources and staff were devoted to public-service enterprises.14 When the Palestinian Authority failed to deliver, Hamas institutions increasingly did.
“Hamas emerged as a credible political and security alternative to Fatah and a challenge to its long-standing dominance,” Shikaki explained.
“The shift did not mean a greater religiosity in society. Hamas responded to the perception of a heightened threat more than anyone else. Palestinians we
re subject to collective punishment, so there was a great deal of public anger. Suicide attacks became very popular. The Palestinian public wanted it in the same way Ariel Sharon’s brutality against the Palestinians was popular among Israelis.”
Support for Hamas more than doubled between the outbreak of the intifada in 2000 and 2004, Shikaki’s surveys found. Support for Fatah had meanwhile tumbled, with Arafat’s personal standing cut in half, from a high of sixty-five percent support in 1996, when he won the presidency in the first Palestinian election, to thirty-five percent in 2004.15
And then Arafat suddenly died, opening the way for long-deferred elections—and even more dramatic change.
Voters, when offered real choices for the first time, often go to the polls to get revenge for the past. Early victors are not always long-term winners. They are simply the ones not rejected.
The day before the election, I drove to Hebron. Twenty miles south of Jerusalem, it is now the West Bank’s largest city. While Ramallah is the most liberal town, dusty Hebron is the most conservative. It is rich with religious history, centered around the Tomb of the Patriarchs, where Abraham is buried, along with Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah, the patriarchs and matriarchs of Judaism. The tomb is a venerated place for Jewish pilgrimages; 500 Jewish settlers reestablished a presence in Hebron, under the protection of 2,000 Israeli troops, to be near it. But Muslims also revere Abraham. Religious tradition holds that he fathered the Arabs through his son Ismail and the Israelites through his son Isaac. He is mentioned more than two dozen times in the Koran. In Arabic, Hebron is called al-Khalil, short for Ibrahim al-Khalil al-Rahman, or “City of Abraham, the Friend of God.” Muslims also pray at the tomb.
Some of the most dramatic violence in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has happened at the tomb. In 1980, Palestinians murdered six Jewish yeshiva students and wounded twenty others as they returned from prayers at the Tomb of the Patriarchs. In 1994, American-born Israeli physician Baruch Goldstein opened fire on Muslim worshippers at the tomb, killing twenty-nine and wounding 125.
I went to Hebron, however, because of a different rivalry. One of the world’s oldest cities had the most interesting contest in the Palestinian election: A top Fatah official who had once been considered an heir apparent to Arafat was running against a popular Muslim preacher with Hamas.
They, too, happened to be brothers.
The Rajoub boys, Jibril and Nayef, came from a family of thirteen children. Both born in the 1950s, they grew up in Dura, on Hebron’s outskirts. In 2006, they symbolized Palestinian politics fifteen months after Arafat’s death. Although eleven parties were competing, the election for the 132-seat parliament and a new government had boiled down to a contest between two: Fatah and Hamas.
The Rajoubs represented the conundrum of choices.
Jibril Rajoub—Jibril is Arabic for Gabriel—is the older brother and a Palestinian legend. He is a bear of a man, now balding and paunchy, with a tough-guy swagger. His career has been checkered. In 1969, at age sixteen, he was caught throwing grenades at Israeli troops in the West Bank. He was imprisoned for seventeen years, until 1985. After the first intifada erupted, he was deported. He went to Tunisia and joined the Fatah inner circle around Arafat.
After the Oslo Accords, Rajoub returned with Arafat and was put in charge of West Bank security, a pseudo-defense minister’s job for a nonstate. The job included liaising with Israel—ironically, using the Hebrew he had picked up in an Israeli prison to deal with his former jailers—and the United States. A bit of a braggart, Rajoub made no secret of ties to the Central Intelligence Agency. During a 2001 trip to Washington, he boasted that the CIA always provided him with an armor-plated limousine during his visits.16 An autobiographical collection of his interviews includes a picture with former CIA Director George Tenet, with whom he worked closely during Tenet’s brief mission in Middle East diplomacy.
By Palestinian standards, the older Rajoub was a tough pragmatist willing to do Arafat’s dirty work. He reined in militants of Hamas and Islamic Jihad to stop attacks against Israelis during peace efforts. He also quashed dissent against Arafat. His Preventive Security Force made calls or visits to media outlets, nongovernmental organizations, and academics that became too critical of Arafat’s autocratic rule. More feared than popular, Rajoub was sometimes referred to as the king of the West Bank.
On Israel, however, Rajoub straddled the line. After the second uprising erupted in 2000, he supported the intifada against Israeli troops in the occupied territories, but he opposed attacks inside Israel.
“Suicide bombs and violence will not serve the Palestinian cause,” Rajoub told Voice of Palestine Radio after two Palestinians were killed while preparing a bomb near the site of the Maccabiah Games, Israel’s Olympics-like athletic competition, in 2001.
“Resistance against the occupation is one thing, and using pernicious means to kill people, just because they are people, is something else,” he added. “These should stop because it is not in our interests, it does not serve us.”17
On Islamic militancy, he took a tough line. He publicly blasted Islamic schools for teaching “dangerous things” about the faith. “No one,” he said in 2001, “has a right to dictate their crazy vision to our children.”18
In the 2006 election, Rajoub’s base of support was hard-core Fatah loyalists and the bloated Palestinian security services. The West Bank force had 5,000 personnel, but Palestinians told me that almost 60,000 were on the payroll—one of the ways Fatah maintained support. Rajoub’s well-financed campaign was partially footed, according to West Bank scuttlebutt, by ill-gotten profits off the Palestinian Authority’s import monopolies. His entourage tooled around in armored vans and European luxury cars. He used the conference center of Hebron’s best hotel to meet local leaders. A large staff of handlers arranged rallies, answered calls, and distributed glossy brochures. He even had a campaign song, with a refrain, “Jibril Rajoub is the lion of the south; he is the strong man.”
Rajoub ran on Fatah’s Future List. The split within Fatah had deepened in the run-up to the election. The young guard, who came from inside the territories, felt it should assume more power after Arafat’s death. When the old guard balked, the younger generation threatened to break away and run on its own. In a last-minute compromise, they agreed to field candidates from both factions, sometimes in the same districts. Each district had multiple seats; Hebron was the largest district, with nine seats up for grabs. Conceivably, candidates from both factions could win. It proved a fateful decision.
Fatah’s young guard was led by Marwan Barghouti, the most popular Fatah politician. Barghouti came from Ramallah. He had been student-body president at Birzeit University and later a leader in the first intifada. Israel deported him to Jordan in 1987; he was allowed to return after the Oslo Accords. In the 1996 election, he won a seat in the Palestinian legislature. Barghouti advocated peace with Israel, but after the Oslo process died and the second intifada erupted, he was again a major figure as a leader of the new Tanzim militia that emerged within Fatah.
Israel arrested Barghouti after it reoccupied the West Bank in 2002. He was charged with the murder of four Israelis and a Greek monk carried out by the Tanzim. It was largely guilt by leadership. He was sentenced to five life sentences. Nevertheless, in 2006 he was running, from prison, for reelection to the Palestinian legislature. As part of the compromise between the old and young guards, he headed Fatah’s list. He became Fatah’s election poster boy. Ramallah and other West Bank cities were festooned with billboards and placards of Barghouti in brown prison garb, smiling and waving his shackled hands above his head, as if in victory.
Fatah did not have much to offer besides Barghouti’s popular appeal. The whole campaign played out over the party’s failures.
During the final campaign week, the eleven parties held a debate at Ramallah’s Cultural Palace. Candidates from each party sat at a desk on stage for two hours of intense questioning by four independent moderato
rs. Each answer was limited to two minutes. Throughout the evening, I kept thinking back to Arafat rambling on interminably and making impossible promises, his inner circle unwilling to rein him in, at Fatah’s 1981 anniversary event. In 2006, eleven parties had to present detailed political platforms in a program televised throughout the Arab world. Each party outlined an agenda centered on ending corruption, investigating government abuses, limiting leaders’ special powers, and strengthening an independent judiciary—all reforms playing off Arafat’s failures.
Rajoub also had little to run on, except his past power. He was often on the defensive and quite elusive to journalists. I set up several appointments to see him. But his assistant, a harried young woman named Rima, called back frequently to change the day or time—until it was finally election eve. When I got to Hebron, she told me that Jibril had had to leave town on short notice and would be unavailable. He may have gotten tired of talking about the competition. On the few occasions when the press did corner him, the subject inevitably turned to Hamas.
“We have nothing to learn from Hamas,” Rajoub told The New York Times. “Hamas believes armed struggle is the only way to confront Israel. I hope they will adopt a pragmatic, realistic platform. But they should learn from us. We have led the revolution. We have led the Palestinian people for forty-one years.”19
Rajoub, like most of the political analysts and pollsters, thought he was a shoo-in. The only question was which brother would come in first.
It was much easier to see Sheikh Nayef, as his younger brother is known in deference to his role as a mosque preacher in the Dura suburb of Hebron. Every time I called a telephone number I had been given, he answered. He was always amenable to shifting the time to accommodate the needs of his brother and rival. He invited me to meet him at his home.