The Modern Middle East - A Political History Since World War I (Third Edition)

by Mehran Kamrava

  Equally important in sparking such debates has been the Israeli state’s historical trajectory since its establishment. When the state was initially created, such thorny questions as Judaism’s role in the political process and the precise definition of a Jew were put on the back burner so as not to upset the fragile coalition of various Zionist tendencies fighting for the state’s creation. This is why Israel does not have a written constitution yet, although, at this point, after more than half a century of successful operation, it may never adopt one. Now, with all the wars fought and with Israel’s physical and military security more firmly established, the profound questions of being and identity have come to the fore again. In many ways, the ongoing scholarly debates signify a maturing of the national project, such that Israelis feel confident enough to undertake a thorough self-examination of Zionism and Israeli identity. That such discussion has emerged at a time when there are still Palestinians who reject the whole notion of an Israeli identity—as there are Israelis who reject Palestinian identity—attests to the sense of security that the debate’s protagonists feel.

  For the Palestinians, becoming stateless has served as a particularly compelling source of cohesion. Internal divisions, derived from differences in religious affiliation, economic standing, and place of residence, tend to run deeper among Palestinians than Israelis. These divisions have remained constant, but other traditional characteristics of Palestinians, such as secularism and a weak middle class, have subtly but noticeably shifted, to a large extent because of the increasing loss of popular legitimacy among the primary articulators of Palestinian identity: traditional Palestinian notables and the PLO, both of whom saw themselves, initially with some justification, as the legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people.28

  Institutions play defining roles in shaping all national identities. Such institutions may be social (e.g., the family, the neighborhood community, religious institutions, self-help groups) or political (e.g., the state or statelike institutions, political parties). Whatever their genesis and functions, institutions and national identity often have a symbiotic, mutually reinforcing relationship, each influencing and being influenced by the other.29 For Palestinians—whose nation has been diminished and fragmented by the birth of the state of Israel, by exodus and exile, and by life in seemingly permanent refugee camps—social and political institutions play an especially pivotal role in the articulation of national identity. These institutions are, after all, for many Palestinians the only tangible manifestations of national existence and a sense of the self.30 In turn, the changes experienced by Palestinian institutions—especially the rise or decline of their popularity—often reflect larger changes within Palestinian national identity. As this chapter demonstrates, the sense of identity that had given rise to the near-complete dominance of Palestinian politics by the PLO after 1967 underwent dramatic changes beginning in the late 1980s. The transforming effects of the intifada on Palestinian national identity gave rise first to a non-PLO-affiliated “counterelite” and then to the Hamas organization. By 1993, when the Oslo Accords were signed, the Palestinians’ uncertainty over their national identity was reflected in the chasm between the two main Palestinian institutions, the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) and Hamas. Several Palestinian civil society organizations were also established in the mid- to late 1990s, although their long-term efficacy and the consequences of their actions for Palestinian identity are far from clear.31 Meanwhile, economic and cultural divisions began pulling the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in different directions, a chasm accentuated by expansive ideological and political differences between the PNA and Hamas, with the former in control of the West Bank and the latter in control of Gaza. Intermittent armed clashes between the two groups throughout 2007 and 2008 led to scores of casualties and arrests by each side of supporters and sympathizers of the other, and the seemingly unbridgeable gap between the two territories took what remained of Palestine to the brink of civil war. As of this writing, in 2013, a tense and uneasy state of acrimony marks the relationship between the two.

  Mention of the continued dispersion of Palestinians, both throughout the diaspora and within the Occupied Territories, must precede analysis of the causes and consequences of changes in Palestinian identity. Palestinians are divided by their place of residence into several different groups. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, run by the PNA, the total number of Palestinians in the world in 2010 was estimated at around 9.6 million (not including an estimated 1.4 million Palestinians with Israeli citizenship), of whom 5.5 million live outside pre-1947 Palestine and 4.1 million live in the Occupied Territories. In 2012, there were an estimated 2.65 million Palestinians living in the West Bank and 1.64 million in the Gaza Strip. By far the largest number of Palestinians outside the Occupied Territories live in other Arab countries, some 4.9 million or 44 percent of a total of nearly 11 million Palestinians worldwide.32 Of these, many hold official refugee status; of the 8.5 million Palestinians who do not hold Israeli citizenship, nearly 5 million, or 59 percent, are officially registered as refugees by the United Nations. According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), in 2010, of a total of 5 million registered Palestinian refugees worldwide, some 2 million live in Jordan (40 percent of total), 1.1 million in the Gaza Strip (23 percent), and the rest in the West Bank (850,000), Syria (486,000), and Lebanon (455,000).33 Additionally, approximately 1.5 million Palestinians, or nearly 12 percent of the worldwide total, live in Israel and are considered Israeli citizens.34

  It is only natural that prolonged residence in different regions and countries gives different perspectives, dispositions, and identities to members of the same larger group. Life in Amman or Beirut is radically different from life in Bethlehem, and both in turn are different from life in Gaza or West Bank refugee camps. At some level all Palestinians share the characteristics of a dispossessed people, no matter where in the diaspora they may be, and the refusal of most of the host Arab countries to grant them citizenship and other rights has inadvertently served to strengthen their own Palestinian identity.35 Nevertheless, diaspora life is bound to have assimilating effects on the lives and identities of those experiencing it, especially in light of continued Israeli unwillingness to even discuss the possibility of Palestinian repatriation.36 At the very least, a subtle and gradual disconnect develops between the members of the diaspora’s perceptions of life in the home territory and the reality of that life as those remaining behind experience it. Following the news of back home with great interest, or even trying to make news at home from a distance, as the PLO tried to do during its exile years, is quite different from experiencing developments firsthand. Slowly but surely, the “outside” leadership of the Palestinians, especially the PLO, and by implication their local allies, especially the notables, lost touch with the reality of life in the Occupied Territories. Not surprisingly, they found themselves shunted aside by an emerging counterelite that was a product of local developments.

  The increasing prominence of the Palestinian counterelite in the politics of the Occupied Territories has been reflected in two other aspects of Palestinian identity, the Palestinian community’s general class composition and its orientations toward religion. Approximately 10 to 12 percent of Palestinians are Christians. The rest of the population, nearly 90 percent, are Sunni Muslims. Historically, most Palestinian Christians have resided in larger towns and cities, and therefore their ranks have been overrepresented among the middle classes and urban professionals. Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip, for example, where living standards are markedly lower than in the West Bank, are almost entirely Muslim. From the very beginning, Christians constituted a substantial minority in the PLO, and this in turn largely accounted for the organization’s avowedly secularist ideology.37 In recent years, with the rise of the more locally based counter-elite within the Occupied Territories, Palestinian Islamists have found an especially receptive audience among the Gazans.3
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  During the past few decades, a somewhat deeper process of socioeconomic transformation has been at work in Palestinian society. Gradually, the more established class of notables, the aʿyan, have been losing much of their traditional power and social prestige to an emerging counterelite that is generally younger and less willing to tolerate Israeli occupation. Traditionally, Palestinian society was composed of a small class of landed elites and local notables and a large class of landless peasants, farmworkers, and residents of refugee camps. Throughout the twentieth century, several factors—chiefly Israeli occupation, involuntary exile or the voluntary departure of those who could afford it, and a general absence of economic opportunities and sources of mobility—combined to hinder the emergence and deepening of an indigenous Palestinian middle class. Whatever middle class did emerge or managed to retain its status did so primarily in the bigger urban areas of East Jerusalem and Bethlehem and, to a lesser extent, in Jericho and Gaza City.39 By the early to mid-1970s, however, the emerging counterelite was rapidly acquiring the political dispositions and articulateness of the middle classes, if not necessarily their economic standing.

  This transformation was largely the unintentional result of Israel’s economic and political policies in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip after 1967, when it repeatedly confiscated Palestinian lands and opened its economy to migrant day laborers and farmworkers from the territories. Both practices undermined the patronage powers of the traditional Palestinian elites and their sources of influence in local communities, instead facilitating the emergence of a younger, increasingly more confident and articulate generation of dispossessed Palestinians.40 The opening of various West Bank universities—namely Bir Zeit (1972), Bethlehem (1973–74), and al-Najah (1977) Universities—helped sharpen the younger Palestinians’ organizational skills, mobilizational possibilities, and, most importantly, sense of the self.41 By the mid-1980s, the Palestinian counterelite had started to eclipse not only the traditional notables but also the PLO, which by now had been run out of Lebanon and was in exile in distant Tunisia. Within this context the popular uprising known as the intifada began in late 1987.

  The actual events that precipitated the intifada and its unfolding will be discussed in the next section. For now it is important to pay attention to the transforming effects of the uprising both for the structure of Palestinian society and for Palestinian identity. The intifada signified the start of a new phase of Palestinian nationalism, one in which the expression of Palestinian identity assumed a popular, grassroots form. The period from 1948 to 1967 had been the “lost years” of high-level but hopelessly inconsequential diplomatic-military negotiations by Arab leaders on behalf of the Pales-tinians. The “PLO years” of the late 1960s to the mid-1980s turned out to be equally frustrating for the Palestinians (table 2). The intifada signified a qualitative shift in the structure of Palestinian society and the expression of popular sentiments—or, more aptly, popular frustrations—by new groups that had now come to the fore. The PLO’s geographic distance from the territories belied an even wider subjective and emotional chasm between its seemingly inconsequential leadership and an increasingly restive, steadily changing constituency. Even the notables who had been traditionally associated with the PLO saw a significant decline in their prestige and stature, with their traditional functions of patronage replaced by the thousands of local popular committees (lijan shaʿbiya) springing up throughout the West Bank and Gaza.

  Insofar as contemporary Palestinian political history is concerned, the intifada turned out to be an incomplete revolution. As will be shown shortly, the PLO, in collusion with Israel, eventually hijacked the movement and used it to give legitimacy to its own efforts at establishing a statelike institution, the PNA. But neither the PLO nor the burgeoning apparatus of the PNA could easily contain the new popular structures and identities to which the intifada had given rise. The intifada, generally dated from late 1987 to 1993–94, was far from a monolithic, cohesive movement. In fact, in its last year or two, the movement in many ways turned on itself, degenerating into a bloody hunt for suspected Israeli informants and collaborators. But it left behind an important imprint on the Palestinian mind that the PNA’s emerging authoritarianism has not been able to erase. For one thing, the extensive participation of women and children in the uprising—their “contributions to the national struggle,” as the Palestinians saw it—challenged the patriarchal nature of Palestinian society and, by implication, the influence and legitimacy of the chief patriarch, PLO leader Yasser Arafat.42

  Figure 28. Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, first president of the Palestinian National Authority. Corbis.

  Equally important, the intifada reoriented Palestinian identity toward the actual conditions of the Occupied Territories. The reference points for Palestinians’ identity—as inhabitants of historic Palestine; as victims of first Zionist colonialism, then Arab betrayal, and finally Israeli repression; as faithful soldiers of the PLO’s struggle—underwent a subtle shift. The weight and repression of the occupation and the impotence of the PLO caused Palestinian identity to be defined more by immediate, existing circumstances. In addition to everything else that composed Palestinian identity, being Palestinian meant having your land confiscated, being at the mercy of an Israeli employer, experiencing prolonged water and electricity shutoffs, being harassed at local military checkpoints, being confined for weeks to the house or to specific areas as a result of frequent “closures” by Israeli authorities, being reminded daily of limited opportunities and inferior living standards as compared to those of Israeli settlers, struggling with bureaucracies to secure identity cards and other necessary documents, and enduring everything else that made daily life unbearably difficult. The intifada made Palestinian identity more realistic and sober, defined less by political institutions or historic events than by the actual circumstances that governed life from one day to the next. It also led to the steady emergence of local leaders with little or no affinity for the PLO, who, especially in Gaza, would emerge as serious alternatives to the PNA’s secular, PLO-affiliated leaders.

  The Oslo Accords enabled the PLO, or, more specifically, the “outside” leadership of the Palestinians, to once again reassert its control over the Palestinian community, but only under very tight Israeli control and supervision. The establishment of the PNA in many ways signified, initially at least, the institutionalization of Palestinian identity, the birth of a set of actual and symbolic institutions that had risen from the collective struggles and aspirations of Palestinians. Now Palestinian national identity had a flag, an anthem, a president, a representative assembly (the Palestine National Council), a police force, and many of the other necessary accoutrements of a state.

  It did not take long, however, for the Palestinians to realize that their initial euphoria had been misplaced. Apart from symbolic acts and empty promises, the PNA was no more capable of alleviating daily stresses and miseries than the PLO had been before the intifada started. The Oslo Accords did stop the intifada, but they could not put the genie back in the bottle unless, of course, they brought tangible improvements to the lives of Palestinians. And that they could not do. As we shall see shortly, before long, in the late 1990s, the Palestinian powder keg once again exploded. By late 2000, what came to be known as the Al-Aqsa intifada was under way.

  Like the first intifada, the second uprising arose in response to the frustration of rising expectations, increased repression by the Israeli occupation authorities, and the continued inability of the PNA leadership to meaningfully improve the harsh realities of daily life, or, for that matter, to contain the spiraling violence of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad (more of which below). By now, the manifold failures of the “outside” leadership had also led to the discrediting of its ideological stance of secular nationalism. For many in the ranks of the ever-more-strident counterelite, political Islam became increasingly attractive.

  Islam had long served as one of the pivot
al elements of Palestinian national identity and as a main source of mobilizing opposition to Israeli occupation. Not until the late 1970s and 1980s, however, was it able to emerge out of the shadows of the PLO’s secular nationalism and, in many ways, to shape and dictate the events unfolding in the Occupied Territories. In fact, the rise in the popularity and spread of political Islam can be traced to the 1980s and even earlier, when a general trend in the politicization of Islam began sweeping across the Middle East following the Arab “victory” in the 1973 War and the success of the Iranian revolution. The harsh repression of Israeli occupation, the seeming impotence of the PLO, the social and cultural resonance of Islam, and the religion’s actual and perceived abilities to deliver on the promises that the PLO had abandoned all combined to enhance Islam’s legitimacy as a powerful political force. Not surprisingly, from 1967 to 1987—from the beginning of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza until the eruption of the intifada—the number of mosques increased from 400 to 750 in the West Bank and from 200 to 600 in the Gaza Strip.43 The Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood organization, which had started in Egypt in 1928, had also long been active in the Occupied Territories and, throughout the mid-1980s, had experienced a rise in its prestige and popularity concurrent with the PLO’s mounting difficulties.44

  Nevertheless, the outbreak of the intifada caught the Muslim Broth-erhood by surprise as much as it did the PLO. Both organizations scrambled to establish their own institutional hegemony over the uprising. The PLO encouraged the establishment of a Unified Leadership of the Up---rising (ULU), made up of secular individuals sympathetic to or loosely affiliated with the PLO. For its part, the Muslim Brotherhood created a parallel organization called Hamas (meaning “zeal” and constituting an acronym of Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya, the Islamic Resistance Movement). A smaller, slightly older organization, the Islamic Jihad, which had started as a more radical offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood and become officially established in 1980, also saw in the intifada the opportunity to expand its social and political base. All three entities—the ULU, Hamas, and the Islamic Jihad—actively participated in organizing the demonstrations, strikes, and other events that collectively constituted the intifada. Of the three, the actions of the Islamic Jihad were by far the most violent. The organization saw the uprising as a perfect opportunity to carry out a jihad (in this sense, “crusade”) against Israel and its occupation. Most of its members came from modest backgrounds in Gaza, and many had spent time in Israeli prisons, having become even more radicalized by their experience.45 But radicalism alone was hardly sufficient to maintain the Islamic Jihad’s popularity during the course of the intifada, and, as time went by, the organization sought to compensate for its ideological limitations by launching spectacular attacks on Israeli targets. Grenade attacks and car bombs, along with other actions that risked the “glory of martyrdom,” only served to further weaken the Islamic Jihad because of the severity of Israeli retaliations. Often Israel, having realized the radicalizing effects of prison sentences, retaliated by deporting the organization’s leaders or assassinating them.46