Inside a Failed Palestinian Police State

[ProgressiveMuslim]

Inside a Failed Palestinian Police State
By Arthur Neslen

The death of Hamas preacher Majed al-Barghouti in a prison cell last week — apparently after being tortured — momentarily shattered the surface calm of news reports from Ramallah. But neither the subsequent rioting nor the fact that the dead man came from one of the most prominent Palestinian families disrupted the ‘democracy versus terror’ agenda that has distorted most news reporting out of the West Bank since last June (when Hamas took control of Gaza).

Martin Luther King once described rioting as ‘the voice of the unheard,’ but despite al-Barghouti’s death, most Ramallans currently seem too depressed to riot. The only events to have lifted spirits in the city lately have been a freak snow storm, and a similarly rare suicide bombing in Dimona — the latter prompting local shopkeepers to cut prices for the morning and, in one case, to waive payment altogether.

More typical events in the last week have included a mysterious explosion, continued Israeli army raids, and a major downtown gunfight between PA ’security’ forces in balaclavas and youths from the city’s Amari refugee camp. The violence, unheard outside Ramallah, is at once cause, effect and byproduct of a pervasive gloom that has settled over ‘Fatahland’ like smog.

In private, moderate former cabinet ministers now compare the government of PA president Mahmoud Abbas to France’s Vichy regime under German occupation. In public, meanwhile, West Bank trades unions affiliated with Fatah are battening down the hatches in an increasingly bitter dispute with the PA that has already sparked a two-day national strike this month.

Sources in the Fatah grassroots camp aligned with Marwan Barghouti, the movement’s single most popular leader who remains in prison in Israel, warn of a rage building among their supporters that they will be unable to control. They complain that the failure of Mahmoud Abbas’s strategy to produce anything other than an increased expansion of settlements, mass arrests and assassinations, has cost him his authority among the Fatah rank and file.

The narrative in much Western news reporting since last year’s Gaza civil war that effectively ended the Second Intifada has emphasized the Annapolis process as the great hope for delivering Palestinian national goals, but you’d be hard-press to find support for it in any quarter of Palestinian society. For now, most Ramallans seem content to soldier on with their private struggles to make ends meet, until stronger political winds again rake up the dust. But feelings of bitterness, defeat and resentment have multiplied.

Supposedly, this gloomy picture is all wrong. Ramallah is enjoying an economic boom with a reported growth rate of 10 percent last year. Residents of cities such as Nablus and Tulkarem are fighting each other for apartments here, while rents and living costs rocket. Billions of dollars and batteries of Western consultants are washing over the streets like icy rain. But the money isn’t trickling down the Fatah food chain.

Supporters of Mohammed Dahlan (the U.S.-backed Fatah strongman driven out of Gaza by Hamas) and Islamic Jihad alike talk about the aid monies as something akin to blood money; the Jihad stalwarts are indignant, Dahlan’s supporters just resigned. Where five years ago, Ramallah was at the heart of the intifada, today there almost seems to be an intifada against its heart.

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http://tonykaron.com/2008/02/26/inside-a-failed-palestinian-police-state/