The PA has "very little more to offer" to Israel and the US is the deciding factor in its "survivability or demise".
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Qatar has been the mover and shaker in this battle to extend and upgrade the informal international legitimacy that Hamas has in the eyes of the people of the region and Third World allies to the official level of Arab and Western governments. That Hamas, with Qatari support, was the first Islamist party in the Arab world that won a solid electoral victory in 2006 did not serve to grant it the legitimacy it deserved in the eyes of the United States, the most formidable anti-democratic force in the region and the world.
Instead, it galvanised the US, Israel and the collaborationist Palestinian Authority to stage a coup against it to deprive it of that victory. Having understood that the electoral strategy failed to have Hamas replace Fateh at the helm of the PA, Qatar and the top leadership of Hamas realised that the "Arab Spring" offers important new opportunities in this regard.
Jordan's king receives Hamas leader |
Jordanian electoral politics
As this will spell the accelerated rate at which Hamas will be offering concessions and reassurances to American interests following in the footsteps of Fateh, the PA is becoming most worried about its standing and its increasing dispensability for both Israel and the United States. US-supported and -protected Arab dictators have always feared only one type of domestic opposition to their rule, namely opposition groups who offer to serve US imperial interests as loyally as the existing regimes do.
I should note here that the US' openness to what it calls "moderate" Islamists has also been supported by a good number of Zionists and Israeli strategists who have been debating such alliances and their long term costs and benefits for the Jewish settler-colony.
The Fateh-controlled PA, like all other Arab dictatorships, prefers a Hamas that threatens US interests and fears most of all a Hamas that is willing to serve them as well as, if not better, than the PA has. The recent flexibility of Hamas on this question, with the prompting of Qatar, has raised alarm bells in PA corridors. Al Jazeera's revelations about the possible poisoning and murder of Yasser Arafat are hardly incidental to the effort of finishing off the PA, once and for all. The PA's futile bid for UN membership is a last ditch effort to save itself, with ambivalent Saudi backing.
Enter the quagmire of Jordanian electoral politics, and I use the term "electoral" very loosely. Jordan has been witnessing a wide-ranging movement for change for the last year and a half, whose leaders are Transjordanian Jordanians as well as former regime operatives (of all geographic origins) who have fallen out of favour in recent years, or at least have been pushed away from the centre of decision-making.
The majority of Palestinian Jordanians have remained quiescent throughout, terrorised as they are, not only by the ongoing institutionalised government discrimination against them which includes their ongoing unconstitutional denationalisation, but also by the poisonous chauvinism of a substantial segment of Transjordanian nationalists, some of whom call for the denationalisation and expulsion of Palestinian Jordanian citizens from the country outright.
Anti-Palestinian cause
The anti-Palestinian cause in chauvinist Transjordanian circles (on the right or on the left) is so widespread that many of the pro-reform and pro-revolutionary elements leading the pro-democracy struggle in the country see their legitimate struggle for democracy and against the dictatorship of the regime and their chauvinist anti-Palestinianism as one and the same fight - meaning that democracy will put political power in the hands of Transjordanian Jordanians, where it should reside, and take it out of the hands of the monarchy, which the chauvinists allege, against all existing evidence and historical facts, is an ally of Palestinian Jordanian interests.![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUaKQuAJ92JNNfD6eFBht-1Yhjn4J3z0FW4cHrTd8yROE9OpgH6F88JpkZsZwFshcJx3tzoM_WERKNA-xGU314PNODRdXlqa-gO3XzlHaCMZDesbVYYKrhfuQ9CbS935IhwA_LCYjyPAhX/s200/King+Abdullah.jpg)
Indeed, al-Tarawneh, whose education in electoral democracy is limited at best, has threatened to criminalise calls for boycotting the elections, hinting that if people do not register to vote, they could open themselves up to government prosecution.
Such measures, elite reformists believe, would strengthen the regime and the government through a democratic veneer that will certainly be undercut by traditional regime co-optation of parliamentarians.
Unlike the Muslim Brothers and a large part of the popular opposition in the country who call for constitutional amendments to limit the absolute power of the king, the former regime operatives limit their call to reforming the election law.
Fateh and Hamas
That the strategy of Prime Minister al-Tarawneh is not working is evidenced by the very low turnout of Jordanians registering to vote. As a result, the government has sought to bring in Hamas and Fateh to compete for the favour of the Jordanian regime in its struggle against democratic reform. Both Fateh and Hamas have jumped at the opportunity to serve the regime and government interests in the country, in the case of Fateh as part of its attempt to salvage whatever legitimacy it can, and in the case of Hamas as part of its attempt to prove its mettle to US interests.
The competition is now on as to who will prove to be more effective in serving US interests in Jordan, Fateh or Hamas. As Qatar has been reassuring the Americans, increasingly successfully, that the takeover of political power by Islamist forces, specifically the Muslim Brothers and kindred groups, is the best option for the US to stabilise the region for decades to come without its imperial strategy being threatened, its push to bring Hamas into the fold of US strategy may soon prove successful.
Same old American crescent
In the meantime, the PA is drowning in its own miasma of corruption, tyranny and collaboration with the Israelis and the Americans. That it has very little more to offer to Israel and the US is the deciding factor in its survivability or demise and the strengthening of Hamas's legitimacy in US and Israeli eyes. We remain unsure if or when Hamas will declare to the Americans, following Arafat's humiliating performance in 1989, that its charter is "caduc" and that its anti-colonial resistance has indeed been "terrorism" all along, which it now "renounces".
It also remains unclear what kind of opposition and resistance exists within Hamas to this new political transformation. As the buzz is increasing in the Arab media about a much delayed Palestinian "spring" in the West Bank, it remains to be seen if this would help this process of substituting Hamas for Fateh along or not.
In Egypt and Tunisia, the rule of the Muslim Brothers and Ennahda party is proceeding with active oppositions (and not only of the counter-revolutionary forces of the anciens regimes which indeed remain active) and popular checks and balances and a popular insistence on the democratic functioning of governance. Moreover, as the Muslim Brothers have ideological red lines that they cannot cross easily with regards to relations with Israel, their limitations will ensure that American demands on that score will not be fully satisfied.
Popular pressure on the new regimes, as has been evidenced, will also restrict their full compliance with US strategy, especially on the economic side of it. Indeed, how far the two new regimes can go in accommodating US interests, despite their sincere commitment to them, remains to be seen.
In Libya, the instability of the new order will remain for the foreseeable future, while in Syria, the regime has recently reasserted its military power over the jihadists in Damascus and Aleppo who have hijacked the pro-democracy movement. As a result and increasingly, the outcome in Syria is no longer assured as it once was for American, Saudi and Qatari interests.
As Hamas is admitted into the US camp, the new "crescent" that is slated to dominate (part of) the region is not "Shiite" and anti-American at all, as US and Saudi propaganda and their allies have claimed for the last decade, but the very same old American crescent, headed by the old tyrannical regimes and the triumphant Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates. That this is the American plan being executed for the region is clear enough, its success however is far from being certain.
Joseph Massad teaches modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University in New York.
River to Sea
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