If free and reasonably fair parliamentary elections have gone ahead as scheduled at the end of January in the Palestinian territories, we are likely to witness a profound shift in power. The radical younger Fatah generation of the intifadas, represented by the imprisoned Marwan Barghouti, will soon be sitting beside Hamas in a “militant” Palestinian parliament.
This reflects the demise of the Palestinian constituency of the 1993 Oslo accords. The Oslo agreement effectively awarded one Palestinian faction, Fatah, a monopoly of power and armed force in return for dismembering their emerging political rivals. But the Palestinian voters who overwhelmingly endorsed this empowerment of that one faction are far from the Palestinian constituency of today.
The erosion of this earlier constituency and, in parallel, of the credibility of the Oslo arrangement itself, was already clearly apparent in 2001 when I served on the staff of Senator George Mitchell’s fact-finding committee convened to inquire into the causes of the second intifada, which broke out in 2000. It was clear that Palestinians had broadly lost faith in the incremental Oslo approach, faced by the growth of settlements, settler-only roads, increasing numbers of checkpoints and the salami-slicing away of their prospective state. Now both the opinion polls and the Fatah primaries confirm that the earlier scepticism has been transformed into a deeper disillusion that is manifest in the overwhelming support for Hamas and the younger generation of Fatah, at the expense of the Fatah old guard.
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