Fatah Election Brings In Younger Leaders

By ISABEL KERSHNER

BETHLEHEM, West Bank — Fatah, the mainstream Palestinian nationalist party, elected a mostly new leadership committee, ushering in a younger generation and ousting some prominent veterans, according to preliminary results released here on Tuesday.

The new leaders are considered more pragmatic than their predecessors and grew up locally, in contrast to the exile-dominated leadership they are replacing. But many are familiar names who have already played active roles in Palestinian society and the peace process, and their election to the committee is not expected to bring about significant changes in Fatah policies.

Nevertheless, party leaders said they hoped the democratic process would lift Fatah’s popularity, strengthen the party in its dealings with Israel and increase its leverage in reconciliation talks with its main rival, the Islamic group Hamas.

Fourteen of the 18 people elected to the Fatah Central Committee have never served on it before. Among them are the veteran negotiator Saeb Erekat and two former Palestinian Authority security chiefs, Jibril Rajoub and Muhammad Dahlan.

Mr. Rajoub said there had been a “coup” in the party hierarchy as a result of an “honest competition.”

Marwan Barghouti, a popular leader of Fatah’s younger guard, also won a seat, but the post is likely to be largely symbolic for now, because he is currently serving five life terms in an Israeli prison. Mr. Barghouti, 50, was convicted in the deaths of five people during the second intifada, the violent Palestinian uprising that started in 2000.

This election was the first for the Central Committee, Fatah’s main decision-making body, since 1989. It rounded off a weeklong party conference in Bethlehem attended by roughly 2,300 delegates, the party’s first in 20 years and the first ever to be held on Palestinian soil.

By the end, many of the participants seemed buoyant. They said that Fatah, led by the Palestinian Authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, had emerged from the conference energized and more unified than it had been in years.

The party at the vanguard of peace negotiations with Israel, Fatah has been tarred by corruption, cronyism and infighting. That and a lack of party discipline led to its loss to Hamas in Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006. The following year, Hamas took over Gaza by force, routing Fatah there.

Many Palestinians also lost faith in the peace talks with Israel, which are now stalled.

Now Fatah must prepare for new Palestinian presidential and parliamentary elections that are provisionally scheduled for early next year.

“Fatah is the strongest movement in Palestinian society,” said Ziad Abu Ein, a member and Barghouti supporter from the Ramallah area. “It will succeed in everything — in peace, in resisting the occupation and in any election.”

One of the old guard who lost his seat in the Central Committee election was Ahmed Qurei, a longtime partner and rival of Mr. Abbas.

Nabil Shaath, another of the older leaders, retained his place on the committee. He noted that the younger members were “not that young,” with many of them now in their 50s.

“It was their first chance to be elected, but they are not novices,” he said.

Khaled Abu Aker contributed reporting.

Signs of Hope Emerge in the West Bank

By ETHAN BRONNER

NABLUS, West Bank — The first movie theater to operate in this Palestinian city in two decades opened its doors in late June. Palestinian policemen standing beneath new traffic lights are checking cars for seat belt violations. One-month-old parking meters are filling with the coins of shoppers. Music stores are blasting love songs into the street, and no nationalist or Islamist scold is forcing them to stop.

“You don’t appreciate the value of law and order until you lose it,” Rashid al-Sakhel, the owner of a carpet store, said as he stood in his doorway surveying the small wonder of bustling streets on a sunny morning. “For the past eight years, a 10-year-old boy could order a strike and we would all close. Now nobody can threaten us.”

For the first time since the second Palestinian uprising broke out in late 2000, leading to terrorist bombings and fierce Israeli countermeasures, a sense of personal security and economic potential is spreading across the West Bank as the Palestinian Authority’s security forces enter their second year of consolidating order.

The International Monetary Fund is about to issue its first upbeat report in years for the West Bank, forecasting a 7 percent growth rate for 2009. Car sales in 2008 were double those of 2007. Construction on the first new Palestinian town in decades, for 40,000, will begin early next year north of Ramallah. In Jenin, a seven-story store called Herbawi Home Furnishings has opened, containing the latest espresso machines. Two weeks ago, the Israeli military shut its obtrusive nine-year-old checkpoint at the entrance to this city, part of a series of reductions in security measures.

Whether all this can last and lead to the consolidation of political power for the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority based in Ramallah, as the Obama administration hopes, remains unclear. But a recent opinion poll in the West Bank and Gaza by the Jerusalem Media and Communications Center, a Palestinian news agency, found that Fatah was seen as far more trustworthy than Hamas — 35 percent versus 19 percent — a significant shift from the organization’s poll in January, when Hamas appeared to be at least as trustworthy.

“Two years ago I couldn’t have even gone to Nablus,” said Tony Blair, the former British prime minister who serves as international envoy to the Palestinians, after a smooth visit this week. “Security is greatly improved, and the economy is doing much better. Now we need to move to the next stage: politics.”

The aim of American and European policy is to stitch Palestinian politics back together by strengthening the Palestinian Authority under the presidency of Mahmoud Abbas, which favors a two-state solution with Israel, while weakening the Islamists of Hamas, who rule in Gaza. Fatah says it will hold its first general congress in 20 years in early August to build on its successes, but it remains unclear if the meeting will take place.

The Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says it shares the goal of helping Mr. Abbas, which is why it is seeking to improve West Bank economic conditions as a platform for moving to a political discussion. The Palestinians worry that the political discussion will never arrive and say the Israelis are doing far too little to ease the occupation. Still, they point with pride to the many changes in the West Bank.

Meanwhile, the Israeli-led economic siege of Gaza continues, letting in only humanitarian goods. That sets the desired contrast between the territories into sharp relief but causes enormous suffering and anger.

Asked to explain why the West Bank’s fortunes were shifting, a top Israeli general began his narrative with a chart showing 410 Israelis killed by Palestinians in 2002, and 4 in 2008.

“We destroyed the terrorist groups through three things — intelligence, the barrier and freedom of action by our men,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity in keeping with military rules. “We sent our troops into every marketplace and every house, staying tightly focused on getting the bad guys.”

But he added that the 2006 legislative electoral victory by Hamas, followed by its violent takeover of Gaza in 2007, led Mr. Abbas to fight Hamas. Palestinian troops have been training in Jordan under American sponsorship.

There are now several thousand men trained in that way, and their skills, along with those of the European-trained police force here, have made a huge difference.

An important element in making the Palestinian force effective, American and Israeli officials say, was taking young Palestinian men out of the ancestral grips of their villages and tribal clans and training them abroad, turning them into soldiers loyal to units and commanders.

The Israeli general said that in the past year and a half, Israeli and Palestinian forces had shot at each other only twice, and in each case there was a meeting to restore trust.

Speaking of the seriousness of the Palestinians, he added, “Twice in recent months we have been amazed.” The first time was during Israel’s military invasion of Gaza when Palestinian police officers kept the West Bank calm during protests. The second was in June when the security forces clashed twice with Hamas men in the city of Qalqilya, fighting to the death.

The Israelis have pulled their forces to the outskirts of four cities, greatly reduced the number of permanent checkpoints and promised to help industry develop. They say the Palestinians now need courts, prisons and trained judges.

Mr. Blair agreed but said there was much more Israel should do, like ending the growth of settlements and taking away dirt mounds and other barriers. In addition, he said, Israel should allow greater Palestinian development in the 60 percent of the West Bank it fully controls.

Palestinian business leaders are incensed at the Israeli limitations. Paltel, which operates the only Palestinian cellphone company, says Israel will not permit it to place its towers on the land it controls. That forces Palestinian customers to pay roaming charges for many calls, and allows Israeli cellphone companies to offer lower rates.

For more than a year, Israel has promised to free a second frequency so that a competitor to Paltel can provide cellphone service, but it has not yet done so. This leaves the Palestinians skeptical.

“I fail to see any indications that Israel wants to help the Palestinian economy,” Abdel-Malik al-Jaber, vice chairman of Paltel, said.

Still, his company has invested millions in the past year in call centers and customer service because of the increased security and disposable income.

As Nader Elawy, manager of Cinema City, the new movie theater here, put it: “We now have law and order. You can really feel the change.”

For Palestinian Forces, a Growing Role in West Bank

By Howard Schneider
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, June 26, 2009

QALQILYAH, West Bank -- It began with the smell of smoke at the Ayyoub al-Ansari mosque and a routine call to the local fire department, but over the next six weeks, it developed into a full-fledged counterterrorism operation.

Palestinian security officials, who joined firefighters at the scene, noticed an oddly placed stairwell and found that it led to an underground room stocked with chemicals, guns and a ready-to-go explosives vest. Follow-up arrests and investigation helped uncover a militant safe house and led to a climactic gun battle in late May in which two men from the Islamist Hamas movement -- who had long eluded Israeli capture -- died in a hail of Palestinian fire, according to Palestinian, U.S. and Israeli officials. Three police officers and another resident of the house were also killed.

The fight last month in this northern West Bank town has emerged as a potential turning point in cooperation between Israeli and Palestinian security officials, a relationship central to the future emergence of a Palestinian state. Palestinian police and security forces have assumed increasing control over towns in the occupied West Bank, a process that took a significant step forward Thursday when Israel agreed to limit military incursions in four major Palestinian cities.

Amid a marked decline in violence in and emanating from the West Bank, the Israel Defense Forces said its troops would no longer enter Ramallah, Bethlehem, Jericho and Qalqilyah unless there are "urgent security needs." The agreement, struck at a Palestinian command center outside Bethlehem where commanders from the two sides gathered on Wednesday night, authorizes Palestinian police and security troops to remain in control of the four cities 24 hours a day. They had previously pulled back between midnight and 5 a.m. to avoid "friendly fire" encounters with IDF patrols.

The agreement stops short of recent demands by Palestinian officials that the IDF pull back fully from "area A" -- the mostly urban territory that, under the 1993 Oslo accords, was put under the authority of Palestinian forces. The Oslo arrangement unraveled beginning in 2000 when a violent intifada, or uprising, led the IDF to reestablish control over the entire West Bank and surround Palestinian cities with checkpoints and barriers.

Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said Israel should move more quickly to bolster Palestinian control in the West Bank -- and prove that cooperation will show results more effectively than the confrontational approach taken by the Hamas movement. Hamas, in control of the Gaza Strip, has criticized Palestinian security efforts in the West Bank for helping Israel, and said that its members have borne the brunt of policing efforts.

"We have a domestic constituency, too," Fayyad said in an interview last week. "We need to carry people with us in this process."

The changes announced Thursday reinforce a step-by-step approach that Israeli military officials say will minimize the risk of a major attack that could set back progress. Israeli military and political officials say their intelligence and other operations laid a foundation that Palestinian forces have built on but are not yet ready to assume full control over.

In recent months, Israel has lifted some of the central checkpoints it had established around West Bank cities. At Wednesday's meeting, the Israelis agreed to curtail inspections at others and begin removing some of the concrete blocks and other barriers to movement in the West Bank, according to a Palestinian commander who was present.

IDF raids are still common, particularly in flash-point cities such as Hebron and Nablus -- a fact Fayyad said undermines Palestinian credibility more than it helps Israel's security. But Israeli commanders say they are now trying to reduce the IDF presence in the West Bank as Palestinian forces increase theirs.

"We've started to see change. Less terror. More law and order," said a senior Israeli military source. Palestinian Authority forces "fought Hamas terrorists in Qalqilyah, terrorists that we were looking for. They killed them, and they lost some people. They have the will to win. To protect their country."

The assessment stands in contrast to the situation in the Gaza Strip, where rocket and mortar fire by Hamas and other militant groups into Israel triggered a three-week war in December and January, and a tightened Israeli blockade of the area.

In the West Bank, European officials have been training Palestinian municipal police. A separate U.S.-funded effort has shipped hundreds of recruits to Jordan for a four-month program designed to improve the Palestinian National Security Forces. Partly about security and partly about nation-building, the program is meant to break down clan and political ties by drawing troops from across the West Bank and molding them into geographically diverse units.

Four battalions of about 500 people each have been deployed to Palestinian cities in the last two years, with six more battalions planned. The muscle behind operations like the one in Qalqilyah, they have helped curb overall crime in the West Bank, allowed nightlife to return in some cities, and have been credited by Israeli officials, at least partially, with causing a drop in attacks inside Israel proper.

In addition, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Fayyad have restructured the chaotic quilt of security and paramilitary forces maintained by the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat under a unified command that is gaining Israeli trust. Top Palestinian commanders meet biweekly with Israeli brigade leaders under Israel's chief West Bank officer, Brig. Gen. Noam Tibon -- a level of interplay not seen since the intifada, and the peak of Israeli-Palestinian cooperation in the years after Oslo.

In some cases, veteran commanders from Arafat's years have emerged as what the U.S. and Israelis regard as streetwise and seasoned leaders, now given more of the tools, the authority and the political backing to do their jobs.

When Israel began military operations in Gaza in late December, there was concern about the potential for violence in the West Bank. In the offices of Palestinian commanders such as Col. Suleiman Omran, a veteran of Arafat's Fatah party, the fax machine began humming early on the day of the invasion -- with clear orders to allow peaceful protest, but nothing more.

Omran, in charge of Palestinian security forces in the Bethlehem governate, said emotions ran high among the security chiefs he gathered in an operations room on the first day of the war. But all agreed that a collapse of order in the West Bank would only damage the ultimate goal of Palestinian statehood.

The plans were set: boost the guard near Rachel's Tomb and other sites Israelis visit, guard against possible snipers shooting at the Jewish settlement of Gilo, put Palestinian intelligence agents on overtime to keep in touch with sources, and call in political party leaders to discourage incitement.

"As a security service, we were issued clear instructions: Any expression of opposition according to the law is allowed, anything else goes to court," Omran said. "We are not working on behalf of the Israelis, or on behalf of the Americans or the Arabs. Our work is clear: There is Palestinian law."