Wobbles all round

Palestine and Israel

Dec 20th 2005 NABLUS AND JERUSALEM
From The Economist print edition

A split in the Palestinians' ruling party and a threat to the health of Israel's embattled prime minister could shake up Middle East politics all over again

JUST a month after the prime minister, Ariel Sharon, overturned Israeli politics by quitting the ruling Likud to form his own party, Kadima (“Forward”), a similar upheaval has hit the Palestinian Authority (PA). And to confuse matters still more, Kadima's own chances of keeping Mr Sharon in power after the election due in March took a knock after he suffered a stroke, albeit a minor one, on December 18th; his new party, after all, depends massively on the charisma of its 77-year-old leader.

Among Palestinians the uncertainty is just as great. After lengthy feuding over whom the PA's ruling Fatah party would field in the election for Palestine's parliament on January 25th, a crowd of ambitious politicians decided that the machinations of a few old stalwarts to lead the party list had gone too far. Primaries meant to resolve things fairly had collapsed in shooting and chaos. Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), the Palestinian president, was said to be drawing up a list that would put unpopular old-timers above genuine vote-winners. So, at literally the eleventh hour on December 14th, with registration due to close at midnight, the Fatah “young guard” announced its own party list, calling it Al-Mustaqbal: “the Future”.

It is the heaviest blow to Yasser Arafat's crony-ridden legacy since he died a year ago. Palestinian voters blame the corruption and ineptitude rampant in Fatah and the PA mostly on a small group of his loyalists. Yet even though Mr Abbas had fired some of the group, such as Arafat's cousin Musa Arafat (later murdered), earlier in the year, he was reluctant to move against other hangers-on, to the bafflement even of some of his close advisers.

Instead, the young guard has done it for him, making him look indecisive and foolish. Drama turned to farce as Fatah released its official list a whisker before the deadline, only to discover that 14 of the people on it were on the al-Mustaqbal list too. For days, officials tried to negotiate a merger while debates raged over whether that was even legal. In the end there are two lists: one for the young guard, another for the rest.

Paradoxically, the split may be good for Fatah. Voters who might have rejected a unified list with the old guard on it now have an alternative, so the two lists will probably win more seats altogether. That will slightly weaken the main opposition party, the Islamists of Hamas; and it skewers a Third Path party recently set up by a bunch of reformist technocrats, including Mr Abbas's much-admired former finance minister, Salam Fayyad.

Though Mr Abbas lacked the guts to follow Mr Sharon's example himself, he can still stay on top. Al-Mustaqbal should win a good number of seats, cutting the old-timers down to size. The president could then side with al-Mustaqbal to push reforms that Palestinians want: fighting corruption, building the rule of law and investing in job creation. Since these are also Hamas's core issues, it will often have to go along. If Mr Abbas is lucky, that could sharply improve the PA's fortunes.

But the endgame is far from clear. Hamas took control of three key cities in local elections last week, including a landslide in Fatah's former stronghold, Nablus. And Hamas has been cleverer about allocating its parliamentary candidates in a complex new system whereby each voter chooses both a national list and a local representative. How much of the parliament Hamas will take—some say as little as a fifth, others as much as a half—is a guess. The result will dictate how much it subjects both its politics and its militant wing to the PA's authority, something Israel sees as a precondition for any peace talks.

Nor will things be simple afterwards. The PA's young guard has at least three competing leaders, each with his loyalists. Though Marwan Barghouti, stewing in an Israeli jail cell, is undisputedly the most popular, the fiercely ambitious Muhammad Dahlan and the slightly-less-so Jibril Rajoub, two former security-service bosses, will scheme against him and each other. Mr Abbas will need as much guile as Mr Sharon to handle this body politic—not something he has recently displayed.

What if the bulldozer is blocked?

As for Mr Sharon's stroke, however minor, it is a reminder that his time may be short. His new party draws its main strength from him. Should anything else befall him before Israel votes in March, there would be turmoil as his heirs fight it out with a rejuvenated Labour Party on the left and Likud regrouping on the right. This week Binyamin Netanyahu, aged 56, a hawkish former prime minister, was elected as Likud's leader. Expect a tense few months.

Copyright © 2005 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.