The distinguished Palestinian historian and analyst Yezid Sayigh gave a tremendous talk Friday at the Palestine Center in Washington DC, where he reported on a recent, four-day visit to Gaza and assessed the situation and standing of the two rival Palestinian administrations in Gaza and Ramallah.
While he started off by noting that both the administrations have succeeded in stabilizing themselves since the terrible rift that occurred between them in June 2007, a lot of the content of what he said seemed clearly to indicate that he thinks the Hamas-led administration in Gaza has been significantly better at achieving more public goods at less cost than the Fayyad administration in Ramallah.
Sayigh is Professor of Middle East Studies in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London and is currently a visiting senior fellow at the crown center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. He is also the author of the magisterial 1997 book Armed Struggle and the Search for a State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949-1993, from Oxford University Press.
Kudos to Brandeis for having brought someone of Sayigh’s stature and breadth as a scholar to stay there for this semester. And special kudos, of course, to the Palestine Center for hosting this talk. You can see the whole video of it, I think, here.
I can’t do complete justice to the talk here, so I urge you to go and listen to it yourselves. But I wanted to share my impressions of some of his key insights and get them into the written-in-English public arena.
The original event was supposed to feature two speakers: Sayigh talking about Ramallah and Khaled Hroub, from Cambridge, UK, talking about Hamas. However, Hroub could not get his flight to DC– because of the BA strike, I think, rather than any ‘Flying While Arab’ security issues. So Sayigh stepped in and gave us his analysis of both administrations; and we were lucky to hear it.
He referred to Ismail Haniyyeh’s government in Gaza as “the elected government” and the Fayyad government in Ramallah as “the emergency government.” Later he made a point of noting that– while he has great personal affection for Salam Fayyad– the Fayyad government is wholly unconstitutional, while he described the Haniyyeh government as “partly constitutional.”
He underlined, regarding the Fayyad government, both the unconstitutionality of the way it was established and has been maintained since June 2007, and the rights-abusng nature of many of the practices of the security forces that are supposedly under Fayyad’s command.
He did not say anything nearly as harsh about the rights practices of the Hamas-controlled security forces there. Indeed, he noted that during a four-day stay in Gaza back in January he was able to travel freely throughout the length of the Strip and,
I saw very few guns. There was a mild police presence, and all the armed men I saw were in uniform. The traffic cops whom I saw working there were not wearing any guns, not even sidearms… This was a very strong contrast with the situation in Ramallah and el-Bireh, where you see many different kinds of heavily-armed people in different uniforms right out on all the streets.
The Haniyyeh government has been able to deliver many important public goods including public security. They deliver it with 12,000 police officers– and they do it preciesly because they see public security as a public good.
Even though people say there are all kinds of abuses, I should note that a good number of the people I talked to there who were pro-Fateh or critics of Hamas from other political perspectives said the security situation had really improved since the situation before June 2007.
At a later point he blamed the 2007 bifurcation of power between Gaza and Ramallah squarely on parties he identified as “the president’s men [i.e. Abu Mazen's men-- though notably not Abu Mazen himself] and certain people here in the Bush administration.”
Sayigh said his main argument is that,
both governments have succeeded in stabilizing their rule since June ’07, and in stabilizing the areas under their respective control. Both have succeeded to certain degree in assuring basic public goods… Both have shown a certain ability to learn and innovate.
Fayyad’s achievements have been made with huge amount of help from international community and at some points from Israel. Whereas Hamas has done it in Gaza without any help from the west…
Since ’07, both government have instituted a certain degree of law and order… However, in the Fayyad government areas there have been major instances of abuses by intelligence agencies which don’t come under any control. Also, there is no parliament there. Any legislating that’s done there is done through presidential decree.
In Gaza, you have 70,000 alleged ‘government employees’, of which 50,000 are in police– all of whom are now being paid by Ramallah to stay home. So the internal-security challenge after June ‘07 was huge; and there has been a steep learning curve. They are no longer bringing in Qassam Brigades fighters to do civilian policing… And they’ve been implementing a series of mechanisms for adjudicating disputes, including reviving the Reconciliation Committees in the different localities, and some courts.
Looking at the economic situation and the ability of the two governments to administer economic affairs, he said that the economic growth that’s been reported from the West Bank,
is nearly all from donor contributions; very little of it is from internally generated economic activities. The banks in Palestine are sitting on $7 billion of assets. There are still major obstacles to real economic growth, so banks and investors aren’t investing.
In Gaza, you have an economy that’s almost entirely cash-based… Hamas offers a strong ethic of honesty that enables the money to circulate pretty efficiently. In cash terms the economy did better last year than it did before the war.
They have really adapted to some tough circumstances.
Sayigh noted that the Haniyyeh government has been able to establish many of the administrative mechanisms required to support good government, including in the areas of financial, economic, and security-sector planning:
The Hamas government has a huge number of websites, one for every ministry, so you can really see what they’ve been doing there…. Their ministry of finance says they have been operating on a budget of around $25 million a month, with a government payroll of 32,000 employees. Only about $5 million/month of that is collected domestically. Their current budget– and yes, they have introduced an orderly budging process!– is for a total of $540 million, of which they admit that only $60 million will be collected domestically…
Both governments are hugely dependent on foreign aid.
The Fayyad government meanwhile is talking about a $2.8 billion budget, of which half is direct foreign aid.
My quick back-of-the-envelope calculation: The Ramallah government’s budget is for about $121 of per capita spending, while the Gaza government’s is for about $36.
Sayigh gave serious consideration to the security policies of both governments, and made these important points:
Neither side really controls its own security…. Neither has a lever to really propel its major political goals of winning an end of the occupation and the success of the negotiations with Israel.
Both governments want to preserve themselves… Both are now in a holding pattern, unable to move forward with their political goals.
Everyone I talk to who knows about the West Bank thinks that Hamas enjoys huge support there, and were it not for Israel’s overarching control there and the continuing Israeli raids into the supposedly Palestinian-controlled areas, Hamas would take over. People there support Hamas even though they also appreciate the relative normalization of daily life that the Fayyad government has brought. But they know that Fayyad is merely normalizing the situation under the continuing Israeli matrix of control, so they feel torn about it.
Fateh is dead. It has been for 20 yrs. It spends half its time criticizing Fayyad government and plotting against it…
Hamas’s political problem is that it sustains the propaganda position, for internal consumption, of martyrdom and struggle, while its actual position is to try to find a way into the negotiations. Some forces inside Hamas have sought to deal with this dilemma by focusing on something else completely: pietistic and proselytization campaigns.
Hamas has been doing everything it can for the last 15 months to keep its border with Israel quiet, and this has led to discontent in own ranks…
On human rights issues, Sayigh spoke about the real concern he has about the anti-Hamas campaign in the West Bank having led to “a real and serious erosion of the rule of law” there. In Gaza, meanwhile, he noted that Hamas “suppresses any sizeable public expression of affiliation with Fateh– though you do see Fateh posters on the walls and they do hold small meetings and marches and so on.”
He warned that,
The status quo is not static. Both governments are able to stay afloat for another year or so. But remember that in August 2011 Fayyad’s two-year frame for declarng independence will expire…. So say that at that point he turns round to the State Department and the EU and asks not just for some formal kind of recognition but also for concrete acts that manifest that. Will the Europeans insist that people and goods should be able to travel freely in and out of Palestine without going through Israeli border controls and customs? Whose excise taxes should be applied? And would these provisions apply to both the West bank and Gaza, or only to the West Bank?
… The French and Spanish are now putting around the idea of recognizing a Palestinian state without borders. But does this mean anything, unless the government has sovereign control over the key levers of governance?
He stressed too that,
I thought what I saw in Gaza in Jan looked more like a state than the West Bank. This is because the Haniyyeh government controls the entirety of its land from north and south, and this is a huge matter.
I worry that it’s going to be very hard to reintegrate the two territories because of the way things have evolved.
… The Haniyyeh government has used the administrative structures that were put into place in the 1990s, and has used them more efficiently and more adeptly than they were used before.
I asked him a question about the terrible dilemma that so many western (and also now Arab) aid-donors find themselves in, in which they are now giving significant amounts of aid each year to the PA and thereby relieving Israel of having to bear the costs of running the occupation– “financing the occupation”, as representatives of some of the more thoughtful European aid donors now call this process.
Sayigh confirmed the difficulty of this dilemma:
The western states (and Arab states) are now locked into a longterm aid-giving— and are doing this primarily as a way of avoiding dealing with the real issue. They know what the main issue is: ending the foreign military occupation of the Palestinian territories. But they can’t do that, so they give money instead. That’s why they’re giving the money on this longterm and continuing basis– not because Palestine is a failed state.
But it’s also a sort of co-dependent relationship. In the West Bank, the PA people aren’t going to voluntarily give up their present perks and financial ‘security’, dissolve the PA and turn themselves into a National Resistance Council.
He said he didn’t see any alternative in sight to the present bifurcation of power between the West Bank and Gaza. (My thought was that, based on what he said and what I myself have seen, analyzed, and surmised, the best hope for ending the bifurcation would seem to be to see Hamas’s supporters in the West Bank truly express their own social and political power. But of course, preventing that is precisely what all the American “security” aid to the Fayyad government is intended to prevent.)
Sayigh said he had concluded in 2001 that the window of opportunity for the two-state solution had closed:
At that point, the Palestinians entered into a period very similar to the situation we were in in spring ’48… a situation of longterm drift in Palestinian politics.
In 2001 I foresaw this period would last 10-15 yrs. Well, we’re nine years into that now, so maybe we will see new a leadership or leaderships emerging.
… However, I don’t think the one-state solution is yet seen as a serious program by most Palestinians on the ground.
He was asked about the political situation inside Hamas– and he noted in passing some Fateh intelligence people have been involved in supplying arms to salafist groups in Gaza.
He said the inability of the Hamas leadership to deliver on its big political program has led to the emergence of some salafist networks, of different types and orientations, and that some of these have supporters both inside some of the grassroots organizations of Hamas and some outside, though he indicated that these networks do not yet seem to pose an unmanageable threat to the leadership.
He said he didn’t think it likely that the Netanyahu government– or any other parties, including the U.S. and Egypt– really wanted to make the siege so much tighter that it starts to threaten mass starvation inside Gaza. (“Imagine what that would do to the standing of the Fayyad government, if thousands of starving Gazans took to the streets or started marching towards Eretz.”) And he reflected a little on why the Netanyahu government even continues to maintain the siege as tight as it does, since very evidently the siege is doing nothing to weaken the Haniyyeh government.
“I think the main reason is because Netanyahu doesn’t dare to lift it and get accused of being ’soft’ on Hamas,” he said.
(Which indicates to me that if the U.S. and the rest of the so-called international community really wanted to lift the siege, they could– and that would give Netanyahu the pretext he might fell he needs to present to his own voters, saying “Washington made me do it!”. But of course, there are no indications yet that the U.S. government does want to see the siege lifted. And this the people of Gaza continue to suffer… )
Sayigh warned forcefully that if the Haniyyeh government should be brought down, it would not be replaced by any political force that would be more pro-western: “If we bring down Haniyyeh, we risk Gaza becoming Afghanistan,” he said.
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