Arafat, Abbas Agree to Share Power

By Megan K. Stack

July 15, 2003 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

JERUSALEM — Breaking a four-day stretch of silent treatment and snubs, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas traveled to President Yasser Arafat’s ruinous West Bank compound Monday night to resolve a bitter power struggle.

The new premier threatened to resign last week over a continuing spat with Arafat, but Palestinian Information Minister Nabil Amr emerged from Monday night’s talks in Ramallah to announce: “The crisis is over.”

A few hours later, a Palestinian militant stabbed a young man to death and knifed two others on a lively seaside promenade in Tel Aviv. Shot in the legs and arrested as he fled along the sea, the Palestinian assailant told police he belonged to the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, the military wing of Arafat’s Fatah faction, Israel Radio reported. Police called the stabbings the first terror attack in an Israeli city since militant factions pledged June 29 to cease fire.

In Ramallah, Amr said the Palestinian leaders agreed to share power and negotiate as a pair -- even though Arafat is banned from talks with Israel. The president will have final say on negotiations, and Amr will act as a mediator between the two. Arafat’s clout was also boosted in London, where British leaders reportedly refused Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s calls to boycott the Palestinian president.

It remains to be seen whether the calm in Ramallah will last. As peace negotiations with Israel sputter along, a yawning divide has opened between Palestinians who, like Abbas, believe the best strategy is to give the U.S.-backed peace plan a chance to end 33 months of bloodshed -- and many in Arafat’s Fatah faction, who believe that compromise has turned into capitulation.

In the feuding figures of Arafat and Abbas, the tension over how much to give, and how soon, found its most visible embodiment -- the two men hadn’t spoken in days, and Abbas had boycotted government meetings and a diplomatic lunch. But a broader argument is roiling throughout Palestinian society, and ratcheting up as the days pass.

“There is a genuine division among Palestinians; they’re torn over what to believe in,” said Palestinian analyst Ali Jirbawi. “There is a huge difference between dealing with the road map and surrendering to the road map because you think it might produce results.”

Ever since the United States turned intense attention this spring to implementing a “road map” to peace, the chasms running through Palestinian society have threatened to pit Palestinians against one another. The militant factions still squabble over the terms of an agreement with the Palestinian Authority not to attack Israel for now, and Fatah has been torn by warring ideas of how to negotiate with Israel. Meanwhile, the famously autocratic Arafat and his longtime underling Abbas have been quietly feuding for months.

In recent weeks, Arafat took small steps to expand his power, sapping strength from Abbas at a moment when the premier had the public in an uproar over his failure to get thousands of prisoners freed from Israeli camps.

On the streets, tension burst out Sunday, when eminent Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki was attacked by a mob of fellow Palestinians. Shikaki had concluded, after three years of research, that only 10% of polled Palestinian refugees would go back to Israel if they were offered compensation instead.

Fundamental Claims

Shikaki’s findings could be seen by some as subverting fundamental claims of both Israelis and Palestinians on a topic that is arguably this region’s most relentless sticking point: the fate of about 700,000 Palestinians who became refugees when Israel was established in 1948.

On Monday, Israelis and Palestinians were still debating the survey’s meaning.

Even the most moderate Israelis are wary of what Palestinians call their “right of return” to lost homesteads. To Israel, refugees pose a demographic threat. If the Palestinians return, Israelis argue, the Jewish state will disappear. In a telling linguistic decree, Israel outlawed the term “right of return” this year in favor of “claim to return” to avoid lending any legitimacy to Palestinian hopes.

In one way, Shikaki’s findings appear to deflate the perceived threat, since most Palestinians say they don’t want to live in Israel, anyway.

The poll results tell a nuanced tale: Most refugees said they were happy to stay out of Israel -- but 95% said the right of return was “a sacred right” that must never be given up, Shikaki said. In other words, refugees living in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Jordan and Lebanon may not want to return -- but they want a legal right acknowledged by Israel.

Once a right is established, Israel also risks setting a precedent that future generations could use to lay claim to long-lost lands, some Israelis argue.

The question of refugees doesn’t figure into negotiations until much later in the “road map,” and there’s no guarantee that the struggling peace talks will make it that far. Still, the prospect of debating the question looms over the region.

Among Palestinians, it’s a long-standing debate: Is peace worth relinquishing the right of return? Some refugee groups were infuriated by Shikaki’s findings. West Bank refugee coordinator Abu Khalil Lahim criticized the analyst for “conducting polls dealing with a fundamental right.”

Not ‘Unsolvable’

Palestinian Labor Minister Ghassan Khatib said the refugees seek recognition and payment, but not return to a Jewish state that doesn’t want them. They want their losses to be chronicled in history, he said, and they want to be compensated. “I don’t think it’s unsolvable,” he said. “It hasn’t been negotiated in a serious way.”

In his younger days, Abbas, himself a refugee from the Galilee, was a staunch supporter of the right of return. In recent years, his stance appears to have softened, but nobody knows for sure how much leeway he’d give if pressed. Many analysts believe he would accept the token return of a handful of refugees and compensation for the rest -- an option many Israelis nonetheless deem unacceptable, since it would implicitly recognize a right they deny exists.

For his part, Arafat has never shown a willingness to accept anything less than the right of return for refugees. “This is the justification for his existence, for the decades of violence and the nationalist movement,” said Gabriel Ben-Dor, director of the National Security Studies Center at Haifa University. “They can’t compromise on this.”

In another reminder of a Palestinian leadership in disarray, Fatah head Marwan Barghouti told a judge in Tel Aviv on Monday that he will not defend himself. Barghouti, widely regarded as the most likely successor to Arafat, is being tried for murder -- prosecutors say he headed the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, and planned the killings of dozens of Israelis. Barghouti has said he’s innocent, and that the court has no right to try him.

Barghouti regained prominence this summer when he put together the cease-fire agreement between Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah from his prison cell.

On Monday, Barghouti complained that the prosecution called him an “arch-terrorist” in a letter sent to Sharon arguing that Barghouti must not be freed. Because of the letter, lawyer Jawad Boulos said, “the verdict is well-known to everybody. It proves this is just a game, a fake court.”

Special correspondents Maher Abukhater in Ramallah and Samir Zedan in the West Bank town of Bethlehem contributed to this report.