Will Palestinian leaders again turn to violence to shore up domestic support?

The Palestinian territories are descending into chaos, but many in Washington seem unconcerned. The Palestinians in the West Bank have too much to lose from a new uprising, some are arguing, given the recent moderate improvements in their daily lives. Others assert that the Palestinian Authority Security Forces, trained under American supervision, will prevent the Palestinians from making the mistakes of 1987 and 2000. Yet the dynamics of Palestinian politics indicate that a third intifada is likely to erupt in the near future. If history is any guide, the Palestinian leadership of the West Bank--whether it includes Mahmoud Abbas or not--may again look to a violence to improve its sagging domestic popularity.

Throughout contemporary Palestinian history, spilling Israeli blood has often been the best way for competing political factions to burnish their nationalist credentials. Consider, for example, the founding of Hamas. In the 1980s, Islamic Jihad became popular among Palestinians because of their attacks on Israelis--to the extent that they began siphoning off supporters from the Palestine branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. In order to compete, the Brotherhood formed the Islamic Resistance Movement (better known by its Arabic acronym, Hamas). By most measures, the strategy worked: Hamas is now a mass movement that controls the Gaza Strip and enjoys deep support in the West Bank. To be sure, the group also uses social services, education, and health care as mechanisms for political mobilization. Yet what has enabled Hamas to remain more popular than other Palestinian factions is--as the middle word of its name suggests--its violent resistance to Israeli occupation.

Around the same time that Hamas emerged, a car accident outside the Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza sparked the first intifada. The uprising surprised almost everyone, but it soon became abundantly clear that the fight was not just between stone throwing Palestinian kids and the Israel Defense Forces. The more important conflict for the Palestinians was yet another internecine battle: the PLO “old guard” in Tunis versus a new group of West Bank and Gazan elites. No one recognized the danger of this situation for the Palestinian leadership better than Yasser Arafat. Had the first intifada been left to the “new guard,” the PLO and Arafat’s dominant faction, Fatah, would have surely withered and eventually died. As a result, Arafat quickly sought to leverage the violence directed at Israelis to his political advantage, turning the intifada into a resistance project of his Tunis-based leadership.

There is no clearer example of this strategic use of violence than the second intifada, which began in September 2000. Suffering politically because he almost made a deal with Israel at Camp David that summer, then-President Arafat used violence to re-establish his credibility with the many Palestinians who not only regarded him as corrupt and ineffective, but also complicit with Israel and the United States in undermining Palestinian aspirations of statehood. Moreover, like the emergence of Hamas in the 1980s, Arafat’s Fatah, which had been negotiating peace with the Israelis for the better part of the previous decade, was forced to match the violence of both Hamas and Islamic Jihad with a new militant arm, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade.

The political dynamics at work that led to Hamas, two intifadas, and the creation of al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade have not suddenly disappeared today. Indeed, the warning signs are just beneath the surface. After a modest uptick in Mahmoud Abbas’s popularity through the spring and summer, Palestinian confidence in him has plummeted. His willingness to delay consideration of the Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict--the Goldstone Report--left the Palestinian president open to withering attacks from within his own party and Hamas. The Islamists have consistently sought to portray Abbas as a stooge of Israel and the United States, and the controversy over the Goldstone Report provided ample opportunity for Hamas to hammer away at his leadership and commitment to the Palestinian cause. At the same time, the recent exchange of 20 female Palestinian prisoners for a videotape of Corporal Gilad Shalit, who has been held in Gaza for three years, was a political victory for Hamas.