Strategic deficiencies in national liberation struggles: The case of fatah in the al-Aqsa Intifada

Abstract

This study reports and explains a cluster of deviations from the basic rational criteria of national liberation strategy exhibited by ‘inside’ West Bank Fatah leaders during the al-Aqsa uprising, based on an analysis of public statements of three such leaders. The leaders fail to recognize that their attempt to deter Israeli offensives by threatening to reciprocate them with attacks inside the Green Line is sabotaged by Islamists independently attacking inside the Green Line; inadequately attend to the distinct possibility that attacks within the Green Line increase Israeli opposition to desired concessions on refugees and territory; and appear to occasionally get swept-up in the sentiment that reciprocating Israeli aggression is inherently just. The study elaborates and examines the possible roles in these strategic deficiencies of leader strategic desperation; rage and indignation; and the political need to satisfy widespread popular militancy. The study's logic complements existing asymmetric conflict research and can inform research beyond the Palestinian–Israeli case.

Key words:

• Palestinian–Israeli Conflict
• Asymmetric Conflict
• National Liberation

Notes

¹Mao Tse-tung, On Guerrilla Warfare, translated by Samuel B. Griffith (New York: Praeger 1961), 49–50.

²On the logic of ideal-type analysis, see Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, translated and edited by Edward Shils and Henry Finch (New York: Free Press 1949), 39–43, 89–110. Zeev Maoz similarly proposes as a basic type of puzzle the systematic estimation of deviations from comprehensive cost-benefit analysis models. (Zeev Maoz, National Choices and International Processes (Cambridge, UK: CUP 1990), 232–7).

³See, e.g., Khalil Shikaki, ‘Palestine Divided’, Foreign Affairs 81/1 (2002), 89–105.

⁴Ivan Arreguín-Toft, How the Weak Win Wars: A Theory of Asymmetric Conflict (Cambridge, UK: CUP 2005).

⁵E.g., Nathan Leites and Charles Wolf Jr, Rebellion and Authority (Chicago: Markham 1970).

⁶Steven Rosen, ‘War, Power, and Willingness to Suffer’, in Bruce Russett (ed.), Peace, War, and Numbers (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage 1972), 167–83; Andrew Mack, ‘Why Big Nations Lose Small Wars: The Politics of Asymmetric Conflict’, World Politics 27/2 (1975), 175–200.

⁷Mack, ‘Why Big Nations Lose’; Gil Merom, How Democracies Lose Small Wars: State, Society, and the Failures of France in Algeria, Israel in Lebanon, and the United States in Vietnam (Cambridge, UK: CUP 2003).

⁸James Lee Ray and Ayse Vural, ‘Power Disparities and Paradoxical Conflict Outcomes’, International Interactions 12/4 (1986), 315–42.

⁹E.g., Arreguín-Toft, How the Weak Win Wars.

¹⁰E.g., T.V. Paul, Asymmetric Conflicts: War Initiation by Weaker Powers (New York: CUP 1993).

¹¹The Palestinian–Israeli interim agreements divide the West Bank into three categories, referred to as Areas A, B, and C. The agreements grant the Palestinians essentially full security as well as extensive political powers in A areas, which encompass the main Palestinian population centers, extensive political powers but minimal security powers in B areas, and neither political nor military powers in C areas. The ‘Green Line’ refers to the 1949 Armistice lines established at the end of the 1948–49 Arab–Israeli war. It separates territory under Israeli sovereignty before the June 1967 war from territories Israel captured in that war, including the West Bank, (including) East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.

¹²Most Palestinians set on conquering Israel believe that it is only possible to do so in stages, with the first stage being Palestinian statehood in the territories conquered by Israel in June 1967. (See Human Rights Watch, ‘Structures and Strategies of the Perpetrator Organizations’, 2002, at <www.hrw.org/reports/2002/isrl-pa/ISRAELPA1002-05.htm>.) The ideal-type thus extends to the strategic thoughts and actions of these people.

¹³E.g., Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven, CT: Yale UP 1966).

¹⁴E.g., Azmi Bishara, ‘The Quest for Strategy', Journal of Palestine Studies, 32/2 (Winter 2003), 41–49; Ghassan Khatib, ‘Significant Gains at Great Costs’, Bitter Lemons, Edition 15, 29 April 2002, at <www.bitterlemons.org/previous02.html>.

¹⁵Though Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians larger concessions on territory (though not on refugees) a few months after the start of the Intifada than he did before the Intifada, the Israeli public terminated Barak's agenda at the polls in Feb. 2001 when it elected Ariel Sharon, with his record of intransigence as well as iron-fistedness toward the Palestinians, by a landslide margin unprecedented in Israeli history.

¹⁶E.g., Jarbawi, ‘Critical Reflections on One Year of the Intifada’; Haydar Abdel-Shafi, ‘Looking Back, Looking Forward: An Interview with Haydar ‘Abd al-Shafi’, Journal of Palestine Studies 32/1 (2002), 28–35.

¹⁷E.g., Yezid Sayigh, ‘Arafat and the Anatomy of a Revolt’, Survival 43/3 (Autumn 2001), 47–60; Yezid Sayigh, ‘The Palestinian Strategic Impasse’, Survival 44/4 (Winter 2002), 7–21.

¹⁸E.g., Sayigh, ‘The Palestinian Strategic Impasse’.

¹⁹Though one might find significant the strategy of attacks within the Green Line restricted to military targets, this strategy faces severe logistical obstacles, almost all actual attacks within the Green Line targeted civilians, Palestinian public opinion polls during the Intifada did not make this distinction, and, with the one exception indicated below, neither did the figures examined in this study.

²⁰The study focuses on forms of violent resistance because, (a) notwithstanding the first few weeks of the Intifada during which large and widespread Palestinian demonstrations were met with harsh Israeli suppression, the Palestinians emphasized violent resistance; and (b) Palestinian acts of violence have had a much larger political impact than Palestinian nonviolent protests. On the benefits and disadvantages of non-violent Palestinian resistance, see Saleh Abdel-Jawad, ‘The Intifada's Military Lessons’, Palestine Report, 25 Oct. 2000, at <www.jmcc.org/media/reportonline>; Abdel-Jawad, Saleh, ‘Interview at Birzeit University’, Palestine Chronicle Weekly Journal, 20 Jan. 2002, at <www.palestinechronicle.com/story.php?sid=20020120192944969>; Rema Hammami and Salim Tamari, ‘The Second Uprising’, Journal of Palestine Studies 20/2 (2001), 5–25, 12, 17, 18; Salim Tamari, ‘What Kind of Palestinian Resistance?’Bitter Lemons, Edition 23, 24 June 2002, at <www.bitterlemons.org/previous02.html>.

²¹See Tamari, ‘What Kind of Palestinian Resistance?’; Azmi Bishara, ‘The Quest for Strategy’, Journal of Palestine Studies 32/2 (2003), 41–9.

²²It might be additionally prudent to contemplate further restricting attacks to soldiers and combatant settlers, refraining from attacks against non-combatant settlers or at least unarmed settlers, particularly women and children. The rationale is that attacks on the latter may cost the Palestinians some international support and trust of the Israeli center-left and intensify Israeli offensives. (On international norms of combat and the targeting of settlers, see Richard Falk, ‘Azmi Bishara, the Right of Resistance, and the Palestinian Ordeal’, Journal of Palestine Studies 31/2 (2002), 19–33.)

²³E.g., Sayigh, ‘Arafat and the Anatomy of a Revolt’; Graham Usher, ‘Facing Defeat: The Intifada Two Years On’, Journal of Palestine Studies 32/2 (2003), 21–40.

²⁴E.g., Abdel-Jawad, ‘Interview at Birzeit University’; Rashid Khalidi, ‘Toward a Clear Palestinian Strategy’, Journal of Palestine Studies 32/4 (2002), 5–12.

²⁵E.g., Ghassan Khatib, ‘Who Needs the Palestinian Authority?’Bitter Lemons, Edition 1, 19 Nov. 2001, at <www.bitterlemons.org/previous01.html>; Ali Jarbawi, ‘Arafat Put to the Test’, Bitter Lemons, Edition 4, 10 Dec. 2001, at <www.bitterlemons.org/previous01.html>. Many, possibly most, Palestinians believed that Israel welcomed egregious Palestinian violence because this provides the pretext for Israel's onslaught on the Palestinian political system. (E.g., Rema Hammami, ‘An Interview with Rema Hammami’, Bitter Lemons, Edition 44, 2 Dec. 2002, at <www.bitterlemons.org/previous02.html>). Some Palestinians even suspected that ‘Sharon wants to bring down the [Palestinian] Authority so that Hamas will rise in its place and make it easier for him to break the Palestinian people.’ (Abdel-Jawad, ‘Interview at Birzeit University’).

²⁶E.g., Jarbawi, ‘Critical Reflections on One Year of the Intifada’; Bishara, ‘The Quest for Strategy’.

²⁷Jarbawi, ‘Critical Reflections on One Year of the Intifada’; Khalidi, ‘Toward a Clear Palestinian Strategy’, 11; Ghassan Khatib, ‘The Israeli Public's Message’, Bitter Lemons, Edition 23, 24 June 2002, at <www.bitterlemons.org/previous02.html>; Tamari, ‘What Kind of Palestinian Resistance?’; Bishara, ‘The Quest for Strategy’. Schelling, correspondingly, states that the nature of a coercive action can convey intentions. (Arms and Influence, 73) Leites and Wolf write on terrorist attacks that they ‘must not be so massive as to make compliance with demands seem as unsafe as non-compliance’. (Rebellion and Authority, 99, emphasis in original).

²⁸Hammami and Tamari, ‘The Second Uprising’, 20; also Shikaki, ‘Palestine Divided’; Usher, ‘Facing Defeat’, 23–4, 25.

²⁹There are at least two stains on Jibril Rajoub's record that encouraged me to omit him. First, as Preventive Security Force head in the West Bank during the Oslo years, Rajoub is a person whom some Palestinians see as having repressed elements of the Palestinian resistance committed to continuing the good fight against Israel during the interim period. Second, PA officials, Hamas members, and members of the Palestinian public blamed Rajoub for being responsible, in April 2002, for the surrender of several resistance fighters to Israel in the midst of an Israeli attack on the Preventive Security Force headquarters in Beitunia.

³⁰The full results of the text analysis are available from the author by request.

³¹Eyad Sarraj, ‘Suicide Bombers: Dignity, Despair, and the Need for Hope’, Journal of Palestine Studies 31/4 (2002), 71–6, 75.

³²Graham Usher, ‘Learning from Experience’, Al-Ahram Weekly, Cairo, Issue 575, 28 Feb.– 6 March 2002, at <http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2002/575/re1.htm>.

³³Wasil Al-Khatib, ‘Fatah's Al-Shaykh Says Independent State Goal of Current Intifadah’, Al-Quds, 17 Jan. 2002, FBIS-NES-2002-0117.

³⁴Graham Usher, ‘They Talk of Peace But Are Preparing for War’, Observer, 24 Feb. 2002, at <http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,656134,00.html>.

³⁵Chris McGreal, ‘Arafat Calls off Palestinian Elections’, The Guardian, 23 Dec. 2002, at <http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,864765,00.html>.

³⁶The figures never explicitly consider the proposition that it is possibly prudent to focus attacks within occupied territories on combatant settlers as well as soldiers to the exclusion of non-combatant settlers or at least women and children, referring instead to settlers writ large as prudent and legitimate targets. It may be worth adding that they never express the idea that Israeli society has normalized in some settlements, for example, the French Hill and Gilo, such that many Israelis will see attacks on these areas as similar in quality and severity to attacks in any other part of West Jerusalem and other places within the Green Line. Barghouti does oppose firing at Gilo (and Psagot), but his opposition is based on tactical considerations. ‘You won't succeed in places that are well-fortified… . You have to think about places where they'll be taken by surprise… . I'm not against a cease-fire in Gilo, where the shooting doesn't do anything’. (Gideon Levy, ‘Death Isn't a Big Deal Anymore: An Interview with Marwan Barghouti’, Haaretz, 12 Nov. 2001, at <www.bintjbeil.com/E/occupation/levy/011112.html>; see also Abdel-Jawad, ‘The Intifada's Military Lessons’).

³⁷‘Chronology’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 31/2 (2002), 169–92.

³⁹Nahum Barnea, ‘We Want to Liberate You: An Interview with Marwan Barghouti’, Between the Lines, 2 Sept. 2001, at <www.between-lines.org/archives/2001/sep/Marwan_Barghouti.htm>. The documents analyzed include at least nine such statements. The appendices report these under the heading ‘statement of tit-for-tat attacks inside the GL’.

³⁸Jefferson Fletcher, ‘Interview with Marwan Barghouti’, Media Monitors, 31 July 2001, at <www.mediamonitors.net/fletcher3.html>.

⁴⁰Levy, ‘Death Isn't a Big Deal Anymore’.

⁴¹As mentioned, it is beyond the study's methodology to claim conclusively that the subjects did not adequately consider considerations they publicly seldom if ever mention. The leaders having been aware of the above flaw in their tit-for-tat deterrence policy would mean that they adopted this policy without particular confidence that it would succeed.

⁴²Levy, ‘Death Isn't a Big Deal Anymore’.

⁴³Usher, ‘They Talk of Peace’. The figures make no mention of Israel's physical ability to seriously damage Palestinian resistance capabilities without sending ground troops into A areas, perhaps reflecting a faith in relative Israeli restraint in aerial bombing campaigns.

⁴⁴None of the nine explicit threats of tit-for-tat attacks within the Green Line comes from Khader. Moreover, Khader does once indicate an appreciation of tit-for-tat deterrent attacks inside the Green Line, but in this instance he explicitly mentions the Israeli military/security apparatus as the target of such attacks. Palestinian reprisals that hit Israeli security personnel inside Israel, leaving aside the feasibility of such attacks, may only marginally impact existing international sympathies, and might even exert only modest effects on Israeli preferences concerning large-scale escalation and final status concessions. (Hussam Khader, ‘Whose Intifada – Theirs or Ours?’Between the Lines, 5 Oct. 2001, at <http://iap.org/khader.htm>).

⁴⁵Usher, ‘Learning from Experience’.

⁴⁶Avi Machlis, ‘Israel Hopes Fence Will Stop Suicide Bombers’, Financial Times, 16 June 2002, at <www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/israel-palestine/2002/0616wall.htm>.

⁴⁷Al-Khatib, ‘Fatah's Al-Shaykh’.

⁴⁸In two interviews in which Barghouti makes two of the nine tit-for-tat statements, Barghouti does elsewhere in the interview express a preference for genuine peace. (Barnea, ‘We Want to Liberate You’; Ben Caspit, “You'll Miss Me Yet”, Interview with Marwan Barghouti’, Ma'ariv, 9 Nov. 2001, at <http://home.mindspring.com/∼fontenelles/barghouti.htm>).

⁴⁹Levy, ‘Death Isn't a Big Deal Anymore’; MENA, ‘Fatah Official Says Martyrdom Operations are Legitimate Palestinian Right’, 29 July 2002, FBIS-NES-2002-0730; Al-Jazeera, ‘Senior Fatah Member Blames Israel’, 24 April 2003, at <www.themedialine.org/news/news_detail.asp?NewsID=1682>.

⁵⁰Fletcher, ‘Interview with Marwan Barghouti’. Parenthetically, the figures exhibit no recognition of the notion of Israeli reluctance to make concessions under fire and a consequent Palestinian need to provide Israel with a way of saving face in making concessions.

⁵¹Barnea, ‘We Want to Liberate You’.

⁵²Yezid Sayigh, ‘Palestine – Where To?’ Roundtable Meeting and Discussion, PASSIA, 9 July 2002, at <http://www.passia.org/meetings/2002/round0907.htm>.

⁵³MENA, ‘Fatah Official Urges US to Pressure Israel to Lift Siege on Arafat’, 29 March 2002, FBIS-NES-2002-0329.

⁵⁴Ali al-Salih, ‘Fatah Field Leaders: Arafat's Cease-Fire Decision Will Not Affect Intifadah’, Al-Sharq al-Awsat (London), 5 June 2001, FBIS-NES-2001-0605, emphasis added. The leaders never mention that Sharon's resounding electoral victory and the Israeli shift to the right resulted at least in part from Palestinian attacks within the Green Line. While the large majority of attacks within the Green Line, including the most deadly ones, came after Sharon's election, the Palestinians did conduct at least five such attacks and two against Israeli targets in East Jerusalem, and started firing at Gilo, before the election.

⁵⁵Madrid ABC, ‘Palestinian Tanzim Leader Al-Barghuthi accuses EU of Siding with Sharon’, 13 Dec. 2001, FBIS-WEU-2001-1213.

⁵⁶Bradley Burston, ‘Barak Pressing New Peace Bid [quoting Israeli Army Radio]’, Forward, 3 Nov. 2000, at <http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb5087/is_200011/ai_n18477830>.

⁵⁷See Hans Morgenthau, Politics among Nations (New York: Knopf 1949), 545.

⁵⁸Further Fatah figure expressions indicating anger and indignation, most of which come from Arabic and Israeli media, are presented below.

⁵⁹Levy, ‘Death Isn't a Big Deal Anymore’.

⁶⁰The first tit-for-tat threat of al-Sheikh comes after Israeli Operation ‘Defensive Shield’.

⁶¹Short of the perception of impending defeat, however, the perception that the Intifada was making little progress may have contributed, if modestly, to a sense of desperation. Palestinian political scientist Ali Jarbawi describes the Intifada as having reached the point of ‘treading water’ no more than a few months after it began. (Jarbawi, ‘Critical Reflections on One Year of the Intifada’).

⁶²On anger and indignation as motives of social action, see, e.g., Max Weber, Basic Concepts in Sociology [1925], trans. by H.P. Secher (New York: Philosophical Library 1962).

⁶³Fletcher, ‘Interview with Marwan Barghouti’.

⁶⁴Ala Badarinah, ‘Report on Statement by Fatah Leader on Operations Inside Israel, PA Reforms’, Al-Quds al-Arabi (London), 27 May 2002, FBIS-NES-2002-0527.

⁶⁵Inaction in the face of indignity, conversely, may generate self-criticism, such that violence against Israel can serve as a means of maintaining Palestinian self-esteem.

⁶⁶The honorability of militancy toward Israel may derive from it enjoying the status of custom/tradition, from a widespread belief that it is efficacious at least over the long term, from religious and political indoctrination, from anger, indignation, and the need for self-affirmation, and from a culture of machismo and bravado. On the last item, see Amira Hass, ‘After a Painfully Long Delay Israeli Army “Backs Off” Indiscriminate Shootings’, 22 May 2001, at <www.change-links.org/Palestine4.htm>.

⁶⁷E.g., Robert F. Hunter, The Palestinian Uprising: A War by Other Means (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press 1991).

⁶⁸Jerusalem Media and Communication Centre, <www.jmcc.org>; also Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, <http://www.pcpsr.org/>.

⁶⁹E.g., Islah Jad, ‘A Road Littered with Disappointment’, Bitter Lemons, Edition 15, 29 April 2002, at <www.bitterlemons.org/previous02.html>.

⁷⁰Sarraj, ‘Suicide Bombers’, 72.

⁷¹Israeli operations in Palestinian areas and restrictions on Palestinian movement intensified this fragmentation (Khader, ‘Whose Intifada?’; Usher, ‘Facing Defeat’, 34).

⁷²E.g., al-Salih, ‘Fatah Field Leaders’.

⁷³Marwan Barghouti, ‘Interview’, Palestine Report, 8 April 2001, at <www.mediamonitors.net/interview3.html>.

⁷⁴Joel Brinkley, ‘Palestinian Group Says It Will Increase Bombings’, New York Times, 23 March 2002, at <http://nucnews.net/nucnews/2002nn/0203nn/020323nn.htm>.

⁷⁵Ami Isseroff, ‘Viewpoints: Of Murder and Suicide’, Mid-East Web Opinion Forum, 15 Nov. 2002, at <www.mideastweb.org/murdersuicide.htm>.

⁷⁶‘Quarterly Update on Conflict and Diplomacy’, Journal of Palestine Studies 32/2 (2003), 120–41, 132. For further propositions on the implications of political fractionalization in national liberation struggles, see Gil Friedman, ‘Rational Counterterrorism Strategy in Asymmetric Protracted Conflicts and Its Discontents: The Israeli–Palestinian Case’, in Rafael Reuveny and William R. Thompson (eds.), Coping with Contemporary Terrorism: Origins, Escalation, and Responses (Albany: SUNY Press forthcoming); Wendy Pearlman, ‘Conflict in Fragments: The Effect of Political Cohesion on Tactics in the Case of the Methods in the Palestinian National Movement, 1918–2006’ (PhD dissertation, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. 2007).

⁷⁷‘Quarterly Update on Conflict and Diplomacy’, Journal of Palestine Studies 31/3 (2002), 118–41, 130.

⁷⁸Brinkley, ‘Palestinian Group Says It Will Increase Bombings’.

⁷⁹Zuhayr Andrawus, ‘Fatah's West Bank Secretary on Revolutionary Council Meeting, Security Situation’, al-Quds (London), 6 March 2004, FBIS-NES-2004-0306.

⁸⁰Abd-al-Ra‘uf Arna‘ut, ‘Arafat Reportedly Decides to Continue Dialogue with Hamas’, al-Ayyam, 16 Nov. 2002, FBIS-NES-2002-1116.