RAMALLAH – Another significant handshake in the history of Palestinians, not at the White House but before what remains of the Mukata’ah, the government center of the Palestinian Administration in Ramallah.
The handshake at the Mukata’ah known also as ‘Arafat’s compound’ came not between Yasser Arafat and an Israeli Prime Minister but between Arafat and his own Prime Minister.
That handshake in Ramallah, the Palestinian town in the West Bank under Israeli occupation, came to end what observers described as the most critical time for Yasser Arafat during which his presidency seemed at stake. It ended also in withdrawal of the resignation by Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmad Qurei’a, who had declared he would quit after the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the military wing of Yasser Arafat’s Fatteh ruling party, abducted senior Palestinian officials accused of corruption.
Qurei’a withdrew his resignation when Arafat agreed to give him control over security. But not everyone is certain what will change.
"I do not see that there will be a drastic and abrupt change, but it will be incremental," says Ali Jarbawi, professor of political science at Birzeit University located about 7km north of Ramallah and 20km from Jerusalem. "The crisis did not end, but was overcome and will keep building up."
Qurei’a offered his resignation "to absorb the crisis," Jarbawi told IPS. "Transferring the conflict that originated between the militant group of Fatteh and Yasser Arafat to a conflict between the Prime Ministry and the President was a game in order to rescue the PA from a crisis."
Jarbawi believes the agreement between the two men will provide only temporary relief. "The situation is like a pressure cooker, every now and then one has to leak out the steam, but the steam stays. I do not know how long can the PA keep doing this." Any change would be a "controlled change" because "Arafat would not give up," he says.
The reconciliation means little to people if no serious measures are taken to fight corruption in the PA’s institutions. Many Palestinians preferred to watch the Lebanese television show Super Star to the two men shaking hands.
A recent opinion poll among Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza showed that 46.6 percent regard reform and fighting corruption as top priority.
In the most recent scandal to surface, at least four Palestinian companies, some owned by senior Palestinian officials were found to have sold cement imported from Egypt to Israeli firms building the West Bank separation wall.
An investigation by the Palestine Legislative Council (PLC) named two ministers among senior officials involved in the deals.
Mohammad Dahlan, former national security advisor to the PA said an interview with the Kuwaiti daily newspaper Al-Wattan that "the PA received about 5 billion dollars from donor countries that have gone with the wind, and until now we do not know where it went."
The allegations of corruption come in a land with severe poverty and unemployment. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics says the number of unemployed in the second quarter of 2004 stood at 310,000. This constitutes 34.3 percent of the lab our force. The report found that 56.2 percent of Palestinians live below the poverty line.
In Al-Ama’ari camp near Ramallah where about 9,000 Palestinian refugees live in squalid conditions, people have little faith in "so-called reform", says Mohammad Abu Ali, who spends most of his time at the camp’s coffee shop.
"They are talking about fighting corruption and reform, while we sit here unemployed," he said. "The problem is that corrupt people can never fight corruption."
Walking through the narrow streets of the camp, Abu Ali points to the open sewage canals. "Look how we live. Corruption is not only financial and administrative but also political. Our leadership is taking us nowhere, they forgot about us, we the refugees. They only fight among themselves over who gets the biggest bite of the cake."
Arafat’s supporters recently held a march through the streets of Ramallah. Abu Ali did not join the rally because "Arafat is in one way or another responsible for corruption as he ignores all calls for reform and he knows all the corrupt people, but does nothing."
Arafat, in his speech to his supporters at the end of the rally said nothing about reform. "With God’s will we will overcome all conspiracies," he said.
An elderly man at the rally calling himself an ‘Arafatist’ insisted Arafat is not corrupt. "He is under siege for almost four years. He always calls for reform; but no one listens to him. His hands are tied, because he can’t be anywhere except his two-room office. Look at him, he has no uniform except the one he wears, is there anything like this transparency?"
The kind of reform many Palestinians want is not the kind Arafat and his entourage talk about. "We want to feel the change and not just hear about it," says nurse Fawziya. "We want to see an end to the conflict between security forces. Unifying the 12 security forces into three means more security and stability for us. We want to see the Authority (PA) confiscate all illegal weapons. This should not be an Israeli or American demand. It is our demand."
She added: "We want to see corrupt people in jails and not given more power and authority. We want a leadership that knows how to deal with all challenges, not a leadership living in isolation from its own people."
