Word: fatah
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...Even if Barghouti had followed the lead of the local al-Aksa brigade commanders and simply backed Abbas, their support in itself creates restraints on the ability of Abbas, or any other elected leader, to cut deals oppose by the Fatah base. (Some Palestinian observers believe Barghouti may have decided to enter the race after Abbas failed to meet the political price for his support - putting prisoner releases at the top of the negotiating agenda - while others have suggested his decision reflects a fear of being eclipsed by rivals among his own "intifadah" generation.) Some of those restraints...
...Barghouti, of course, is the public face of the intifadah, a popular West Bank Fatah Secretary General who cut his political teeth in the streets of Ramallah and the prison cells of Israel during first intidafah (1987-1991) while Abbas and the rest of Arafat's inner circle plied the diplomatic circuit from their headquarters in far-off Tunisia. The fact of his imprisonment by Israel after being convicted of terrorism - he didn't bother to defend himself, dismissing not only the charges but the court's right to try him - has done nothing to diminish his allure...
...fundamental split in Palestinian politics right now, in fact, is less the competition between the Islamists of Hamas and the secular nationalists of Fatah, than it is the internal battle within Fatah between Abbas's "Old Guard" - often derisively termed "Tunisians" to mark their returning-exile status - who have dominated the Palestinian Authority and the failed Oslo negotiation process; and a younger generation of activists committed to continuing the intifadah. While Abbas publicly denounces the intifadah as a catastrophic strategic error that has set back hopes of Palestinian statehood, and insists that the Palestinians best hopes lie in doing whatever...
...Whatever their differences in tactics, much of the Fatah rank-and-file shares the objective of preventing Abbas from shutting down the intifadah and pursuing the sort of deal the U.S. and Israel is hoping he might accept. Indeed, nothing has hurt Abbas quite as much in the eyes of the Palestinian electorate as the poorly disguised enthusiasm for the Palestinian moderate on the part of the Bush administration - anti-American sentiment is as high, if not higher, in the West Bank and Gaza as it is in most other parts of the Arab world...
...split in Fatah embodied in the Abbas vs. Barghouti race is not simply a debate over strategic direction; it's also a product of the grassroots backlash against the corruption and cronyism created by Yasser Arafat in his reliance on the politics of patronage to run the Palestinian Authority. It was the first intifadah, which raged from 1987 to 1991, that did more than anything else to ensure Arafat's triumphant return to the West Bank under the Oslo agreements, but the local leadership of Fatah in the West Bank and Gaza, who had risked and sacrificed the most...