Column One: The Fatah fairy tale
BY CAROLINE GLICK the Jerusalem Post 19/02/2010
www.jpost.com/LandedPages/PrintArticle.aspx?id=169129
Israel's is the only government that can force the rest of the world
to recognize that Abbas is not an ally.
Fahmi Shabaneh is an odd candidate for dissident status. Shabaneh is a
Jerusalemite who
joined the Palestinian Authority's General Intelligence Service in 1994.
Working for PA head Mahmoud Abbas and GIS commander Tawfik Tirawi, Shabaneh
was
tasked with investigating Arab Jerusalemites suspected of selling land to
Jews. Such sales
are a capital offense in the PA. Since 1994 scores of Arabs have been the
victims of
extrajudicial executions after having been fingered by the likes of
Shabaneh.
A few years ago, Abbas and Tirawi gave Shabaneh a new assignment. They put
him in
charge of a unit responsible for investigating corrupt activities carried
out by PA officials.
They probably assumed a team player like Shabaneh understood what he was
supposed
to do.
Just as Abbas's predecessor, Yasser Arafat, reportedly had full dossiers on
all of his
underlings and used damning information to keep them loyal to him, so Abbas
probably
believed that Shabaneh's information was his to use or ignore as he saw fit.
For a while, Abbas's faith was well-placed. Shabaneh collected massive
amounts of
information on senior PA officials detailing their illegal activities. These
activities included
the theft of hundreds of millions of dollars in international aid; illegal
seizure of land and
homes; and monetary and sexual extortion of their fellow Palestinians.
Over time, Shabaneh became disillusioned with his boss. Abbas appointed him
to his job
around the time he was elected PA head in 2005. Abbas ran on an
anti-corruption platform.
Shabaneh's information demonstrated that Abbas presided over a criminal
syndicate
posing as a government. And yet rather than arrest his corrupt, criminal
associates,
Abbas promoted them.
Abbas continued promoting his corrupt colleagues even after Hamas's 2006
electoral
victory. That win owed to a significant degree to the widespread public
revulsion with
Fatah's rampant corruption.
With Israel and the US lining up to support him after the Hamas victory,
Abbas continued
to turn a blind eye to his colleagues' criminality. his new status as the
irreplaceable
"moderate," he allowed his advisers and colleagues to continue enriching
themselves
with the international donor funds that skyrocketed after Hamas's victory.
Since 2006, despite the billions of dollars in international aid showered on
Fatah, Hamas has
consistently led Fatah in opinion polls. Rather than clean up their act,
Abbas and his Fatah
colleagues have sought to ingratiate themselves with their public by
ratcheting up their
incitement against Israel. And since Abbas has been deemed irreplaceable,
the same West
that turns a blind eye to his corruption, refuses to criticize his
encouragement of terrorism.
And this makes sense. How can the West question the only thing standing in
the way of a
Hamas takeover of Judea and Samaria?
Recently, Shabaneh decided he had had enough. The time had come to expose
what he knows.
But he ran into an unanticipated difficulty. No one wanted to know. As he
put it, Arab and
Western journalists wouldn't touch his story for fear of being "punished" by
the PA.
In his words, Western journalists "don't want to hear negative things about
Fatah and Abbas."
Lacking other options, Shabaneh brought his information to The Jerusalem
Post's Khaled
Abu Toameh.
On January 29, the Post published Abu Toameh's interview with Shabaneh on
our front page.
Among other impressive scoops, Shabaneh related that Abbas's associates
purloined
$3.2 million in cash that the US gave Abbas ahead of the 2006 elections. He
told Abu Toameh
how PA officials who were almost penniless in 1994 now have tens and even
hundreds
of millions of dollars in their private accounts. He related how he watched
in horror as
Abbas promoted the very officials he reported on. And he showed Abu Toameh a
video
of Abbas's chief of staff Rafik Husseini naked in the bedroom of a Christian
woman who sought
employment with the PA.
If Shabaneh's stories were about Israeli or Western officials, there is no
doubt that they would
have been picked up by every self-respecting news organization in the world.
If he had been
talking about Israelis, officials from Washington to Brussels to the UN
would be loudly calling
for official investigations. But since he was talking about the
Palestinians, no one cared.
The State Department had nothing to say. The EU had nothing to say. The New
York Times
acted as if his revelations were about nothing more than a sex scandal.
As for Abbas and his cronies, they were quick to blame the Jews. They
accused Shabaneh
- their trusted henchman when it came to land sales to Jews - of being an
Israeli agent. And
when Channel 10 announced it was broadcasting Husseini's romp in the sack,
Abbas demanded
that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu bar the broadcast, (apparently
forgetting that unlike
his PA-controlled media, Israel's media organs are free).
SHABANEH'S ODYSSEY from PA regime loyalist to dissident is an interesting
tale. But what
is more noteworthy than his personal journey is the world's indifference to
his revelations.
Just as the mountains of evidence that Fatah officials - including Shabaneh's
boss Tirawi - have
been actively involved in terrorist attacks against Israel have been
systematically ignored by
successive US administrations, Israeli governments and EU foreign policy
chiefs, so no one
wants to think about the fact that Fatah is a criminal syndicate. The
implications are too
devastating.
Since at least 1994, successive US administrations goaded by the EU have
made supporting
Fatah and the PA the centerpiece of their Middle East policy. They want to
receive proof that
Fatah is a terrorist organization that operates like a criminal organization
like they want
- in the immortal words of former EU Middle East envoy Christopher Patten -
"a hole in
[their] head."
As for the Western media, their lack of interest in Shabaneh's revelation
serves as a reminder
of just how mendacious much of the reportage about the Palestinians and
Israel is. For 16
years, the American and European media have turned blind eyes to Palestinian
misbehavior
while expansively reporting every allegation against Israel - no matter how
flimsy or obviously
false. When the history of the media's coverage of the Middle East is
written it will constitute
one of the darkest chapters in Western media history.
But while the American and European allegiance to the fable of Fatah as the
anchor of the
two-state solution accounts for the indifference of both to Shabaneh's
disclosures, what
accounts for the Netanyahu government's behavior in this matter?
Shortly after the Post first published Shabaneh's story, the PA issued an
arrest warrant
against him. He was charged among other things with "harming the national
interests" of
the Palestinians.
But Abbas's henchmen couldn't put their hands on him.
Israel had already arrested him.
Shabaneh was booked for among other things, illegally working for the PA. It
is indeed illegal for
Israeli residents to work for the PA. But oddly, although Israeli
authorities have known whom
Shabaneh worked for since 1994, until his disclosures were made public, they
never saw any
pressing need to arrest or prosecute him.
Official Israel has nothing to say about Shabaneh's information. Rather, in
the wake of his
disclosures, everyone from Netanyahu to Defense Minister Ehud Barak has
continued to
proclaim daily their dedication to reaching a peace accord with Abbas. This
even as Abbas
and his cronies accuse Israel of using the "traitorous" Shabaneh to pressure
Abbas into
negotiating with Israel.
There are two explanations for Israel's behavior. First, there is the fact
that the presence of
Barak and his Labor Party in the government makes it impossible for
Netanyahu and his
Likud Party to abandon the failed two-state paradigm of dealing the PA. If
Netanyahu and
his colleagues were to point out that the PA is a kleptocracy and its senior
officials enable
terror and escalate incitement to deflect their public's attention away from
their criminality,
(as well as because they want to destroy Israel), then Labor may bolt the
coalition.
Beyond that, there is no doubt that an Israeli denunciation of Abbas and his
mafia would
enrage the US and EU. Apparently, Netanyahu - who to please President Barack
Obama
accepted the two-state paradigm in spite of the fact that he opposes it, and
suspended Jewish
construction in Judea and Samaria despite the fact that he knows doing this
is wrong - is loathe
to pick a fight by pointing out the obvious fact that the PA is a corrupt
band of oppressive thieves.
Shabaneh argues that due to PA corruption, Hamas remains the preferred
alternative for
Palestinians in Judea and Samaria. In his view, the only reason Hamas has
yet to take over
Judea and Samaria is the IDF presence in the areas.
The strategic implications of his statement are clear. Far from being a
bulwark against Hamas,
Abbas empowers the Iranian-backed jihadist force. The only bulwark against
Hamas is Israel.
WHAT THIS means is that Israel must end its support for Abbas. Every day he
remains in power,
Abbas perpetuates a myth of Palestinian moderation. As a supposed moderate,
he claims that
Israel should curtail its counterterror operations and let his own
"moderate" forces take over.
To strengthen Abbas, the US pressures Israel to curtail its counterterror
operations in Judea
and Samaria. To please the US, Israel in turn cuts back its operations.
Abbas's men fight Hamas, but they also terrorize journalists, merchants and
plain civilians who
fall in their path, and so strengthen Hamas. To ratchet up public support
for Fatah, Abbas
escalates PA incitement against Israel. This then encourages his own forces
to attack Israelis
- as happened last week when one of his security officers murdered IDF
St.-Sgt. Maj. Ihab
Khatib. And so it goes.
It is clear that Barak will threaten to bolt the coalition if Netanyahu
decides to cut off Abbas. But
if he left, where would he go? Barak has nowhere to go. He will not be
reelected to lead his
party. And if Labor leaves the coalition, Netanyahu would still be far from
losing his majority in
Knesset.
As for angering the White House, the fact of the matter is that by pointing
out that Abbas is not
a credible leader, Israel will make it more difficult for Obama and his
advisers to coerce Israel
into making further concessions that will only further empower Hamas.
Shabaneh told the Post that he fully expects the PA to try to kill him. But
in a way, the yawns that greeted his story are his best life insurance
policy. Until the world stops believing that Fatah is indispensable, no one
will listen to the Shabanehs of the world and so the PA has no reason to
kill him.
Just as the Post was the only media organ that would publish his story, so
the Israeli government is the only government that can force the rest of the
world to recognize that Abbas is not an ally. But to do that, the government
itself must finally break with the fairy tale of Fatah moderation.
caroline@carolineglick.com
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Caroline Glick
www.CarolineGlick.com
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