The Mechanisms of the Palestinian People’s Mobilization

My goal here is to use the ideas developed by McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly in “ Methods for Measuring Mechanism of Contention,2007” to read the mechanism of the Palestinian people mobilization in the West Bank and Gaza (which actually excludes the Palestinians in the Diasporas.)
McAdam and his partners suggest four approaches to measure the mechanism of contention: two of them are direct and two are indirect. I think that the direct approaches are appropriate for my goals. Especially the first one, that is, the systematic usage of events data to identify the process of the mechanism. Though the second direct approach-the use of field ethnographic methods- is possible principally speaking, It s obvious that it is beyond the reach of this paper.
The Palestinian people in the West Bank and Gaza has demonstrated a certain capacity to mobilization at least three times in the historical era that follows the 1967 war which witnessed the occupation of the West Bank-which was under the Jordanian rule- and Gaza -which was ruled by Egypt-.
I think that the study of the “mechanism” of mobilization in Palestine is -as probably- in other areas of the world more insightful and grasps better the complex process that takes place leading toward mobilization and then demobilization in a cycle that looks some how difficult to explain by other means of social research.
Skimming the historical period post 1967 has led me to the identification of a basic mechanism that works to produce the masses mobilization and then bring that to an end because of the last episodes of that same mechanism.
The process is like this: The masses are frustrated deeply because of some major defeat, so they look sort of cynical and skeptical, they lose the interest and care about politics and “public” things, every one seems more dedicated to her own private things. The intellectuals feel that there is no hope. Some regular activities would take place here and there like students’ activities and the activities of the organizations of the civil society, then “suddenly” some spark gives birth to some “explosion”. The people -as though infected with some strange virus- go to streets in thousands and dozens of thousands. Committees are spread everywhere and the masses want all in all independence. The spark takes place first in this or that place and then spreads to the rest of sites- cities, villages, and camps- and then “fire” is burning all around the West Bank and Gaza.
The Palestinian official leadership-the PLO is considered this leadership here because actually it has assumed this role at least since March 1968- feels the threat of the mobilization which produces some rival “local” leadership, so a race begins to dominate the decision making process and since the PLO has always been relatively rich, it makes use of the financing of the activities and the activists to contain the mobilization and to direct it toward some “useful” agenda that at least does not contradict the “hegemonic” role of the PLO. The layman begins to feel and smell the odor of corruption, and people start to move away from the “financed- struggle”, because they feel it is not the “truthful” form of struggle. The result is some isolated forms of limited mobilization that take their decision from the upper ranks of the PLO-when the fax was dominant in the eighties many people called the phenomenon the “fax” revolution to refer to the way the political resistance is administered, the ironic sense of the word in its Arabic context is unmistakable-. This is by no means the only way for the containment or the exclusion of the “people” from the effective participatory role in the everyday political struggle. An alternative is the “militarization” of the resistance, which would deter such social slides like women, kids, old people, and even some non-violent people from participation. The result again is the isolation of the movement and its dominance by the leadership of the PLO. There is an important point that I want to emphasize here concerning the relation between the “people” and the “leadership”: It looks that the best moments for people s moment of mobilization is that when the leadership-PLO is weakened. This not only does cause people to lose their hope in “external” help, but also makes the leadership- PLO less capable of dominating the people and so gives some room for peoples creativity. Needless to say that strangely enough the peoples mobilization supports the strength of the leadership who become again important on all levels: the global, the pan-Arabs, and the local one.
Despite the importance of this I would claim that some major defeat should accompany the leadership “plan” to bring the mobilization to an end. With out that it would be a bit difficult to contain the energetic mood of the people.
The previous description has tried to draw briefly the elements of the mechanism of mobilization and demobilization in the West Bank and Gaza in the post 1967 period. Now I ll try to track the mechanism in a more concrete context of the time and space of the Palestinian people. I think that referring to the real context is so important to the verifying -or falsifying – of the theoretical suggested mechanism and on the other hand one should not forget that actually the mechanism -no matter the degree of its abstractness – is derived from the real contexts that it is supposed the ability of explain. I think it by no means acceptable that it fails to explain the events that produced it.
So if I start with the 1970 s I find basically how the Palestinian people -as all Arabs- were completely devastated by the “six-day war” in which Israel had inflicted an unbelievable defeat upon the heart of the Arab dreams the Nasser regime. It was so beautiful to be true for the Israeli s and so tragic, and humiliating for Arabs to be anything but a malicious nightmare. If the minor battle between PLO guerrilla men and Israel in March 1968 did some little effect to raise the spirits, September 1970 inflicted some incomparable tough frustrating effect on people. The war of October 1973 convinced everybody that the Arab official regime has done all that it can do, and no one should expect any more. And the Lebanese civil war with its repercussions added a darker tan to the Palestinian political life. The people have started some limited demonstrations here and there especially in the West Bank big city of Nablus and the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza. The confiscation of some Palestinian-Israeli s citizens land inside Israel led to confrontation and the death of some ten Palestinians. This gave birth to mobilization -though not as wide and effective as the following mobilizations-that would come to an end with the PLO dominating the scene and taking the lead from the hands of the National Orientation Committee. Especially after the deportation of the mayors and their assimilation -or corruption as others may say- by the PLO, and then the failure of PLO completely in the 1982 war against PLO and Lebanon, the Palestinian people entered the cycle of frustration and lost any desire for political activities. The leadership was trying -striped from its ability to conduct any “armed” struggle-, in vain to engineer some political peace project in cooperation with Jordan or Egypt or any body. The PLO was so weak in Tunisia -for they were to leave Lebanon- as a result of their defeat- to be taken seriously. When no one had any idea of what was to take place a little “odd road accident” in Gaza caused the death of a few Palestinian passengers in the autumn of 1987. The next day the Palestinian young people in Gaza protested against that regarding it some deliberately aggressive act by the Israeli driver of the truck that caused the accident. The Israeli forces responded as usual and the next days the “events” spread everywhere in Gaza and then gradually in the West Bank.
It took politicians and political observers months to figure out that what was taking place was something different from the “normal” and that some serious “new” phenomenon was being born. That thing was to be named Al-Intifada – when the seventies mobilization was called habbah, both words mean something like uprising- and to be claimed by everybody either as its “engineer” or being the insightful scientist who predicted it. Needless to say that social science is still so helpless when it comes to predicting people s mobilization.
The second year of the Intifada witness the efforts of the -forgotten PLO- to dominate the movement and to gradually taking the lead of the United National Leadership that supervised the activities of the Intifada. It was Hamas who appeared as a “variable” that no body had expected. The result was the birth of the rivalty that we still see between the two “heads” of the Palestinian politics. But as we ll see this variable does not affect the mechanism that I think can explain the Palestinian people mobilization and demobilization.
The PLO took advantage and returned in 1988 as strongly as possible to push for “peace” agreement. The independence declaration and the financing of the activities and the exaggerated hopes were to “calm” the rhythm of the Intifada, but one needs the second Gulf War and the defeat of Iraq, to see the Palestinian Intifada coming to its end. Some would claim that the Intifada had some extra one or two years after that. Actually nothing that could be popular mobilization happened regularly after the gulf war.
In the same way we can trace the mechanism of the Palestinian mobilization after the Oslo Principles agreement was signed in 1993. The people had to pass through the “same” way of seeing their hopes evaporating and then starting to be frustrating, and then convinced that their leadership is helpless. Still we would see Sharon s- the previous prime minister- visit to -the holy for Muslims- Aqsa mosque, that what was to be called the second Intifada takes place.
Again we find the PLO -now in Ramallah- doing its best to dominate the people. After a brief time people would abandon the street for the militias and the “organized” members of the factions. But again the completely defeat of the mobilization would need some humiliating military defeat. In this case the unbelievable collapse of the Palestinians “ forces”-though very weak in weapons and limited in numbers- convinced people that they are “dying” to give credibility to some “traitors”. The people went back to their “homes”. And said to themselves: No more politics.
Now -if I were to use the “mechanism for prediction- the people are frustrated watching the leadership doing nothing. They are in a mood of “waiting for goddot”. When the Gaza late little mobilization took place, I thought probably they were coming back. But according to our suggested mechanism that step needs some ten years for it looks that a deep change in the people’s “mood” takes a decade in the case under study.

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