JERUSALEM, Nov. 22 -- The most important decision about who will run for president of the Palestinian Authority was made Monday by the Fatah movement's 15-member Central Committee, which nominated former prime minister Mahmoud Abbas as the group's presidential candidate for the Jan. 9 election.
The choice by the 13 committee members who voted -- almost all in their sixties and seventies, and all elected to their posts 15 years ago -- was unanimous. It was also an emphatic decision by the old guard of Fatah, the political organization founded by Yasser Arafat more than 40 years ago, not to turn over the leadership to a younger generation agitating for power. Abbas, 69, who was recently elected to replace Arafat as chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, is also the second-ranking official in Fatah and a Central Committee member.
Yasser Arafat displayed a portrait of the jailed Marwan Barghouti, now a possible candidate for president, at a February rally in Ramallah.
(Muhammed Nasser -- AP)
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By all accounts, Fatah's candidate is a prohibitive favorite to win the election. But as the organization works to smooth Abbas's path to victory, there remains a possible bump: Marwan Barghouti, 45, the charismatic, firebrand leader of Fatah's young reformist wing. Polls had consistently ranked Barghouti as the most popular Palestinian after Arafat, but he is serving five life sentences in an Israeli prison. Barghouti's followers, including guerrillas from the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the Fatah military wing that has conducted a suicide bombing campaign against Israel, maintain that he has the support of the Palestinian street and should be Fatah's candidate.
An early champion of the 1993 Oslo peace accords and their two-state solution, and a strong critic of official Palestinian corruption, Barghouti began advocating violent resistance against Israel because of what he considered its pattern of breaking promises made in Oslo. He was a member of the Palestinian parliament and a founder of the al-Aqsa Brigades. This year, an Israeli court convicted him of murder and belonging to a terrorist organization.
The split between backers of Abbas, commonly known as Abu Mazen, and Barghouti is the most visible sign of a major generational power struggle over the Palestinian leadership and the direction of the four-year-old uprising, known as the intifada, against Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
"There's a major crisis in Fatah. How are we going to face it?" said Dayseer Nasrullah, head of Fatah in the West Bank city of Nablus. "If it were in my hands, I'd call a conference to elect a new leadership and kick out all the old guard."
"Barghouti got his popularity in the intifada; the rest of the leaders have the media, but they have no public support," said Hisham Ahmed, a friend and former teacher of Barghouti's. Nonetheless, "there is a strong feeling among Palestinians, especially young Palestinians, that the old guard wants to have the upper hand all the way down the road."
Even some who support Abbas for president say it is time for the older generation to step aside.
Despite threats that Barghouti could run as an independent, Hussein Sheikh, the general secretary of Fatah in the West Bank, said Barghouti would "honor the decision of Fatah" and not destroy the movement's unity.
Nabil Shaath, the Palestinian Authority's foreign minister and a member of the Central Committee, said Monday night that the committee's unanimous choice of Abbas still had to be approved by Fatah's Revolutionary Council, the movement's larger parliamentary body, at a meeting scheduled for Thursday.
"The idea of nominating Marwan from jail seems out of all practical requirements for the coming period," Shaath said. "President Arafat was in a semi-jail in Ramallah, and it was so difficult, so the idea was not really seriously contemplated. But no doubt Marwan remains a highly appreciated Fatah leader for the future."
If he were to run as an independent, Barghouti might be the only person popular enough to beat the Fatah candidate. In a survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research conducted in September, before Arafat's death, Barghouti received 22 percent support for vice president against 2 percent for Abbas. Barghouti's share was almost twice as high as that of any other Palestinian.
Saad Nimr, head of the campaign to get Barghouti released from jail, said Barghouti would work to maintain the unity of Fatah, "but which unity? If the overwhelming majority of the grass-roots members of Fatah wants him to run, you could say it's the others that are going against the majority." Nimr said a final decision by Barghouti was expected in a few days.
"He will never work for the disunity of Fatah," agreed Ahmed, a political science professor at Bir Zeit University near Ramallah and Barghouti's former thesis adviser. "But at the same time, I don't believe he would ever work with Abu Mazen. They have had serious differences since the outburst of the intifada. They have two diametrically opposed perspectives," with Abbas harshly critical of the Palestinians' turn to violence and Barghouti believing it was the only option left.
"Israel will have security only after the end of the occupation, not before," Barghouti wrote in a January 2002 op-ed column in The Washington Post, before he was arrested and tried by Israel. "I am not a terrorist, but neither am I a pacifist. I am simply a regular guy from the Palestinian street advocating what every other oppressed person has advocated -- the right to help myself in the absence of help from anywhere else."
Two senior al-Aqsa Brigades leaders -- Nasser Jumma in Nablus and Zakaria Zbeida in Jenin -- said in separate interviews last week that though they favored Barghouti, they would support Abbas if he were elected fairly and did not betray the Palestinian cause. But both said that militants would turn against him if he gave up the demand of Palestinian exiles to return to homes that they or their families left in Israel or if he did not continue to demand a Palestinian state inside the 1967 borders of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with Jerusalem as its capital.
"Abu Mazen knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that there are people who will not allow him to cross the line," said Jumma, 38, one of the top al-Aqsa leaders in the West Bank.
