Fatah's 'young guard' faces test at the ballot box

Last in an occasional series of articles on the Palestinians as they prepare for legislative elections on Wednesday.

NABLUS, West Bank -- Nasser Jumaa sees himself as the kind of next-generation politician who could help lead the Fatah party -- and the Palestinian government it dominates -- out of the rut of weakness and disunity where it has languished for more than a year since the death of its founder, Yasser Arafat.

Jumaa, 38, wields street credibility honed over 15 years commanding militants and serving time in Israeli prisons during two Palestinian uprisings. As a leader of Fatah's reformist ''young guard," he won a landslide victory in last month's party primary here in Nablus, the largest city in the West Bank. And he has adopted the moderate language of someone who might someday deliver a deal with Israel to establish a Palestinian state -- branding suicide bombings a mistake, calling for pragmatic compromises, and trying to rebrand Fatah as the party of ''rational resistance."

But during the countdown to Palestinian legislative elections on Wednesday, Fatah and the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority have spun out of control. The party has descended into a generational power struggle. Increasingly brazen attacks on government buildings and border crossings by Fatah-linked gunmen have embarrassed the authority, which seems powerless to control the militants who nominally answer to its own ruling party, let alone the rival groups that Israel demands the authority rein in.

Israeli leaders -- and many Palestinians as well -- fear that a divided and ineffectual Fatah would open a catastrophic vacuum, weakening Palestinian governance and leaving Israel with no viable partner for peace talks.

During the chaos, Jumaa has found himself as much an emblem of Fatah's troubles as of its future.

He is part of Fatah's younger generation, leaders of the most recent Palestinian uprising that raged from 2000 to early 2005, whom Palestinians see as less corrupt and more in touch with their lives than the Arafat associates in their 60s and 70s who returned from exile after the 1993 Oslo Accords. But even after Jumaa and his allies won lopsided primary victories and threatened to field a competing list of candidates, Fatah did not give them as prominent a role as they demanded. That enraged Jumaa and his allies, and analysts say it could hand the anticorruption vote to the rival militant group Hamas.

Jumaa supports the informal truce that militants declared with Israel 11 months ago and says the cells that answer to him in the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, a loosely organized armed wing of Fatah, have observed the cease-fire. But he is powerless, he says, to control other cells that continue to attack Israel and defy the Palestinian Authority, which appears unable or unwilling to crack down on militant groups as Israel demands.

And even as he calls for a new Palestinian consensus on how to deal with Israel, Jumaa has trouble articulating a clear philosophy that would differentiate a reformed Fatah both from Hamas, which has a more implacable position on Israel, and from Arafat's longtime associates. That Fatah old guard is widely blamed by Palestinians and Israelis alike for failing to bring peace or prosperity 12 years after the Oslo Accords placed them in charge of the Palestinian Authority that administers the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

''As Palestinians we don't have a clear strategy," he said in an interview in Nablus, his home city, where he agreed to stay and not conduct attacks in exchange for not being arrested or killed, under a deal between Israel and some militant leaders. ''We should have an internal agreement among Palestinians regarding the conflict. . . . Should we use guns, do we have the ability to fight Israel with armed resistance? We don't have this ability. The most effective weapon is the weapon of peace. We are not using this weapon at all."

Fatah is the ruling party of the Palestinian Authority, the Palestinians' governing body that is charged with dismantling militant groups. Yet the party also has its own armed wing, a constellation of gunmen so disparate that some cells are alleged to answer directly to Iranian backers while others serve in the very security forces that are supposed to disarm them. One of Fatah's biggest selling points is that it's the only party that Israel will deal with, but Israel threatens to freeze it out if it doesn't crack down on the gunmen.

From Israel's point of view, the authority and Fatah -- both led by Arafat's successor, authority president Mahmoud Abbas -- have already failed their obligation to disarm militants, yet remain indispensable because the alternatives are worse. Fatah signed on to Arafat's decision to accept a Palestinian state alongside Israel as part of the Oslo Accords, while Hamas and the rival group Islamic Jihad still call for the destruction of Israel.

Fatah's own militants, the Al Aqsa brigades, have caused nearly daily chaos in the Gaza Strip over the past month, occupying government buildings to demand higher slots on the party's campaign slate, kidnapping foreigners in an effort to extort jobs in the security forces, even tearing down part of the barrier separating Gaza from Egypt to protest the arrest of one of their leaders.

The chaos alarms Palestinians like Samir Nasrullah, a pharmacist who witnessed the riots at the Egyptian border. That day began with Al Aqsa gunmen banging on his door and threatening to kidnap three Americans staying with him; during a tense standoff he talked them out of it by explaining that two were the parents of Rachel Corrie, a peace activist run over by an Israeli bulldozer while protesting the demolition of Palestinian houses.

''Every minute was like an hour," he said of the tense moments he spent negotiating with the gunmen. ''I don't know why the PA can't deal with them . . . We are the victims. We pay the price."

The Palestinian Authority is synonymous with Fatah for many Palestinians, so its failings reflect directly on Fatah.

Authority officials don't have the strength and weapons to confront militants head-on; Israel says they do. On paper, at least, the authority has 60,000 security forces to Hamas's estimated 5,000 gunmen.

But Israeli and Palestinian officials say no one knows how many of the authority's security forces are also members of militant groups. And as many as 15,000 of the forces get paid without coming to work, according to aides of Salam Fayyad, the finance minister who quit to run against Fatah on an independent slate.

Fatah leaders can't bring Al Aqsa brigades under a single command, Jumaa explained, because some cells are being funded directly by Iran or its proxy, Hezbollah.

Fatah faces challenges over its integrity, as well. Eighty-seven percent of Palestinians believe that there is corruption in the authority, and 95 percent believe that personal connections are the key to getting government jobs -- a sore point in an economy where such jobs are often the only option.

The young guard started the second intifadah so that it could paint itself as an alternative more pragmatic than Hamas but more militant than Fatah's old guard, Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki said. But now that Hamas is running in elections, he said, it has ''turned out more pragmatic than they thought."

His polling suggests that Fatah has gained in popularity in Gaza since the Israeli pullout. That's because Gazans' priorities have shifted: Before the disengagement, Israeli occupation was their number one concern -- something people turn to Hamas to combat; now, the main concern is the economy -- and they see Fatah as the party that can get Israel to open the borders to trade and workers.

If people think there's hope for progress with Israel, Shikaki concluded, Fatah will do well on Wednesday. If they are focused on conflict with Israel, and on corruption in the Palestinian Authority, then Hamas will do better.

Jumaa now has to confront these problems in his campaign.

He wants a reformed Fatah to be ''the clean resistance," but acknowledges that even some of the younger generation have ''graduated from the old guard's school of corruption." And while he wants Fatah to be ''the rational resistance," he concedes his words might sound defeatist to the fired-up young men in the street.

Suicide bombings, he said, were ''a strategic mistake" that made the Palestinians' legitimate right to resist become terrorism in the eyes of the world, he said. And Israel's military superiority means fighting won't work.

''We are the people in the right, but we are the weak people. We should behave more wisely," he said.

He added: ''The battle with Israel is long. It will go on for generations."

Globe correspondent Sa'id Ghazali contributed to this report.