The new wave within Fatah

Followers of Marwan Barghouti (featured on poster) are seen as the future of peace in the Middle East. Picture / Reuters

NABLUS, The West Bank - When Nasser Juma says Yasser Arafat led his people to "disaster" in the last years of his life, he speaks with authority.

"We are the generation that was most connected with the Palestinian people. We were active in the first and second intifadas; we were active in the resistance. To whatever extent we believed in it, we were part of it."

It is this street credibility which makes Nasser Juma a typical member of the group that staged a dramatic breakaway from Fatah, the mainstream Palestinian faction, under the leadership of Marwan Barghouti, last Wednesday.

Juma, 39, is already eighth on the list of the new faction "the Future", formed from Barghouti's prison cell and splitting the group founded by Arafat and Abu Jihad in 1959.

Less than a year ago, Juma was high on Israel's wanted list as one of the key Fatah-linked al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade leaders in the West Bank. Juma, now no longer on the run, topped the primary poll to select the Fatah candidates running for Nablus in next month's Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) elections.

He did so as part of the "new guard" of Fatah activists seeking to supplant what he sees as the corrupt old leadership installed in the Palestinian Authority by Arafat.

The crisis brings to a head weeks in which Fatah, under pressure from Hamas, has been fighting over who should represent it in the the PLC. Primaries in Gaza and the West Bank have been marred by gun battles between rival gangs. Last week, the Central Election Commission offices in Gaza and the West Bank closed after Fatah gunmen ransacked them.

In most primaries Juma's generation won. In Ramallah, Barghouti, the charismatic and highly popular former Fatah secretary general in the West Bank, currently serving a life sentence in an Israeli jail over intifada attacks, topped the poll.

Juma is convinced that Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, also "wants to send the old guard away. He suffers from the old guard."

Abbas personally insisted on putting Barghouti top of the official Fatah candidates' list. The appeal of Barghouti and Juma could help him win a PLC majority over Hamas. And as avowed reformists, a sizeable Barghouti presence may help him rebuild the PA's sclerotic apparatus.

But Abbas was also obliged by the powerful Fatah central committee to accept Ahmad Qureia, his unpopular Prime Minister, in second place, along with several others of the committee and their henchmen. This triggered the Barghouti breakaway.

Juma, who in the 90s was tortured in Palestinian jails on Arafat orders and also spent eight years in Israeli prisons, includes Israel in blame for inflaming militant tensions.

But he unequivocally condemned the recent suicide bombing in Netanya and, more strikingly, he believes the intifada played into the hands of right-wing Israelis.

It also helped Ariel Sharon's goal of taking territory to serve the demographic need to have an Israel with a Jewish majority, he said.

"The Palestinian leadership under Arafat should have made an assessment of who benefited from the intifada. It was Sharon."

Arafat also failed, in Juma's view, to understand the impact of September 11 on international opinion.

"The resistance after September 11 should have kept itself far away from terrorism. Israel took advantage of September 11 to say that the Palestinians were terrorists."

Hamas's suicide bombing, which helped to "drag" the Fatah factions into suicide attacks on Israeli civilians, was, he believes, a catastrophe.

Many of these criticisms echo those made by President Abbas.

But if Sharon wins the Israeli election and, as many predict, imposes a new border that will annex East Jerusalem and tracts of the West Bank, that will be no more acceptable to the Barghouti generation than it would have been to Arafat.

Indeed, while Juma says "the most effective weapon is peace", he leaves options for what he says may be a struggle "over generations".

Western diplomats who see the "new guard" as Fatah's best hope know they will not agree to anything short of a viable Palestinian state.

But they believe its (untested) commitment to reform is essential to giving the PA transparency.

Such an outcome could make the US readier to press Israel to go further towards a final settlement.

But that is far from certain. While Juma says the decision to break away is fixed, Abbas will lead efforts to re-fuse the two groups.

In any case, Juma says Abbas should nominate Barghouti as PM, to increase pressure to release him.

Yet Khalil Shikaki, the leading Palestinian pollster and analyst, says that the methods of the "young guard" have hardly been above reproach, and that Hamas could benefit from the Fatah split.

This new generation, however they stand, will probably make significant gains in elections next month. In the long run it could even be they, and perhaps Amir Peretz, the new Labour leader, or another Israeli leader, who achieve the lasting peace to which they are publicly committed.

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