Third Way (Palestine)
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The Third Way is a small centrist Palestinian political party active in the Palestinian National Authority (PNA). The party is led by Salam Fayyad and Hanan Ashrawi.
In the January 2006 PLC elections it received 2.41 % of the popular vote and won two of the Council's 132 seats.
[edit] Background
The Third Way can be interpreted as the end result of the process of disenchantment that overtook the leaders of Palestinian intellectual, liberal, and upper-class society with the militant groups in the PNA since the assumption of power by Yasser Arafat in 1994 and the controversial 1996 Palestinian Legislative Council Elections.
Ashrawi and Fayyad were both top advisors to Arafat and were renowned for their eloquence as advocates of the PLO's case in negotiations to the western media and diplomatic communities.
Ashrawi had earned her position as one of the founders of Birzeit University's Legal Aid Committee/Human Rights Action Project in the Ramallah suburb of the same name in the 1970s during the Israeli military administrations efforts to close the institution. Her long involvement in the non-violent protest movement and condemnation of certain armed actions carried out by Palestinian insurgent factions earned her a reputation for integrity among western collaborators who opposed the Israeli administration in the West Bank and Gaza, yet were unwilling to support the PLO's terror tactics openly. She was also a recognized leader of the Palestinian women's rights movement, the Christian community in the PNA, and the academic community in Palestinian society. She holds a Masters in English Literature at the American University of Beirut, and a PhD. from the University of Virginia.
Whereas Ashrawi is considered the rhetorical leader of the group, Fayyad may be considered the practical voice, as his specialization has been in economic issues. Holding a BSc. in Engineering from the American University of Beirut, an MBA in Accounting at the University of Texas-Austin, and a PhD. in Economics at UT-Austin, Fayyad held several positions in the World Bank between 1988 and the Oslo Accords (1993). In the government of Prime Minister Ahmad Qurei (2005-06) he served as minister of finance and head of the treasury, and was one of the few PNA officials who made an attempt at reform (reforms that proved too late to prevent the rise of Hamas).
In addition to these posts the two were both members of Arafat's negotiating teams during sessions with Israeli officials, and have been identified as leading advocates of the Palestinian side in the negotiations in universities and the media throughout the world since 1993. However, while they gained prestige as ambassadors to the world of their nation's cause, they were often faced with moral conflicts due to the militarization of the Palestinian street by Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the rest of the myriad militant groups that flooded the West Bank and Gaza under the PNA's anarchic rule. They also, as academics, recognized the threat that two of these groups supported by Iranian and Saudi sources, Islamic Jihad and Hamas, had on social freedoms and the rights of minorities in the PNA, as fears increased that an Islamicized society would drive out Christians, curb freedom of the press, and lead to imposition of the Sharia.
Most of the stress brought upon them, though, had little to do with social trends, but rather with the bizarre pressures of maintaining their personal integrity in PNA government rotted to the core with corruption and favouritism. Under Arafat, the PNA ministries became the golden geese of warlords of the PLO, especially those of the Fatah Old Guard such as Farouk Kaddoumi and Musa Arafat. These political bosses, most of them veterans of the Fatah exile headquarters in Tunis during the late 1980s stunned the local Palestinians with their excess. Under Arafat, Palestinian society became more divided than ever between Islamists (Hamas) and secularists (Fatah), exiled insurgents (Arafat) and locals who fought in the First Intifada (Marwan Barghouti), hard-line insurgents (Muhammad Deif) and exhausted pragmatists (Muhammad Dahlan). Fayyad recognized that Arafat may unite them temporarily under his father-like image, yet his death would create a void that would cause the rupture of the façade of Palestinian unity, as it did in Fall 2004.
[edit] Dissidence and Disintegration
Following the 1996 PLC elections both Fayyad and Ashrawi were noted dissidents of Arafat. They also noted how his security forces, the Palestinian Police and Preventive Security Service, controlled by local warlords like Dahlan and Jibril Rajoub were more intent on preventing criticism of Arafat than on fighting internal crime or preventing Hamas and Jihad terror attacks that shook negotiations. They were powerless, though, to do anything to curb the power of the armed militias in a PNA that lacked the rule of law and was effectively controlled by Arafat's decree with sporadic cooperation with Hamas. Though the two leaders supported Arafat's position at the 2000 Camp David Summit, the Al-Aqsa Intifada that followed in September of that year caught them off guard and effectively sidelined them. As the intensity of the skirmishes increased, and bombing after bombing appeared on world television screens, moderate voices on both sides were soon squelched.
During the course of the Intifada Ashrawi become noted for her media appearances condemning the civilian casualties of Israeli military operations in West Bank and Gaza. But her influence on the Palestinian side was minimal compared to terror chiefs such as Salah Shehadeh (Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades/Hamas) or Zakariah Zubeidi (Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades/Fatah) who earned the loyalty of the Palestinian street. Fayyad was reduced to a pawn of Arafat, a moderate dove who was a mouthpiece of the Chairman's conciliatory statements to the West at the same time as he was authorizing the armament of Fatah militias with weapons for the purposes of launching an offensive war on the Israelis. The Karine A affair, a scandal that ripped the olive branch off of the pictures of Arafat in the world press, left Fayyad feeling betrayed and powerless. Karine A would shatter the Palestinian argument of fighting a defensive guerilla war using small arms, as the pictures of large scale anti-tank weapons and rockets brought to light the massive arsenal that Arafat had planned to use on the Israelis.
Arafat's deteriorating health in Autumn 2004 brought the Intifada to a pause as many Palestinians contemplated for the first time the possibility of the death of the ancient Chairman. Fayyad and Ashrawi, however now were faced with their own crossroads: On the one hand, with the death of Arafat the foundation of a real democratic opposition would be far more viable in the PNA.
