Khaled Meshaal has come a long way from the days when he would sit on a lonely hilltop next to his village of Silwad doing his grammer school homework. There is no solitude on that summit today. The Israeli settlement of Amona is a jumble of prefabricated dwellings surrounding a modern children's playground with a million-dollar view east to Jordan. Silwad sits in the shadow of the small settlement.
Meshaal's horizons are far broader these days. Together with many of his generation, Meshaal left his West Bank village for Kuwait with his family after the June 1967 war. The one-time high school physics teacher, who has led the political bureau of the Islamic Resistance Organization (HAMAS) since 1995, is said to be gunning for the top job in the PLO.
This is a new old story, with an important contemporary twist. Since bursting onto the Palestinian political scene during the first intifada, Hamas has tried without success to enter the closed shop that is the PLO. Fatah, first under the leadership of Yasser Arafat and today with Mahmoud Abbas, has owned the franchise. Arafat built the PLO. He worked hard to free the organization from its roots as a play thing of Nasser in the mid-1960s, and cemented “the independence of Palestinian decision-making” to insulate the PLO from the machinations of third parties. In April 1990, Hamas proposed that the organization be given 40% of seats in the ruling Palestine National Council (PNC). Arafat was prepared to grant entry to the upstart organization, but only on terms that guaranteed rejection. He offered Hamas 18 seats (about 4%), later increased to 24 seats.
As long as the Rais [president] ran the PLO, Hamas had few options, except those earned by resistance to the occupation. The PLO was and remains the internationally recognized representative of the Palestinian people. The Palestinian Authority (PA) created by the Oslo agreement in 1995, was not only a creature of Israel but also of the PLO, which remained the formal diplomatic address for all negotiations with Israel.
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