New voices temper Palestinian rule
Khouloud Daibes defies the image of a Palestinian government run by a pack of gun-toting Islamic militants.
The new Palestinian tourism minister takes the reins this week from the outgoing minister from Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement, which formed a government a year ago that much of the international community has shunned.
She is proud to call herself a technocrat – she earned a PhD in architecture in Germany and was in charge of tourism to Bethlehem, Jesus' birthplace at the turn of the millennium celebrations in 2000. Besides being a multilingual woman, she's also a Christian and a political independent.
This makes Mrs. Daibes part of a new cadre of respected and successful pro-peace Palestinians who have joined up with compatriots in Hamas in the hope of reestablishing relations abroad and staving off a civil war at home.
But this wider-than-ever variety of political orientations represented in the new Palestinian cabinet is already presenting a dilemma for Israel as US and European diplomats this week met with the new Palestinian finance minister, apparently ending a year of ostracism. Norway recognized the new government this week, and Hamas officials predict that others will come around.
The Quartet, which includes the US, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia, said that the new government – still headed by Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh – has yet to meet its three core conditions: that the new government renounce terror (Palestinians view this as the right of resistance), recognize Israel, and recognize previous agreements signed.
On Wednesday, the Bush administration said it would cut by nearly one-half the amount of money it will send to support Palestinian security because some of the money sent last year could not be accounted for.
But to whom in the Palestinian leadership to speak is becoming a complex matter, one which Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will have to navigate when she arrives in the region Saturday.
New ministers, such as Daibes, will make it difficult to broad-brush the new Palestinian government as one of Islamic extremists.
"Having a government with independents and technocrats will be a message to the world that this conflict should and can be solved," says Daibes in an interview at her home in East Jerusalem. Besides her work, she's a mother of three children. Her husband is a senior official with a German aid group here. She is as comfortable speaking English and German as she is speaking Arabic.
To her, the cool international reception to the new Palestinian government, with many Western countries announcing that they would meet only non-Hamas ministers, is a "frustration." Then she adds that "frustration isn't a strong enough word." Rather, she says that after Palestinians elected Hamas in January 2006, the world induced a kind of "collective punishment" on the Palestinians for having made a "democratic choice."
Among this new generation of moderates are Finance Minister Salam Fayyad, a former World Bank official who leads the moderate Third Way Party, now the political home of Palestinian spokeswoman Hanan Ashrawi; the new foreign minister, Dr. Ziad Abu Amr, an author and political scientist who has long studied Hamas but was never a member of it; and the minister of information, Moustapha Barghouthi, also a progressive who has been an advocate of a two-state solution with Israel and a critic of corruption in Fatah, the main political faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
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