Hijacking the Palestinian Cause

I first met Kamal Medhat, whom I always knew as Kamal Naji, in early 2007, when I was looking for background information to review a book on militant Islam in the Ain al-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp. At the time, Kamal could still claim to have abandoned everything for the attractions of academia, though you knew even then that the finality of the man was not a fastidious thesis and a chalkboard.

Kamal had been an aide to Yasser Arafat in the 1980s and was the official who surrendered the Palestinians' heavy weapons to the Lebanese government in 1991, when the army, backed politically by Syria, attacked Palestinian forces east of Sidon. When Abbas Zaki was named the Palestinian Liberation Organization's representative in Lebanon after the Syrian pullout in 2005, he chose Kamal as his deputy. Zaki needed a man with     experience and decisiveness on the ground. He also used him as a counterweight to the secretary of the Fatah movement in Lebanon, Sultan Abu al-Aynayn, whose allegiances, typical of a Palestinian official who had to maneuver through the years of Syrian domination, were complicated when it came to the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority.