There have been so many false dawns. The latest truce, unexpected though it was, is raising few Palestinian hopes. However, one day there will be an end to hostilities that leads to a just and lasting peace and this might be it.
There are, of course, so many things that can go wrong. For the Badr Brigade to be deployed into the Gaza strip from its current training base in Jordan will take time. This 1,000-strong force, loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas, would be tasked with ensuring that militant rocket attacks into Israeli territory do not begin again. Unless Hamas militants and the administration in Gaza are, however, prepared to honor the truce and support the brigade’s operation, it will be impossible to carry out. Hamas has created its own Executive Force of 6,000 men for local policing because it does not trust the regular police, whom it suspects of sympathizing with the rival Fatah party.
Gaza, poverty-stricken, seriously damaged and extremely angry, has rightly been described as a tinderbox. The arrival of the Badr Brigade could merely be fresh fuel for a conflagration that may yet ignite between Hamas and Fatah. Unity of purpose has never been more necessary for the Palestinians, yet there has surely never been a time when it has looked so hard to achieve.
Palestinians have been punished and pauperized for electing a government Washington did not like. They will only have the sentence lifted if they overturn their democratic verdict and accept a government of national unity.
It is hardly surprising that many in Gaza in particular suspect they are once again being set up by the Israelis for another bloody fall. Why is the outside world insisting on unity when the outside world has allowed the Palestinians to be beaten and broken into factions like never before? Why could the world not have worked for peace with Palestinians when they were largely united under the Fatah leadership?
And why is Israel suddenly talking peace? It may have been defeated and humiliated by Hezbollah in Lebanon, but its military is still powerful, as witnessed by the devastating shelling of, and attacks on, Gaza. Could it be that Ehud Olmert is simply helping Washington out by producing a truce to coincide with the arrival in the Middle East today of President Bush and Condoleezza Rice? This way Bush will not look entirely useless as he faces the bloody wreckage of the Iraq he supposedly wanted to save.
Israeli’s sign-up to the truce may be supposed to give Bush one diplomatic win in the midst of his disasters. Olmert can present Israel’s well-rehearsed reasonable face to the world — patience despite Palestinian provocation, giving peace a real chance and allowing Palestinians to set their house in order at last. All the time, Olmert knows that, as has happened so often before, Palestinian hotheads can easily be goaded into an attack which would justify Israel’s apparently sorrowful and reluctant return to its normal business of oppression and occupation.
It is a script we are all familiar with.
