JERUSALEM, 17 June 2007 — What would a definitive Hamas victory in Gaza mean for the Palestinians, the Israelis and the Middle East?
Speaking by telephone from his sixth-floor apartment in Gaza City, Nagi Shourrab, a political scientist at Al-Azhar University, offered a bleak assessment.
“I think we will return to square zero,” he says. A complete Hamas conquest of Gaza would leave the dream of a unified Palestinian state in tatters, he added.
Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff, of the daily Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, wrote Wednesday, “Hamas’ takeover of Gaza is destined to split the territories into two entities that are politically and culturally separate: Hamastan (the Gaza Strip) and Fatahstan (the West Bank).”
Although Israeli restrictions on Palestinian movement during the last seven years of violence have effectively cut off Gaza from the West Bank, one long-standing objective of the Middle East peace process has been to preserve the geographic integrity of the two territories to create a viable state.
There have been various proposals by the international community to link Gaza and the West Bank with a sunken highway or a railway.
But a formal political separation between the two territories would create two incompatible, disconnected government systems for the Palestinian people.
Under Hamas control, Gaza might become a mini-Islamic state, some analysts predict.
“They would impose some of the features of an Islamic state, like maybe the hijab,” said Ali Jirbawi, a political scientist at Birzeit University in the West Bank, but Hamas, he said, is ultimately a pragmatic organization and its true goals are quite simple.
“They want recognition, basically. What they are doing by controlling Gaza is thinking that if they control Gaza they will be a force to be reckoned with. And Israel has to recognize that and the outside world has to recognize that,” he said.
So far, much of the world has been unwilling to deal with Hamas unless it meets Western demands that it recognize Israel, renounce violence and abide by previously signed peace deals.
But Gaza’s mounting economic and social problems may eventually force the world to take notice of its landlords, Jirbawi said.
Gaza has served as a strong base for the Hamas movement, whose schools and charities helped win it a loyal support base.
Hamas’ current showdown with Fatah is rooted not only in their deep ideological division, but also in the power vacuum created by Arafat’s death in 2004.
“The dynamics of Palestinian politics is very much like the dynamics of Iraqi politics. After the death of Arafat there was no strong man, there was nobody to hold it together and this is what we’re seeing,” said Gerald Steinberg, an analyst at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University.
Those political divisions, Steinberg predicted, could now take the form of two starkly different Palestinian territories, with Gaza descending into deeper chaos, and giving the West Bank a chance for calm and, maybe someday, some prosperity. For the people of Gaza, caught in the middle of the fighting factions, such separation would be a disaster, Al-Azhar’s Nagi Shourrab said.
