SUNDAY’ bloodbath in Gaza was an act of communal insanity. For Palestinian to turn on Palestinian with guns, rocket launchers and grenades was total and utter madness. The only comfort that can be drawn from this appalling confrontation, which left nine dead and dozens injured, is that politicians from both sides recoiled in horror and steps were immediately taken to try and defuse the situation. The only beneficiaries from this tragedy were Israel and Washington, both eager to characterize the Palestinians as unstable, aggressive and incapable of statehood.
The anger and bitterness caused by this clash are sure to simmer. The greatest care must now be exercised to avoid further flash points. Political and community leaders have to use all of their influence to calm tempers and fears.
The plain fact is that the Palestinians, already regularly brutalized by Israeli occupation forces, have, since the democratic election of the Hamas government in January, also been pauperized by the Washington-led economic and aid boycott and the Israeli refusal to release funds belonging and owed to the Palestinian Authority. The Hamas administration has had no money to pay civil servants, including police and security forces. Decent hardworking Palestinians, already cut off from earning a living in Israel have been reduced to a subsistence economy. In such fraught circumstances, families and friends have only been able to support each other on a trickle of foreign funds and the last of their savings. Even the Hamas welfare schemes, which were a potent foundation of its electoral success, have been hit hard by the freezing of its overseas funds, on the grounds that they were being used to fund terrorism.
So the grievances that caused unpaid policemen and civil servants, many of them Fatah supporters, to take to the streets and set up barricades were real enough. President Abbas ordered the security forces to stay clear of the demonstrations. He probably calculated that once the protesters had made their point they would break up peacefully. Unfortunately, Hamas militias, called out by the government to keep order, apparently saw the demonstrations as a serious breach of civil order and fired on the crowds. It may never be clear who or what triggered the violence, but there has to be a strong suspicion that there were agent provocateurs somewhere in the crowds. It only needed one or two shots to be fired for nervous and frightened militiamen to respond and initiate the terrible spiral of violence that followed.
This tragic and shameful episode will hopefully have brought everyone to their senses. If bloody divisions continue, the Palestinian cause will be grievously damaged and the only victors will be its enemies. And there is an important wider lesson to be learned: It must also be hoped that the international community, particularly the Europeans will now rightly feel ashamed that they have helped inflict such economic beggary upon the Palestinians and will act now to restore a proper flow of funds to the elected government.
