When I was in the bullet-pocked, rocket-rocked Gaza Strip last month, I could feel the Palestinian political ground fracturing beneath my feet. The rival political parties Hamas and Fatah were tooling up for a civil war. The dull cruelty of killing the other side’s children had begun. Even the leading campuses in Gaza, the Islamic University (Hamas) and Al Azhar (Fatah), were firebombed just after I visited them. Locked in their box by the Israeli Army, starved of resources by the international blockade, the Palestinians were turning on each other.
If Palestine turns into a Somalia-replica, it will be a catastrophe for the sallow children of Palestine, who have already been so strangled by the four-decade-long Israeli occupation and the international boycott that more than half of them will go to bed hungry and traumatized tonight. It will also be a catastrophe for Israel. Hamas and Fatah could ensure between them that there is all quiet on the Qassam Front: an end to missile attacks on civilians in Israeli cities. But if Gaza dissolves into civil war with a hundred different warring centers of authority, this slips off the table.
Every side will demonstrate its machismo by firing into Israel.
So you would expect Israel to welcome the Makkah Agreement smelted in Saudi Arabia over the past fortnight. Hamas and Fatah have agreed to join together in a national unity government. This is partly to stem the sectarian killings, and partly a desperate attempt to end the international sanctions imposed on Palestine since last year the population democratically voted “the wrong way” in electing Hamas. The world has been demanding a unity government under Mahmoud Abbas ever since — and now we’ve got one.
The response? The US and Israel are doing everything they can to break it apart. Even the EU is insisting the sanctions that shuttered Palestinian hospitals and schools will stay. The Jerusalem Post has reported that Condoleezza Rice has “remonstrated” with Abbas “in a bad temper” for signing the agreement, leaving Abbas to splutter that the US is “pushing the Palestinian people toward civil war.”
Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, says it is not enough that Hamas has pledged to “respect” all the agreements signed by the Palestinian Authority, including implicitly the recognition of Israel’s right to exist within the 1967 borders. No: Olmert demands more. Even though Israel is imposing violent occupation on them, he wants the Palestinians to pre-emptively disarm and renounce all violence, even that offered in self-defense.
What Palestinian government could do it? Yet the world — including the British government — is backing this impossible Israeli hurdle. It’s like demanding in 1992 that Sinn Fein recognize the Royal Ulster Constabulary, hand over their guns and pledge allegiance to the Queen, or all talks are off. There are many decent Israelis who oppose all this. The former chief of military intelligence, Gen. Shlomo Gazit, calls these conditions “ridiculous, or an excuse not to negotiate.” He explains, “I am in favor of starting negotiations today ... Why should Palestinians stop fighting against us when they know we are unwilling to make an agreement?”
There are three potential motives for Israel’s behavior. The first is a lingering belief that if they resist Hamas, they will get a softer, gentler Palestinian leadership; but when they had this softer, gentler leadership under Abbas, they shunned and humiliated him too. The second is incompetence. The third is more disturbing. Is this stoking of a civil war in Gaza an attempt to legitimize holding on to the West Bank? We withdraw, and see what happens! This is a bizarre misreading of Israel’s own self-interest — but it may be the the government’s nonetheless.
If the signatories to the Makkah Agreement can’t show real progress to their followers, it will collapse. Already Abbas is being attacked within Fatah, and Hamas is being savaged by the Islamic Army. This weekend, five people died in fights between clans allied to the different sides.
The US government is fast-forwarding this failure. It seems it views the rise of Hamas not as an internal Palestinian issue, but as another round in the showdown between the US and Iran. They see Hamas as Iranian puppets, and Ahmadinejad as the demon puppet-master. This is mythical: if Iran had never existed, Hamas would still have won the election, and would still be fighting. But the Bush administration, soaked in delusion, seems to be prepared to turn Gaza into the site of a proxy-war between superpowers —like Nicaragua circa 1985, only with more beards and less salsa.
Today, a glistening opportunity to avert a Palestinian civil war is being kicked into the trash by the “international community” with a glib, finger-wagging sneer.
