Jun 21st 2007 | GAZA AND RAMALLAH
IT IS a sullen parade of short, bitter stanzas, equal parts sadness, bewilderment, shame and rage. In a poem that Palestinians have been posting on blogs, circulating by e-mail and handing out in offices, Mahmoud Darwish, their unofficial poet laureate, lashes out at the internecine fighting that culminated, during one blood-soaked week, in what some fear could be a fatal schism in their putative state. Gaza, where the Islamists of Hamas now hold sway, and the West Bank, where secular Fatah retains control, have been driven asunder almost exactly 40 years after Israel occupied them. Mr Darwish laments:
June amazed us on its fortieth anniversary: if we do not find someone to defeat us again, we defeat ourselves with our own hands so as not to forget!
Many see an opportunity in the debacle. Fatah thinks it could recover from its defeat at Hamas's hands in elections 18 months ago. America and Israel, as well as some Arab leaders, see a chance to isolate Hamas, which refuses to contemplate a permanent peace with Israel. Foreign donors, who spent vast sums on handouts for ordinary Palestinians while boycotting the Palestinian Authority (PA) itself, can go back to giving the PA less costly but more productive development and budget aid, now that Fatah's Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, has dismissed the Hamas-led government and appointed a largely technocratic cabinet.
But a lot of Palestinians wonder if this is the death-knell of their dream of statehood. The foreigners' optimistic scenario—that Hamas will cave in and give up control of Gaza—is far from guaranteed. Permanent separation between a chaotic, violent Gaza Strip and a more prosperous West Bank seems a real possibility. The title of Mr Darwish's poem sounds an almost biblical warning: “From now on you are not yourself!”
Hamas's takeover surprised everyone, but it was the outcome of a contest stretching back to Hamas's foundation in 1987, from a Palestinian offshoot of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood. When Fatah's Yasser Arafat signed the 1993 Oslo peace deal with Israel, Hamas called him a sell-out; then, as the PA under his rule grew corrupt and ineffectual, Hamas filled the gaps with social programmes and held up its mani pulite to Arafat's graft. It also pioneered terrorist tactics that Fatah later copied.
In sporadic attempts to keep his promises on security to Israel during the 1990s, Arafat ordered vicious crackdowns on Hamas. That left it with a long-standing hatred of Muhammad Dahlan, Arafat's enforcer in Gaza, whose men arrested thousands of Hamas militants and tortured and killed several.
The stranger and I against my cousin
Not until last year did the Islamists feel ready to challenge Fatah in parliamentary elections. It meant, after all, tacitly accepting the Oslo accords, which had created the PA. But Fatah was by then in such a mess that it could not even unify its lists of candidates. Using its network of cells as a grassroots campaign organisation, Hamas won nearly twice as many seats as Fatah (though a small majority of votes).
Fatah, however, never fully relinquished control. On the eve of the new parliament's swearing-in, Mr Abbas brought some of the PA's dozen-odd security forces under his own command by decree. Other forces, notionally under the new Hamas government's orders, stayed largely loyal to their Fatah commanders.
Its power curtailed, Hamas created its own force in Gaza. America, which before Hamas's election had been helping reform the PA forces as a whole, switched to beefing up Mr Abbas's presidential guard. Hamas-Fatah clashes, exacerbated by feuds between Gaza's powerful clans, grew more frequent. Attacks by militants on Gaza's border crossings prompted frequent closures of these trade lifelines by Israel, tightening the economic chokehold imposed by the West's embargo of the PA. When the militants raided Israel and kidnapped a soldier, Israel launched an offensive that killed some 400 Gazans.
After some arm-twisting from Saudi Arabia, Fatah and Hamas at last formed a unity government at a meeting in Mecca in February. But they could not agree on who would control the security forces. Mr Abbas made Mr Dahlan, Hamas's nemesis, secretary of a new national security council. The unity agreement began to unravel. Last month Fatah forces were suddenly deployed on the streets of Gaza; Hamas forces responded; the clashes killed 40 people before they subsided. When another spark lit the tinderbox this month, it was all over—though not before another hundred had died.
Why did Hamas go for broke this time? And why was its victory so quick and total? Mouin Rabbani, a Jordan-based analyst with the International Crisis Group, a lobby in Brussels, thinks the combination of economic boycott, domestic discontent, criticism from radical groups abroad, the growing threat from Fatah and splits within Hamas itself meant that people who used to think time was on their side began to think it was working against them.
Fatah, meanwhile, seemed unprepared. Some of its top people in Gaza were away, Mr Dahlan among them. Mr Abbas, sitting in the West Bank, did not declare a state of emergency until Hamas militants were ransacking his Gaza home. Mid-level Fatah officers complained bitterly about lack of leadership. “We had orders not to fire except in self-defence,” says one, whom Israel allowed to flee to the West Bank. Now he sits in the lobby of Ramallah's smartest hotel, nervously smoking with his fellow fugitives and endlessly repeating stories of Hamas's brutality.
Indeed, some Fatah officers suspect their leaders' apathy was deliberate. Letting Hamas win Gaza has a certain logic to Fatah. No sooner had Mr Abbas sworn in a new government under Salam Fayyad, a former World Bank official well-liked in the West, than America, the European Union and Canada lifted their 15-month-old boycott, and Israel said it would consider releasing frozen PA tax revenues, removing some of the internal checkpoints that stifle the West Bank's economy, and holding more meaningful talks with Mr Abbas. Thus, runs the theory, Mr Abbas will reap the praise for a better life in the West Bank, while Gazans' well-being will be at the mercy of a now-isolated Hamas.
So it was all planned, was it? Qaddoura Fares, one of Fatah's younger leaders in Ramallah, lets out a short, dry laugh. “If only!” More likely, agrees Diana Buttu, a former adviser to Mr Abbas, the famously diffident Palestinian president wanted to avoid a showdown, and simply did not expect Hamas to go so far.
My cousin and I against my brother
Another popular theory is that Hamas wanted to settle scores with Mr Dahlan personally, more than with Fatah as a whole. Certainly, there has been some score-settling within Fatah itself. Some members want Mr Dahlan to stand trial. From his Israeli jail cell, Marwan Barghouti, Fatah's most popular young leader, put out a veiled but unmistakable call for his chief rival to be stripped of power. Fatah's secretary-general in Gaza, Ahmed Hallis, who harbours barely disguised contempt for Mr Dahlan, did not flee, lending credence to the view that the battle with Hamas was partly personal. But making Mr Dahlan a scapegoat would give Hamas an easy way out of the stand-off, and Fatah has decided not to give it one. “This was a military coup,” insists Mr Fares, who is close to Mr Barghouti. “On this issue, at least, Fatah is united.”
Both sides are now taking stock. In the West Bank, where Hamas is much weaker than in Gaza, Fatah leaders have tried to stop their fighters from taking revenge and spreading the conflict. They have largely succeeded, though one Hamas man there has been killed and most are in hiding. Mr Abbas has outlawed Hamas's militias (a largely empty gesture for now). Fatah people are relatively optimistic: they think Hamas has damaged its credibility at home, given political Islam a bad name abroad, and will be unable to provide any basic services for Gazans.
Hamas is talking tough; Ismail Haniyeh, the prime minister, has refused to recognise Mr Abbas's authority to dissolve the government (one of the few things the ill-drafted basic law, the fledgling constitution, in fact allows him to do). But in reality it is running scared. The Islamists have been making increasingly frantic promises to free Alan Johnston, a BBC journalist allegedly held by a Gazan criminal gang (whom they accuse Mr Dahlan of backing too). And their own disagreements are growing more evident.
Hamas's supreme leader based in Damascus, Khaled Meshal, quickly contradicted Mr Haniyeh by acknowledging Mr Abbas's authority, and others in Gaza have called for talks with Fatah. But in a fiery television speech the normally mild Mr Abbas seemed to rule this out. He called Hamas “murderous terrorists” who had staged a coup and tried to assassinate him. He said he would refuse to talk to the organisation, whose takeover of Gaza had been agreed with “foreign elements” (he may have meant Iran) in the region.
So now the brinkmanship begins. According to the basic law, Mr Fayyad's overworked government—most of its ministers have two or three portfolios—has at most 30 days in power, since the Hamas-dominated parliament will never ratify it. Elections are not for another two-and-a-half years; nobody can dissolve parliament and call new ones except parliament itself. It is possible, however, that Mr Abbas could legally keep appointing governments every few weeks, perhaps rotating the prime minister each time, in the hope that Hamas will crack and agree to an election or some other compromise.
Will it? Hamas controls nothing in Gaza besides the streets; the PA bureaucracy there, and its purse-strings, are in Mr Fayyad's hands. Yet Mashhour Abukada, the blunt-spoken telecoms expert who has just been made transport minister (“not to my liking, I must admit”), doubts whether Mr Fayyad will take part in enforcing any isolation of Gaza: “We will co-operate even with Hamas in that task.” Nor will Mr Abbas want to be seen punishing 1.4m of his own citizens living in Gaza.
Meanwhile, Gaza under Hamas forces' sole control is likely to be safer and more orderly. If Hamas can also crack down on renegades who have been kidnapping people and attacking the border crossings—and if that prompts Israel to open the crossings more often—it will have a good case for retaining influence.
So this could drag on. And the longer it does, the less legitimate Mr Abbas's constitutional balancing act will look. Hamas may be quiescent in the West Bank now, but some of its militants there have given ominous interviews warning that they have lots of men and lots of guns.
And when election day dawns at last, Hamas will still be there. Many Palestinians feel that for all its faults, it was robbed of the chance to govern properly. Fatah, to become electable again, needs to end its infighting and corruption. “If we continue with these policies,” acknowledges Mr Fares, “we may also lose the West Bank.” But the party has been promising in vain to reform since its electoral defeat last year. Indeed, with Hamas boxed in, Fatah's incentive to clean itself up will be weaker, while its incentive to use force against Hamas in the West Bank (now, no doubt, with tacit approval from other countries) may well grow.
All of which raises a frightening prospect: Hamas defiantly holds on in Gaza, shorn of powers and responsibilities; Fatah repeats its old mistakes in the West Bank, seeding new support for Hamas or, worse, radical jihadist groups of the kind Palestine has mostly been free of so far. Life in Gaza, with renewed PA funds, less violence and continued humanitarian aid, will get no worse and may even improve, as long as attacks from Gaza do not provoke Israel into launching another offensive. Meanwhile, Hamas in the West Bank could sabotage Mr Abbas's plans to create a prosperous rump state by keeping up a low-level stream of attacks on Israel or its settlers; Israel would then refuse to ease restrictions on West Bankers' movements. Each player in this conflict knows all too well which levers to pull.
Mr Darwish, in his poem, portrayed the Palestinians' perverse self-destruction by distorting a favourite Arab proverb, “I against my brother, my brother and I against my cousin, my cousin and I against the world” (the results are the sub-headings in this article). But another stanza sums up the Palestinian quandary:
O future: do not ask us: who are you?
And what do you want from me?
For we too do not know
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