Palestine descends into abyss

Parts of the jigsaw puzzle are falling into place and a dangerous game is about to start - one whose outcome not even the United States and Israel can control.

What happened in Gaza last week was a political earthquake, which left all those who had helped, directly or indirectly, stoke the fires that led to a bloody Fatah-Hamas confrontation stunned and outmanoeuvred.

It is not Hamastan yet, but odds are that Palestinian National Authority President Mahmoud Abbas's reaction to the routing of his forces in Gaza at the hands of Hamas militants will not reverse the fact that the strip, which is home to more than 1.4 million Palestinians, is no longer under his control.

By declaring a state of emergency and firing Prime Minister Esmail Haniya, Abbas, with US prodding, may have driven himself and his PNA into a blind alley.

But if anyone is surprised, concerned or shocked by the results of last week's events in Gaza, it should not be Abbas, the Israelis or the Americans.

For months, ever since Hamas contested and won the legislative elections in January of last year, the three, later joined by most Arab countries and the Europeans, have been colluding to undermine the new government.

When international sanctions bit hard throughout the embattled Palestinian society, Abbas and Hamas relented and signed on to a Saudi- backed initiative in Makkah. They agreed to form a national unity government headed by Haniya.

Economic siege

By that time a state of lawlessness had prevailed in Gaza and most of the West Bank. The Makkah accord did not bring the two sides closer nor did it help end the economic siege.

The US continued to boycott Hamas ministers while Israel refused to ease its blockade and denied Abbas any political gains. Fatah backed militias in Gaza, loyal to Mohammad Dahlan, continued to beef up their forces, receiving military hardware and personnel through Egypt.

Bloody fights on the eve of Al Naqba, the 1948 war, between Hamas and Fatah, left dozens dead and tens injured. The build-up to last week's battles had begun.

With the failure to bring the security agencies, all answering to Abbas and his henchmen, under government's command, the stage was ready for a final showdown. What Abbas and his US allies had miscalculated was that Hamas, while battered by recent Israeli strikes against its positions and personnel, was not fatally injured.

When Dahlan's forces made their move, Hamas fought back hard and overran Abbas loyalists. It was all over within three days.

The question now is how to deal with the new reality in Gaza. Arab reaction, represented by the Arab League foreign ministers' emergency meeting, is mostly rhetorical.

It is up to Abbas and Hamas top man Khalid Mesha'al, who is in exile in Damascus, to reach a compromise. But that requires courage and most of all freedom of decision away from external pressure.

It is unlikely that both men will able to set aside brinkmanship and rise up to the challenge that now faces the Palestinian people. The polarisation of the Palestinians has been compounded by Israeli occupation, short-sighted US policy, foreign intervention and even infiltration.

As Gaza events unfolded, a confidential report by UN special to the Middle East envoy Alvaro de Soto charged that US pressure had "pummelled into submission" the UN's role as an impartial negotiator, that it had made the Middle East peace process subservient to wider policies on Iraq and Iran, and that the US had got the other members of the Quartet negotiating team - the EU, Russia and the UN - to impose sanctions on the government formed after painful negotiations between Fatah and Hamas.

The sanctions did not encourage the unity government to function properly. They killed it off, he said in his 52-page end of mission report published by the Guardian.

Since the outbreak of the second Intifada, Israel has been pushing towards, and benefiting from, Palestinian fragmentation. On the ground it has been implementing a sinister plan to partition the West Bank and isolate its cities and towns. Meanwhile, it has escalated its campaign to sabotage PNA institutions and hunt down over one third of Palestinian legislators, mostly from Hamas.

State of division

In reality Abbas has lost control and may soon find himself unable to sway his own Fatah loyalists. For Hamas extending its influence over the West Bank is a remote possibility.

The coming weeks will deepen the state of division among the Palestinians while the US and Israel ponder the consequences of the latest developments.

The spectre of a Hamas victory in Gaza is a roadmap for disaster to the national Palestinian cause of liberation. The outcome may be something similar to the rise of Islamic courts in Somalia two years ago.

A Palestinian Islamist enclave will not be tolerated by either Egypt or Israel and both will be tempted, with US prompting, to take drastic action to undermine it.

Furthermore, the loss of Gaza to the Islamists will be a deep blow to Palestinian unity, both at home and in the diaspora. The fragmentation of the Palestinians could be the penultimate step in a fiendish plan to grab what remains of their land while breaking the people into many tribes and clans.

The current slide into soft civil war in Gaza is a bellwether of things to come as much as the infiltration of refugee camps in Lebanon by rogue movements points to vague attempts to readdress the status of Palestinians in that country.

A possible way out of the current fix is for Hamas to agree to early elections and for Fatah to put its house in order and help fight the state of lawlessness that has spread across Palestinian territories.

At another level Abbas should seriously consider disbanding the PNA and declaring all of the West Bank as occupied lands thus forcing Israel to face its responsibilities as occupier.

Osama Al Sharif is a Jordanian journalist based in Amman.