The wrong road for Palestine

Khaled al-Hroub is a Palestinian academic at Cambridge in the UK, author of a recent book called Hamas for Beginners, host of a book-review show on Al-Jazeera and a regular contributor to newspapers including al-Hayat. Today in that paper he warns against the effects of allowing the Gaza/West Bank separation to continue. First of all, he says, it will be in Israel's interest to see the separation continued, and Israel will almost certainly be working toward that end. The reason is that the separation sets up a set of problems for the Palestinians to solve that have nothing to do with their traditional nationalist aspirations, and that if continued will eventually undermine those aspirations. Putting the argument another way, he says the "national issue" will be transformed into the mere aim of re-uniting Gaza with the West Bank under a common leadership, completely and utterly separated from the issue of liberation from the Israeli occupation.

Secondly, he says, the Israeli screaming about being "surrounded" by "Hamastan" on the south and Hizbullah on the north is nothing but an exaggeration to beef up foreign support. Israel knows full well that the last thing on the minds of the Hamas administration in Gaza is sending rockets into Israel. Not only is Gaza exposed to Israeli attack by land, sea, and air, but if there were constraints in the West Bank about not hitting Abbas-related institutions, there will be no such constraints in Gaza. Hamas knows this, and in all liklihood it will concentrate on fostering domestic unity and forget about inciting Israel, at least in the coming period of time.

Thirdly, Hamas is going to have to use all of its efforts in fostering internal peace and stability, and in fact it appears one of its first tasks is going to be to try and encourage the release of the BBC person Alan Johnston, and then of the Israeli soldier Shalit, all in order to demonstrate to the ouside world that it is in control. And al-Hroub says it is likely that Israel, recognizing this, will avoid re-occupying Gaza with all of the problems that would bring with it, because the dynamics of the situation suggest that will not have any justification from a security point of view.

The fourth problem with continued separation is simply that the longer it lasts, and the longer the two sides stick to an attitude of no-dialogue and mutual accusations of illegality, the more this idea of separation will become confirmed or hardened (the word is takriis, literally meaning consecrate) and the harder it will be to eradicate. And it is already going to be hard enough to eradicate.

Other factors will be working in the same undesirable direction. Regionally, the two sides will be in the gravitational pull of the two "axes" (of "moderation" and the other "radical" one), so that will further militate against any movement toward unity. Similarly, and ironically, each will be in a position to have discussions with Israel, but not with each other. Fatah in the West Bank will talk to Israel directly, and Hamas in Gaza perhaps indirectly. Because the writer says on his reading of the situation, Israel will in fact be willing and even anxious to see to the survival of Gaza as an entity independent of the West Bank, for many of the above-mentioned reasons.

What lies at the end of that road, al-Hroub says, is a three-state solution, one strong Israeli state, and two weak Palestinian ones.

What all this comes down to is that [if things go the way they are going] the concept and the dream of an independent, unified, Palestinian state will become unattainable, and the whole idea of either a two-state or a one-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian question will gradually be replaced by the three-state idea. In the push-and-pull of all of these internal divisions, the culture of Palestinian rights will gradually weaken as a national issue, to be replaced by issues relating to internal struggles...

Avoiding this result would require [persons of] enormous capacity, such as we are not currently blessed with, for feeling their responsibility to the nation, something that is now a lifeless corpse, and for putting this responsibility ahead of party-egoism.

Just to get you started thinking about this, he says there are two conditions: The first is for the leadership on the Hamas side to decide whether it is better, for the national cause, to unite Gaza with the West Bank even if this means leadership that Hamas sees as corrupt, or to keep Gaza separate and thus free from such [corrupt] leadership. And likewise for Fatah to decide whether it would be better, for the national cause, to join the West Bank with Gaza even if that meant Hamas leadership in Gaza, or to keep them separate. To the writer, the right answers are obvious.

His second condition is this: The rules of political engagement should be changed to make it clear that it is politicians who are responsible for discussing and deciding on political questions. We can't go on having these situations where politicians on one side are answered by the military wing on the other side, and so on back and forth, until the political content of the issue is completely obscured. For instance, where were the politicians when members of the respective military wings commited the outrages that we all saw on our television screens in the last few days?

That's his analysis. Obviously it deals with the behavior of the Palestinian political class, and it doesn't deal with any ideas of change "from below" such as a West Bank intifada or anything like that, so that has to be understood. But taken on its own terms, I think this is an edifying view of the problems that led to this result, and the dangers of allowing this situation to continue.