|
Behind the Gaza Breakdown
Chris Toensing
TomPaine.com
(12/18/06)
The latest convoluted set of events
within Palestine, and at its borders, form a depressing tableau
that mirrors the conflict as a whole.
Ismail Haniyeh, the prime minister
compelled by an Israeli-Arab-Western financial blockade to seek
his government's budget from Iran and Sudan, was denied reentry
into Gaza, the seat of his government, until Israeli-Egyptian-US
negotiations decided he would leave his bags of donated cash behind
in Egypt. That a Palestinian's movements should be thus externally
controlled is not, of course, novel, and Israel accorded Yasser
Arafat similar treatment, in life and in death. But there was a
twist in Haniyeh's delayed border crossing on December 14: the prime
minister's entourage met a hail of bullets from gunmen likely linked
to Fatah, the main rival of the Hamas movement to which he belongs.
Haniyeh escaped, but a bodyguard did not.
The backdrop to this imbroglio is the
refusal, by Israel, the United States and much of Fatah, to accept
the outcome of the January 2006 Palestinian elections, won fair
and square by Hamas. Israel promptly halted transfer of the customs
revenues it owes by treaty to the Palestinian Authority (PA). The
US organized a Western-Arab aid embargo upon the Hamas-led PA, to
remain in place unless Hamas recognizes Israel, renounces violence
and embraces all agreements signed between Israel and the Palestinians
under Arafat.
One might call these actions hypocritical.
Having spent 2005 extolling the virtues of electoral democracy to
Arabs, the Bush administration then boycotted the victor of the
first Arab elections in decades in which the reins of power actually
changed hands. Certainly, the revenue and aid blockade, aiming as
it does to starve the Palestinian people into turning against Hamas,
is immoral.
But the half-secret behind the sordid
scene at the Gaza border crossing is that the embargo is slipping.
For some months, alarmed by humanitarian crisis in the Palestinian
territories, the European Union has been sending indirect aid, which,
though not disbursed by Hamas-controlled ministries, does ease the
burdens on the population and, hence, the popular pressure on Haniyeh's
party. Neither is Hamas simply waiting for charity. According to
European border monitors, the prime minister's colleagues had already
brought some $80 million in cash, much of it raised in the Arabian
Peninsula, into Gaza before he was stopped. Hamas has weathered
the embargo without acceding to US-Israeli demands and, thus, it
has retained its mantle as the political force representing the
spirit of resistance to Israeli occupation. As independent leftist
Mustafa Barghouthi told the Washington Post , “If they
were to hold [new parliamentary] elections tomorrow, I'm fairly
certain the results would not be much different.” Why? Mouin Rabbani
of the International Crisis Group puts it this way: “The Palestinians
are being asked to choose between their national dignity and their
next meal” -- and so far they are choosing the former. Even Israel's
five-month offensive in Gaza, following Palestinian capture of an
army corporal, seems not to have eroded Hamas' support.
Enter the final dramatis personae,
President Mahmoud Abbas and those others in Fatah whose hopes spring
eternal for a resurrection of the 1990s “peace process,” despite
Israel's manifest lack of interest. For months, Abbas has been avowedly
anxious to woo Hamas into forming a “national unity” government,
but his conditions keep moving away from a national reconciliation
document agreed upon in June and toward the Israeli-US conditions
for relaxing the siege upon Gaza and the West Bank. For that reason,
and because the embargo has amplified less compromising voices within
Hamas, the Islamist movement has declined. On December 16, Abbas
upped the ante, threatening to call new parliamentary and presidential
elections if Hamas does not change its mind.
The US and Britain have backed this
maneuver, whose legality the American media persist in casting as
“unclear.” But according to Nathan Brown, a scholar of Arab constitutions,
the Palestinian Basic Law is “extremely clear and definitive” that
Palestinian legislative terms are four years long. Full stop. The
Palestinian president, Brown writes, “has no more basis for early
parliamentary elections than President George W. Bush has for ordering
new Congressional elections if he does not like the result.”
Couple this fact with Fatah's
complicity in Washington's attempts to unseat Hamas -- such as back-door
funding, already in October, for the Islamists' putative electoral
opponents -- and the deeper contours of the ongoing Hamas-Fatah
clashes in Gaza come into focus. The US might like to see the fighting
escalate; when Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert last visited Washington,
Bush reportedly pressed him to allow the Badr Brigades, a Palestinian
armed unit based in Jordan, into the West Bank. Do the two largest
Palestinian factions have the stomach for civil war? Or, instead,
will Hamas return underground and step up attacks on Israel, hoping
for Abbas to assume the role of Israeli-US proxy policeman played
by rafat during the 1990s? The Hamas politburo head promises the
latter scenario, if his party is not permitted to govern. So Israel
and the US, who limned the Palestinians' current plight, will also
sketch the outline of the sequel.
---
Chris Toensing is editor of Middle
East Report , publication of the Middle East Research and Information
Project (www.merip.org) in Washington, DC.
URL for Nathan Brown's commentary: http://www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=18738&prog=zgp&proj=zdrl,zme
|
