(18 June 2007)
“There is no dialogue with those murderous terrorists.”
—Palestinian President and leader of Fatah, referring to Hamas, suddenly adopting the language of the West with regard to his own people

The five-day war? The three-state solution?

Each month, when I sit down to write the Report, it feels as if things have gotten just about as bad as they can get for the Palestinian people, as if things have finally come to some kind of a head, but then, the next month, the death tolls rise even higher, folks become ever more desperate, and politicians all over the spectrum become, amazingly, even more useless.
Palestinian politicians are failing miserably at their jobs, be they Fatah folks giving speeches from deep within America’s quite roomy pocket or Hamas folks stubbornly trying to explain away their shameful thwarting of peace at every turn by pushing a narrow-minded, muddle-headed interpretation of Islam—a religion that, when taken back from the fundamentalists who have mutineered it and sullied its reputation (in much the same way that Bush and his cronies have mutineered USA and gotten the rest of the world to look at us with such disdain), is full of love and peace and, let’s face it, some of the finest poetry on the planet.

Regardless of what I think of Fatah and Hamas (both of which have deftly played the roles of both hero and idiot throughout their histories), the Palestinian populace seems to think rather highly of Hamas. In fact, back before the Western aid embargo rendered Hamas powerless to help the suffering masses of Palestine in any way, they were wildly popular. Hamas candidates were swept to victory in landslide elections in January of 2005. Very few didn’t want Hamas at the helm, but among them were three very powerful men named Bush, Blair, and Sharon.

And, voila, we have the Western aid embargo, all aid cut off to some of the poorest people on earth, a foreign policy that essentially amounts to Let’s starve ‘em out, yee haw! And we have the US training and arming of Fatah’s security services. And we have Israeli PM Ehud Olmert, on 18 January, giving $100 million in withheld tax revenues to Mahmoud Abbas (Palestinian president and leader of Fatah). And we have the $60 million in emergency “aid” money given to Abbas by Bush a few months back.

All of this should have spelled defeat for Hamas. They had risen from a glorified street gang to the highest offices of government in Palestine, but, with aid money cut off, their positions were rendered powerless. And with Fatah receiving training and money (albeit with all manner of strings attached) from USA and Israel, they had no real hope of holding onto power for very long. It was only a matter of time before the Palestinian people would be forced to accept an imposed and artificial government over the one they had voted for, naively thinking at the time that their votes mattered.

So, what we had in Palestine was a situation where two distinct political parties had developed and, rather than letting their differences be resolved in peaceful and democratic fashion, Bush and his European and Israeli friends decided to stoke and exacerbate the differences between the two, which led to the proto-civil war that took place in January and February and ended in a power-sharing deal (stripping Hamas of some of the power that it had been given by Palestinian voters), and which culminated in last week’s horrifying civil war and Abbas’s shameful dissolution of the unity government just a few days ago.

Briefly, it all went down like this: After engaging in minor skirmishes with Fatah militants throughout Gaza on and off for the last several months, Hamas, like any political creature, did what it had to do in order to survive. On 12 June, Hamas militants came out in droves and swarmed all over that seaside prison called Gaza. In highly organized fashion, Hamas took over all of the Gaza Strip, village by village, camp by camp, attacking Fatah buildings and security posts along the way. (According to witnesses, there were incidents of surrendered Fatah militants being executed in the streets, and one case of Hamas militants unironically opening fire on a crowd of Palestinian civilians protesting against the violence.) In all, 116 Palestinians were killed. Two hundred Fatah fighters surrendered all at once to Hamas in Gaza City. In the final days of fighting, some Fatah fighters, trying to escape the swift and merciless onslaught of Hamas, actually fled through the Erez crossing into Israel. Curiously enough, Israel actually allowed some of them through.

In the end, Fatah, despite its fat wallet and fancy American weapons, was outmatched. By 16 June, Fatah was gone from Gaza, and Palestine itself lay torn asunder.

Mahmoud the marionette

As it became clear that Fatah was losing its influence in Gaza, Abbas ordered Fatah militants to strike at various Hamas targets in the West Bank, including the Parliament, arresting and killing many, in an effort to isolate Hamas’s influence to the beleaguered Strip. Then, after the fighting finally stopped, Abbas promptly dissolved the unity government that he had agreed to form, amidst much fanfare and photographed handshaking in Mecca, a mere four months earlier. And, suddenly, out came the Western politicians, making it known that they liked the idea of a Hamas-free Palestinian government. Bush and the EU immediately suggested that they were ready to resume direct aid to, and formal contact with, the Palestinian government. Then, on 15 June, Abbas appointed a new prime minister, Salam Fayyad, who went to school in Texas and was a World Bank official from 1987 to 1995 in Washington, D.C. Whatever his credentials, though, he will surely lack credibility among the people, who will view him (for my money, rightfully) as something of an Israeli and American collaborator, along with Abbas. Over the last few days, USA and Europe resumed aid to the new government, while Israel released to Abbas nearly $600 million in withheld tax revenues. Such a paltry sum he received for the very soul of Palestine.

Abbas ostensibly sacked the unity government and installed this American-approved one in response to Hamas’s use of violence in Gaza. However, Fatah had been fighting Hamas in Gaza for months, and it’s unclear which party, if either, started the conflict. In this light, Abbas’s dissolution of the government seems not so much to be a scolding of Hamas for failing to put the guns away and act like politicians, for Fatah stood guilty of the same thing. Rather, Abbas’s move seems more and more like the petty act of a sore loser. Not only had Fatah lost the elections to Hamas, they’d also lost the civil war in which they then engaged with the help of their friends in high places. Whatever we think of their politics, Hamas has not executed a coup. They have not taken power; they have attempted to defend it against those who sought to strip them of it.

Saeb Erakat, longtime Fatah spokesman, speaking here for all Palestinians, said, “This is the worst thing I’ve seen since 1967.” Saudi foreign minister Prince Saud al-Faisal put it rather perfectly when he said that both parties, by their failure to come to terms, are guilty of “realizing Israel’s dreams.”

The events of the last few weeks may indeed spell the death of the dream of Palestinian statehood. It will now be more difficult than ever to bridge the gaps that are dividing Palestinians, for they have been transformed from merely ideological divisions to actual geographical separation. Whatever our opinions may be about the fundamentalism of Hamas, the interests of the Palestinian people have clearly not been served by this turn of events. Israel, the United States, and Europe have all benefited. Abbas and his cronies have personally benefited. But nothing has improved for the Palestinians of Gaza, living 80,000 to a square mile without steady food, water, electricity, or employment. In fact, they now have even less hope of ever getting out of the mess they’re in.