The Somalia-like chaos and civil war that is now unfolding in Gaza as a result of this decades-old stalemate can be blamed partly on ill-conceived Israeli policies, and partly on an American administration that, for six long years, relegated the cause of Israeli-Palestinian peace to the bottom of its agenda. But it is misleading to attribute the failure of the Palestinians to develop an orderly system of self-government only to the pernicious effects of Israeli occupation and American policies.
The Palestinian crisis is first and foremost one of leadership. True, Yasser Arafat was not a model democrat, but his charisma and political acumen were crucial for holding all the Palestinian factions together. Now, not even Fatah, Arafat's own party, can claim to be a coherent organization. Hamas' electoral victory in January 2006 was to a large extent due to Fatah's fragmentation under Arafat's successor, Mahmoud Abbas.
With no effective central authority to inspire fear or respect and the PLO devoid of legitimacy precisely because of its refusal to give Hamas its rightful share in the organization, a grotesquely ineffective brand of "cohabitation" between a Fatah president and a Hamas prime minister has emerged. As a result, Palestinian politics has degenerated into a naked struggle for the spoils of power. Last February's Mecca agreement, which created the Fatah-Hamas unity government, was supposed to establish a civilized system of power-sharing. But that deal now appears to be collapsing. The current flare-up is largely due to the fact that Fatah, encouraged by the international community's boycott of Hamas, never really accepted its electoral defeat and Hamas's right to govern. Moreover, since Hamas's rise to power, Fatah's challenge to the new Palestinian rulers was enhanced by lavish financial support it secured from the United States and Europe, and by a generous supply of weapons from both the US and Arab countries.
Thus, the current conflict is essentially a pre-emptive war by Hamas - aggravated by lawlessness and banditry, clashing free-lance militias, tribes, and families, and a spiral of senseless massacres - to prevent Fatah from being turned by the international community into a formidable challenger to its democratic right to govern.
For Hamas, this is a life-and-death struggle. It has not shrunk from bombarding Abbas's presidential compound, attacking Fatah's command centers, and targeting Fatah military leaders like Rashid Abu Shbak, the commander of Fatah's internal security and many others, all of them lieutenants of the supreme Fatah military authority in the Gaza strip, Mohamed Dahlan.
Hamas's determination to assert its authority can be gauged by the desecrated corpses of Fatah fighters, many of them with bullets fired at their heads, a practice dubbed "confirmation of death." The rocket attacks against Israeli territory are a transparent attempt to divert attention and rally the masses around Hamas as the true champions of the Palestinian cause.
Tragically, all this is not only about human victims, but also about the Palestinians' political horizon. Three times in their history - in 1937,1947, and 2000 - the Palestinians were offered a state, and three times their leaders failed to meet the challenge - admittedly never an easy one for a nation built on such an unwavering ethos of dispossession. Today, when America finally understands how vital an Israeli-Palestinian peace is for its fortunes in the broader Middle East, and the Arab world is for the first time committed to pursuing a comprehensive settlement with Israel, anarchic Palestinian politics is making a decision for peace well nigh impossible. However vibrant, Israel's democracy is not exactly manageable or predictable, either. But although Prime Minister Ehud Olmert might seek to regain his popular credibility by a major new peace demarche, the two-headed Palestinian Authority, always a dubious partner in the eyes of the Israelis, is now more suspect than ever.
"Every day that goes by only causes more people to wish for the renewal of the Israeli occupation of Gaza. Let the Jews come already and save us!" But that despairing hope, uttered by a desperate Gazan, will not materialize. Israel will avoid at all costs a large ground incursion. Yet, engaged in a war driven by fury and vengeance, the Israelis are now focused again on a manhunt for gang chieftains, targeted killings of Hamas squads, and the arrest of its political leaders, not on peace overtures.
Only a dramatic move by external powers can still save Gaza from becoming a second Mogadishu and both Palestinians and Israelis from a total war that would only breed more rage and desperation. For the building blocks of a renewed peace process to be sustainable, an international force must be deployed along Gaza's border with Egypt to prevent the constant smuggling of weapons and isolate the conflict. Simultaneously, the international community must help make the unity government work by recognizing Hamas' right to govern in exchange for a performance-based stability plan.(www.project-syndicate.org)
j Shlomo Ben-Ami, a former Israeli foreign minister, now serves as vice-president of the Toledo International Centre for Peace. His latest book is Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy.
