Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, on the current situation

Described as "their unofficial poet laureate" by the The Economist, the magazine publishes Darwish's reaction to, as the magazine puts it, "the internecine fighting that culminated, during one-blood-soaked week, in what some fear could be a fatal schism in their putative state":

June amazed us on its fortieth anniversary: If we do not find someone to defeat us again, we defeat ourselves with our own hand so as not to forget!

The fortieth anniversary Darwish refers to here is that of the Six Day War, the war in which Israel defeated the militarized Arab states in less than a week.

The defeat was so humiliating for the Arab leaders that Gamal Abdel Nasser, the leading Arab Nationalist at the time, wanted to resign from power. The Egyptians protested this move, and Nasser, as is typical in the region, remained in office until he died.

Regardless of the loyalty Egyptians felt towards Nasser, his political program, the idea that hte Arab states would draw strength from and unify around the idea that they were all Arabs, united by culture and language, would be supplanted by a new unifying force: Islam as the solution to the region's problems.

Hamas is one of the groups who was able to capitalize on this belief.

As to what Darwish thinks will happen to the Palestinians, as he continues in his poem:

O future: do not ask us: who are you?
And what do you want from me?
For we too do not know.

Hamas speaks

And now for the Hamas side of what just happened in Gaza from Ahmed Yousef, political advisor to Ismail Haniya, the Palestinian prime minister via the New York Times:

THE events in Gaza over the last few days have been described in the West as a coup. In essence, they have been the opposite. Eighteen months ago, our Hamas Party won the Palestinian parliamentary elections and entered office under Prime Minister Ismail Haniya but never received the handover of real power from Fatah, the losing party. The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, has now tried to replace the winning Hamas government with one of his own, returning Fatah to power while many of our elected members of Parliament languish in Israeli jails. That is the real coup.

From the day Hamas won the general elections in 2006 it offered Fatah the chance of joining forces and forming a unity government. It tried to engage the international community to explain its platform for peace. It has consistently offered a 10-year cease-fire with the Israelis to try to create an atmosphere of calm in which we resolve our differences. Hamas even adhered to a unilateral cease-fire for 18 months in an effort to normalize the situation on the ground. None of these points appear to have been recognized in the press coverage of the last few days.

Nor has it been evident to many people in the West that the civil unrest in Gaza and the West Bank has been precipitated by the American and Israeli policy of arming elements of the Fatah opposition who want to attack Hamas and force us from office. For 18 months we have tried to find ways to coexist with Fatah, entering into a unity government, even conceding key positions in the cabinet to their and international demands, negotiating up until the last moment to try to provide security for all of our people on the streets of Gaza.

Sadly, it became apparent that not all officials from Fatah were negotiating in good faith. There were attempts on Mr. Haniya’s life last week, and eventually we were forced into trying to take control of a very dangerous situation in order to provide political stability and establish law and order.

Ok, so this is the Hamas view of what just happened. So how does Hamas see the way forward? What should we expect of them? Yousef continues:

We have begun disarming some of the drug dealers and the armed gangs and we hope to restore a sense of security and safety to the citizens of Gaza. We want to get children back to school, get basic services functioning again, and provide long-term economic gains for our people.

Ok, now what about this stated goal of Hamas, that its purpose is to take back all the land under Israel's control, not just the West Bank and Gaza? I quote here what they say in their 1988 Covenant:

The Islamic Resistance Movement [aka Hamas] believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up. Neither a single Arab country nor all Arab countries, neither any king or president, nor all the kings and presidents, neither any organization nor all of them, be they Palestinian or Arab, possess the right to do that. Palestine is an Islamic Waqf land consecrated for Moslem generations until Judgement Day. This being so, who could claim to have the right to represent Moslem generations till Judgement Day?

This is the law governing the land of Palestine in the Islamic Sharia (law) and the same goes for any land the Moslems have conquered by force, because during the times of (Islamic) conquests, the Moslems consecrated these lands to Moslem generations till the Day of Judgement.

Not surprisingly, the Hamas spokesman Yousef doesn't say much on this issue:

We continue to believe that there is still a chance to establish a long-term truce. But this will not happen unless the international community fully engages with Hamas.

Any further attempts to marginalize us, starve our people into submission or attack us militarily will prove that the United States and Israeli governments are not genuinely interested in seeing an end to the violence.

Unfortunately, a willingness to negotiate a long-term truce does not exactly translate into recognizing Israel's right to exist. But perhaps if Hamas really could stop the rocket launchings, suicide bombings, kidnappings, and other types of incursions into Israel, maybe there could be room for discussion, even if the end result could only be a long-term truce as opposed to full recognition.

But, suppose for a moment now that Hamas really did go this far, that it really could declare and enforce a truce?

How long do you suppose it would take for a new faction to arise? For disgruntled members to say that by virtue of such a truce, the Hamas leaders only desecrated the Waqf - that is the Hamas - covenant? This seems to me to be a real stumbling block.

Anyone have any ideas on how to solve this fundamental problem? Check out the source documents on which the Hamas Covenant portends to be based. Maybe therein lies some kind of solution.

Palestine: Is reality on the horizon?

Fouad Ajami, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and author of The Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, the Arabs and the Iraqis in Iraq, writes in today's New York Times about the Palestinians:

The Palestinian ruin was a long time in coming. No other national movement has had the indulgence granted the Palestinians over the last half-century, and the results can be seen in the bravado and the senseless violence, in the inability of a people to come to terms with their condition and their needs.

As he continues:

The political maxim that people get the leaders they deserve must be reckoned too cruel to apply to the Palestinians. Before Hamas, for four decades, the vainglorious Yasir Arafat refused to tell his people the basic truths of their political life. Amid the debacles, he remained eerily joyous; he circled the globe, offering his people the false sense that they could be spared the consequences of terrible decisions.

The Arab states, too, says Ajami, must bear some responsibility for having contributed to the delusions. As he writes:

The Arab cavalry was always on the way, the Arab treasure was always a day away, and there was thus no need for the Palestinians to pay tribute to necessity. In recent years, the choice was starkly posed: it was either statehood or a starring role on Al Jazeera, and the young “boys of the stones” and their leaders opted for the latter.

The Palestinians, Ajami suggests, are not the dolphins they've been made out to be. As he writes:

It has long been a cherished legend of the Palestinians, and a proud claim, that they would not kill their own, that there would be no fratricide in their world. The cruelty we now see — in both Gaza and the West Bank — bears witness that the Palestinians have run through the consolations that had been there for them in a history of adversity. . .

We must not overdo the distinction between the “secularism” of Fatah and the Islamism of Hamas. In the cruel streets and refugee camps of the Palestinians, this is really a distinction without a difference. . .

It is idle to think that Gaza could be written off as a Hamas dominion while Fatah held its own in the towns of the West Bank. The abdication and the anarchy have damaged both Palestinian realms. Nablus in the West Bank is no more amenable to reason than is Gaza; the writ of the pitiless preachers and gunmen is the norm in both places.

Amazingly, Ajami still holds out hope that the Palestinians will finally grasp their reality:

For decades, Arab society granted the Palestinians everything and nothing at the same time. The Arab states built worlds of their own, had their own priorities, dreaded and loathed the Palestinians as outsiders and agitators, but left them to the illusion that Palestine was an all-consuming Arab concern.

Now the Palestinians should know better. The center of Arab politics has shifted from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, a great political windfall has come to the lands of the Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula, vast new wealth due to the recent rises in oil prices, while misery overwhelms the Palestinians. No Arabs wait for Palestine anymore; they have left the Palestinians to the ruin of their own history.

The Arab states, says Ajami, should also finally be forced to acknowledge the role they played in fomenting this mess:

The rise of Hamas in Gaza should concentrate the minds of the custodians of power in the Arab world. Palestine, their old alibi, the cause with which they diverted the attention of their populations from troubles at home, has become a nightmare in its own right. An Arab debt is owed the Palestinians — the gift of truth and candor as well as material help.

Curiously, he leaves the Quartet (the U.S., E.U., U.N., and Russia) - and even Israel - almost entirely out of the discussion of the way forward. What he seems to be saying here is that the Palestinians need not look to anyone but themselves and their brotherly Arab nations to find the way out of their misery.

While Ajami's advice seems reasonable enough to me, I bet it will continue to be dismissed by "pro-Palestinians" because it will be perceived as being "anti-Palestinian" (i.e., "pro-Israel") or "anti-Arab" (i.e., "pro-Israel" or perhaps even "neocon").

To paraphrase Bernard Lewis, we live in a world where if you see the Palestinians as ultimately capable of solving their own problems using their own enterprise, this is not a "pro-Palestinian" view. To be "pro-Palestinian" in other words, you have to see them solely as victims, as a childlike people who have only been exploited.

Will there be one or two Palestines?

In its Week in Review section, the New York Times had an interesting article yesterday that explored the possibility that two Palestines might emerge as a result of the Hamas take-over of Gaza. As the Times writes:

For the first time in the history of the Palestinians’ fight for nationhood, there seemed a real possibility that two Palestines rather than one might emerge — one in Gaza, dominated by Hamas, the other in the West Bank, led by Fatah.

The Times provides some background on why this split may have happened:

They have always had distinct traits, culturally and geographically — the West Bank supporting a landlocked urban and agricultural society, Gaza facing the sea.

Those differences increased after the creation of Israel in 1948, when Gaza fell under the administration of Egypt and the West Bank was annexed by Jordan.

Egypt treated Gaza as a Palestinian enclave and encouraged a strong sense of Palestinian identity. Many Gazans who studied in Egypt during those years were influenced, in turn, by the Muslim Brotherhood, whose goal is to establish Islamic theocracies across the Arab world.

Back in Gaza, some of those men founded Hamas in 1987.

Jordan, on the other hand, suppressed Palestinian nationalism in favor of Jordanian identity and Palestinians in the West Bank were more influenced by the secular societies of Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, where many went to study. Others traveled even further abroad, bringing back a liberal view of the world.

During the 1990s, before the roads were closed, it was Gazans who generally had to travel to the West Bank in search of work, as opposed to the other way around. This was because in spite of Gaza's potential as a seaside resort town, it is the West Bank which has the more thriving economy as given that it is home to many Christian and Jewish holy sites, including Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Jericho, it has a well-established tourism industry.

As the Times continues, the economic hardships in Gaza forced many Palestinians in the territory to look to religion - and to Hamas for comfort.

Fatah recognized Hamas' increasing influence in Gaza, and of course tried to rein it in, even resorting to torturing, killing and humiliating its leaders in an effort to get Hamas under its control. Hamas was increasingly seen as the underdog champion of the Palestinians, as group that would suffer enormous costs to fight for their rights, and eventually it was Hamas who Palestinians voted in at the polls, not Fatah.

But as the Times goes, on, the Palestinians, like all publics, are fickle:

Hamas’s military victory last week obscures the fact that Fatah has been gaining political support in Gaza over the past year, according to Mouin Rabbani, an analyst at the International Crisis Group in Jordan. He says this may be because a larger percentage of Gazans depend on Fatah finances to make a living. Hamas, meanwhile, has been gaining support in the West Bank because Palestinians there are discouraged by Fatah’s corruption and policy failures, Mr. Rabbani says.

Moreover, as the Times continues, many ordinary Palestinians are by now disgusted with both parties, seeing their conflict as nothing more than an out-of-control family feud that portends to destroy any hope of an economically viable future.

This is the reality, the Times suggests, that may in the end, work to force some sort of reunification to occur:

Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza, meanwhile, recognize that Fatah alone holds the lifeline of Western financial support.

So if military dominance gives Hamas bargaining power, the economic imperative of a unified Palestinian body politic argues, in the end, for some accommodation with Fatah.

Even the Arab states appear to have had it with Hamas

And maybe even Palestinians in general.

No less an authority than Al Jazeera reports:

Arab League foreign ministers gathered for an emergency session in Cairo to discuss how to deal with the Palestinian split after Hamas gained full control of the Gaza Strip.

A statement from the 22 members of the group condemned what it called "the criminal acts recently committed in Gaza".

"We are seeking a national unity in Palestine and we stand against the events that we have witnessed in the last days," Moussa said after the six hour meeting in the Egyptian capital.

He said there must be an "immediate and full halt" to the violence.

The Arab states expressed their backing of President Mahmoud Abbas and the elected assembly of the Palestinian Authority - that is, they did not seem to be willing to recognize Hamas militant takeover of Gaza as a legitimate route to power.

As Al-Jazeera went on to sum up what seemed to be the Arab states' overriding sentiment:

Egypt's state MENA news agency quoted Prince Saud al-Faisal, Saudi Arabia's foreign minister, as asking the Arab League in dismay whether Palestinians had forgotten a commitment made in Mecca earlier this year to "unite and never to fight".

"Today the Palestinians have come close to putting by themselves the last nail in the coffin of the Palestinian cause," he said.

The WSJ's assessment of why the Palestinians used their opportunity for statehood to fight a civil war in Gaza

The editors write in today's on-line edition of the Wall Street Journal:

Scores of Palestinians were killed this week in Gaza in factional fighting between loyalists of President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah and those of Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas. As if on cue, it took about 24 hours before pundits the world over blamed the violence on Israel and President Bush.

This is the Israel that dismantled its settlements in Gaza in August 2005, a unilateral concession for which it asked, and got, nothing in return. And it is the U.S. President who, in a landmark speech five years ago this month, called on Palestinians to "elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror." Had Palestinians done so, they could be living today in a peaceful, independent state. Instead, in January 2006 they freely handed the reins of government to Hamas in parliamentary elections. What is happening today is the result of that choice--their choice.

That election didn't simply emerge from a vacuum, however. It is a consequence of the cult of violence that has typified the Palestinian movement for much of its history and which has been tolerated and often celebrated by the international community. If Palestinians now think they can advance their domestic interests by violence, nobody should be surprised: The way of the gun has been paying dividends for 40 years.

The day after the revolution: A report from Gaza

Via the New York Times:

This packed, impoverished coastal strip had a postrevolutionary feel on Friday: the green flag of Hamas, victor over Fatah in what amounted to a five-day civil war, flew over public buildings where once the multicolored Palestinian one had been.

So how are Gazans reacting to the Hamas victory?

“These are the darkest days of my life,” said Ahmad Sawafiri, 47, a taxi driver. “What comes after all of this?

“We went backward 100 years.”

Mr. Sawafiri stood in a disgusted crowd in Gaza City watching looters strip the sumptuous villa of Muhammad Dahlan, a former Fatah security chief and bitter rival of Hamas, who was not in Gaza.

It was, for many Palestinians, a confusing and unaccustomed sight: black-hooded and normally disciplined Hamas fighters, seemingly driven by devotion to God, stripping away chandeliers, carpets, a bathtub — earthly goods but also symbols of what many see as Fatah’s corruption and excess. After the fighters left, poor people with donkey carts arrived, sweeping up stray bits of wood and metal and even uprooting the dapper Mr. Dahlan’s garden plants.

“I will explain it to you,” said one looter, Mazen Qasas, a vendor. “I am 34. I am married. I have six children. I am looking for a lamp, anything I can sell or use for my poor house. We are very poor. This is public property. These are corrupt people,” he said, referring to Fatah leaders. “They took everything.”

Abu Muhammad Ashor, a 33-year-old policeman who until recently supported Fatah, looked with amazement and anger at the fine beige tiles that lined Mr. Dahlan’s living room. “Look at these tiles,” he said. “With these tiles, we all could have bread every day.”

Read the rest of the article to get a sense for how the neighbors - and the U.S. - were reacting, not to mention the deposed Palestinian Authority now fighting to maintain control in the West Bank.

I wonder when these war crimes will be prosecuted

Here's some of what went on in the battle for Gaza according to the Economist:

Ordinary Gazans have been sickened by the violence, which has included kneecappings, summary executions and throwing handcuffed captives off tall buildings. But when a group of them sallied out to protest in the streets and call for calm, they too came under lethal fire.

So now that Hamas has taken control, we'll no doubt be seeing them tracking down and trying everyone who committed such war crimes. Because when you're running a state, gentlemen, that's what you have to do: Clean up your act and everyone else's too. And good luck with this new task you've just seized for yourselves.

And let's hope your outside funding depends on your doing the right thing going forward. Because even if you were elected to power - or had to seize it - or whatever - the cost of dysfunctional statehood is that in the end, it's your outside bankers who get to call the shots.

So my advice would be to focus on the economy. Do what you have to do to achieve financial independence. And as you build up your treasury with your own enterprise, you might even find that the road to peace and Palestinian independence doesn't pass through Jerusalem at all.

A Gaza housewife expresses relief at hearing Israeli bombers overhead

I'm not kidding. From today's Reuters:

For most Palestinians, black-hooded gunmen have long been respected symbols of resistance against Israeli occupation.

Now, frequent internal fighting and lawlessness gripping the Palestinian territories have transformed the militants into no more than gangsters in the eyes of many of those who once saw them as heroes.

"It's very ironic but I'm relieved the Israelis have started a bombing campaign. The gunmen killing each other on the streets were forced to go into hiding," said Mai, a Gaza housewife, referring to strikes aimed at halting rocket attacks on Israel.

As Reuters continues:

"Many of these groups are now a burden on society. They were created to fill a security vacuum under the pretext of national resistance, said legislator Nasser Jum'a, once a leading member of Fatah's al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.

"They then blackmailed people, attacked them and confiscated their freedoms as the weak official security forces failed to punish them," he said.

Jum'a said ordinary Palestinians were so fed up with the armed groups "they now wish the Israeli occupation would take over in Gaza or hope for the return of Jordanian rule in the West Bank" to get rid of them.

Yes, it is - as the Gaza housewife said - ironic.

The anniversary of the Six Day War

On the Palestinian side, there was this reckoning, the New York Times reports:

The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, said Tuesday that the Palestinians were on the brink of civil war and that their internal battles were as dangerous to their welfare as Israeli occupation has been, if not more so.

Mr. Abbas was speaking in a televised address to mark the 40th anniversary of the start of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, which ended in a stunning military victory for Israel and a sobering defeat for the Arab armies, and began Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

And on the Israeli side:

Israeli peace activists protested against the four decades of occupation in Hebron, a tense and conservative Palestinian city with a biblical past, and tried to drown out a small counterdemonstration of local Jewish settlers with their chants. . .

Fatah and the Israeli center and left are in favor of ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by means of a negotiated two-state solution. The Israeli nationalist right wing opposes giving up territory won in 1967, while Hamas seeks Israel’s destruction.

Hebron is of particular significance to religious Jews as the burial place of the biblical patriarchs. It is also the only Palestinian city with a Jewish settlement at its heart, with about 500 Jews and an additional 250 transient yeshiva students living amid 160,000 Palestinian residents. About 7,000 Jews live in the settlement of Kiryat Arba, adjacent to Hebron.

Close to 300 Israeli anti-occupation protesters from the Peace Now movement arrived here on Tuesday morning in bulletproof buses and an army escort. They shouted “Hebron settlers, a bone in the throat,” while about 30 settlers demonstrated behind police barricades at the other end of the lot. Scores of police officers and security forces separated the two groups.

David Wilder, a spokesman for the Jewish community of Hebron, called the return of Jews to Hebron a “miracle” and termed the Peace Now demonstration a “desecration.”

“They are coming and saying it would have been preferable if we had lost the war,” he said, adding that “it was a war of survival.”