WHEN HAMAS gunmen killed seven Palestinians at a rally in Gaza Monday to mark the third anniversary of Yasser Arafat's death, the violence was part of a recurring pattern in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: a chance for peace appears, and then is lost to internal conflict on one side or the other.
With a much-anticipated peace conference scheduled for Annapolis, Md., in the next few weeks, there could hardly be a worse time for the rivalry between Hamas and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah movement to take another violent turn. If the Annapolis meeting is to usher in negotiations leading to an end of Israeli occupation and the creation of an independent Palestinian state, there will have to be unity - or at least a tacit consensus - among the Palestinian factions.
A domestic consensus is also needed in the Israeli camp. The Israeli forms of dissension may differ from the Palestinian variety, but they are no less an obstacle to peace. Israelis who recently commemorated the murder of Yitzhak Rabin by a settler fanatic have their own anxieties about intramural violence.
Ever since Hamas ousted Fatah from Gaza last June, the two factions' power struggle has cast a shadow over prospects for a negotiated two-state peace accord. Fatah officials, who called for the peaceful rally Monday, were surprised at the turnout, variously estimated at between 200,000 and 500,000 people. That demonstration of support for the secular nationalism associated with Arafat's legacy - and opposition to Hamas's Islamist program - coincided with a recent opinion poll by a Palestinian research institute that found support for Hamas in both Gaza and the West Bank has declined since September from just under 30 percent to just under 20 percent. In the same period, support for Fatah increased from 30 to 40 percent.
Some of this change in attitudes, to be sure, must be attributed to a stifling economic embargo on Hamas-ruled Gaza that has been enforced by Israel, the United States, and Europe. But the way Monday's rally unfolded suggests that other forces are also at work.
When Hamas security forces fired on unarmed demonstrators, they were committing an act with symbolic connotations as well as practical ones. They were not merely signaling that Hamas will not brook any challenge to its dominion in Gaza. They were also shooting down the one consistent principle of Arafat's leadership: his insistence on maintaining the unity of nearly all the ideologically disparate Palestinian groups and factions.
In his lifetime, Arafat - like his Israeli counterparts - missed many opportunities to forge a two-state peace agreement. If the current Palestinian and Israeli leaders hope to make the peace their predecessors failed to make, they will first have to knit their own peoples together in a peace-seeking consensus. The greatest hindrance to that peace are the hard-liners and fanatics on either side.
