Senseless in Gaza
BOTH SIDES are labeling the fighting in Gaza between the nationalists of Fatah and the Islamist movement Hamas as a civil war. Whether or not the mayhem fits some abstract definition of civil war, there is a struggle for power, one that Hamas at present is winning. But the 1.4 million Palestinians living in the impoverished cage of Gaza are the principal losers in this power struggle, and not merely because civilians have been caught in the crossfire or because Hamas gunmen have been shooting down peace marchers in cold blood.
The people of Gaza are the true victims of the civil war most of all because the fighting is destroying their future. With the military wing of Hamas poised to seize complete control of Gaza in what Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has rightly called a "coup attempt," Gaza's residents stand to lose whatever hope remained of achieving independence and a decent life in a viable Palestinian state.
The Hamas campaign to eradicate Fatah from Gaza is certainly not the sole cause of Gazans' misery. They long suffered from Israel's suffocating occupation, and then from Ariel Sharon's foolishly unilateral withdrawal in 2005, a move that allowed Hamas to bid for power with the misleading claim that its rockets and suicide bombings had driven Israeli soldiers and settlers out of Gaza. Gazans were victimized as well by the corruption and misrule of Yasser Arafat's Fatah cronies.
The bitterness of the civil war that has forced the United Nations relief agency to suspend all but emergency deliveries of food and medical supplies is clear in the epithets the two sides use for each other. Hamas calls the Fatah fighters "the Jew-American army" while Fatah, alluding to Iran's backing for Hamas, calls the Sunni Muslims of Hamas "the Shi'ites."
What looms ahead is a division between a Fatah-ruled West Bank and a Gaza that is already being called Hamastan. Arafat may be remembered today for his many failings, but the cardinal rule of all his exasperating deceits and maneuvers was to avoid precisely this sundering of the Palestinian national movement. Arafat understood that without Palestinian unity there could be no hope of an independent Palestinian state.
The Hamas-Fatah civil war, and the resulting fracture between Gaza and the West Bank, is sure to be used as validation by those Israelis who insist there is no Palestinian partner for peace. Sunni Arab regimes fearful of Iran's influence on Hamas and of their own Islamist movements will find it hard to resist taking sides in the Palestinians' internecine conflict.
Everybody is threatened by the civil war in Gaza -- not only the two warring sides, but also Israel, the Arab states, and even the United States. All have an obligation to help the Palestinians end the madness. 