Radicalization, despair in the Mideast
ONCE AGAIN American policy in the Middle East lies in shambles.
It can be argued, as Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian scholar at Columbia University, has, that the current crisis in Gaza began with the response by Israel, the United States, Europe, et. al., to the elections for the Legislative Council of the Palestinian Authority in January 2006 -- the election that brought Hamas to power.
The Bush administration pushed for the election, over considerable Israeli doubts, in the American belief, at times naive, that democracy cures all ills. Once the Palestinian people had spoken, however, Israel and the West didn't like what the people said.
The Hamas victory "quickly moved from a crippling financial siege of the PA [Palestinian Authority], with the aim of bringing down the government, to an escalation of Israeli assassinations of Palestinian militants, and to artillery and air attacks in Gaza," Khalidi writes in his book "The Iron Cage, The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood." Almost as quickly Gazans moved to confrontation with Israel, which brought down even more destruction on their heads.
Hamas was as surprised by its victory as was the rest of the world. "We wanted, expected, to win about 30 percent of the vote, enough to have an influence in the Palestinian government," a Hamas official told me. "We didn't realized just how fed up people were with the corruption of Fatah."
Might things have turned out differently had Israel and the West not attempted to strangle the infant Hamas government in the cradle? Would Hamas have become more responsible if it had been allowed to govern without its funds frozen?
In any case, the attempt to bring down the newly elected Hamas government failed, and America's dedication to democracy ended up looking like rank hypocrisy.
Also, the American effort to arm and train Fatah so that it would defeat Hamas militarily has failed -- at least in Gaza. It succeeded only in making Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah movement look like American and Israeli collaborators in the eyes of many Palestinians.
How would things have turned out differently if Gazans had stuck to their cease-fire, refrained from rocketing Israel, and moved quickly to unite Hamas and Fatah factions in the interest of good governance? After all, Hamas was elected to clean up corruption and serve the people, not make war on Israel. If Palestinians had consolidated after Israel's withdrawal from Gaza, had an Israeli soldier not been kidnapped, would the tragedy of Gaza have been averted?
The failure of Palestinians to unite -- the quarrels between factions and families -- hindered their national movement since before the birth of Israel, especially in comparison with the more disciplined Zionists.
There were times when David Ben-Gurion thought the struggle between his labor movement and Menachem Begin's right wing faction "might even lead to civil war," according to historian Tom Segev.
" 'We must take up our rifles against them,' Ben-Gurion declared," Segev writes. But just when serious infighting was about to break out into civil war, the Jews in the Palestinian territories stepped back from the brink.
The tragedy for the Palestinians is that, in Gaza, they are committing national suicide just at the time when Israel was ready to more toward a Palestinian state. The present Israeli government was elected on a platform of unilateral withdrawals from the West Bank. But the failure in Gaza, especially the rockets on Israeli towns, makes any talk of further withdrawals impossible. Israel is not going to put major population centers in the range of Palestinian missiles.
Now Israel and the United States are looking for ways to stem the damage. There will be an understandable desire to isolate Gaza, quarantine the territory as you would an outbreak of bubonic plague.
There will be an equally understandable desire to turn to the West Bank, still controlled by Fatah, and explore a separate deal that would exclude Gaza. This would, sadly, end up as yet another policy disaster. For in the end, despite the differences between the two entities, Palestinians are not going to accept a separation of the two.
When things settle down, Israel and the West are going to have to deal with Hamas and Gaza. Keeping the entire territory in its current embargoed state, increasing unemployment and economic blockade, can only lead to further despair and radicalization.
And if Palestinians are ever going to achieve statehood, they have to draw back from the brink of a civil war that can only cripple their cause for generations to come.
H.D.S. Greeenway's column appears regularly in the Globe. 
