The struggle within

RAFAH, Gaza Strip --When Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the storm-tossed Palestinian Authority, decided to take a popular vote on what is patriotically, if somewhat vaguely, called the Palestinian national agenda, what he really wanted was to give Palestinians a chance to answer the question the world has been asking them since January: What did they mean, exactly, when they voted Hamas into power?

Almost from the moment that the militant group won its surprise victory, triggering a crippling Western economic boycott, Hamas's rivals have argued vociferously that Palestinians didn't really mean it. They don't support the entire Hamas program-an Islamic state, a fight to the death with Israel-the argument goes. They really just meant to register a protest vote against the corrupt and long-ruling Fatah party.

Abbas's gamble will test that claim. Amid an intensifying power struggle between the Hamas-led parliament and the Fatah-dominated civil service, Abbas and his fellow Fatah intellectuals have decided that the only way out of a constitutional crisis-and possibly a civil war-is to agree on a set of basic national goals ratified by the Palestinian people.

So Abbas has decreed that Palestinians will go to the polls on July 26 to approve or reject a compromise hammered out by rival Fatah and Hamas militants serving together in an Israeli jail. The Prisoners' Initiative calls for a Palestinian state side by side with Israel, implicitly accepting that the Jewish state is there to stay. It also calls on militants to ''focus" violent attacks on Israeli targets in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, not inside Israel.

Abbas has argued that uniting behind such a platform-more moderate than Hamas's but less conciliatory than that of the discredited Fatah-would have far-reaching and concrete

benefits, from ending the international boycott to calming the street fighting between rival Hamas and Fatah gunmen. ''The faster we move, the faster we will be in saving our people," he told supporters in Ramallah on June 10.

Abbas is asking his people to decide no less a question than what kind of society and future they want. He is asking them to bridge, or at least set aside, their political and cultural divisions-between Fatah and Hamas; between those who favor a secular state and those who want one governed by religion; between those willing to compromise, even if compromise includes disappointment or corruption, and those insisting on principle at any price.

But Abbas's gamble to unite Palestinians is also dividing them-and the referendum could sink the whole enterprise if people perceive the vote as a contest between deeply entrenched factions. That's certainly the way Hamas leaders saw it when Abbas first proposed the referendum last month. They quickly called the move an attempt to undo their election victory. And in a report issued Tuesday, the International Crisis Group, an independent organization dedicated to conflict prevention, declared that Abbas's ''ultimatum" could result in ''an uncontrollable battle from which all Palestinians would emerge losers."

Indeed, since Abbas dropped his bombshell, factional fighting has accelerated, killing a dozen Palestinians. The main Hamas signatory has removed his name from the prisoners' letter, citing the president's ''unacceptable abuse" of the document. On Monday, Fatah gunmen stormed government buildings and torched offices. On Wednesday, an angry crowd of civil servants invaded a legislative session, stood on the desks of Hamas lawmakers, pelted the legislators with water bottles and tissue boxes, and chanted, ''We are hungry."

Palestinian and Israeli officials say they've never seen Palestinian society in such a precarious position-on ''the brink of internecine conflict," in the words of the Crisis Group report. But what is the Palestinian divide really about? Political leaders debate how to approach Israel, but on the streets of the West Bank and Gaza, those differences often become proxies for more immediate concerns: religion, culture, jobs, and power.

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To read Israeli newspapers and listen to the international debate, one would think that the Palestinians' internal struggle is mainly about Israel. But Palestinian views on how to deal with Israel are well documented and relatively consistent: Typical is a recent poll by Ramallah's Bir Zeit University that found 77 percent support the prisoners' document and 83 percent support a two-state solution, with a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.

Abbas's plan to resolve Palestinian infighting through a new consensus on lofty questions related to Israel thus played well to his supporters in Ramallah, the relatively wealthy intellectual and cultural center of Palestinian life, where he delivered his most recent speech about the vote on June 10. But a day earlier, in the dilapidated and bullet-pocked southern Gaza town of Rafah-the other geographical and political extreme-it was clear that militants saw the referendum less as a chance to agree on a common policy than as a contest between two political tribes.

As Gazans packed into a soccer stadium to mourn a prominent militant commander killed by an Israeli strike-ostensibly a unifying moment-talk of the referendum sparked shouting matches between groups of young men whose physical appearance declared their loyalties. Bearded Hamas members in black T-shirts and crisp camouflage pants stood in disciplined lines, part of Hamas's controversial new security force. Fatah's militant wing, the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, sported a more swashbuckling guerilla look, in rumpled purplish camo and bandannas worn so that the printed face of Yasser Arafat stared out from their foreheads.

In the thick of the crowd, a half-dozen young soldiers in the Fatah-dominated National Security Force sat in the covered bed of their pickup truck taking shelter from the sun. They had no idea what any of the 18 points enumerated in the Prisoners' Initiative actually said. But they knew how they were going to vote.

''This referendum will prove that Fatah is the party that people really want," one of them said, just before his officer scolded him for talking about politics.

What they had absorbed was that the document is more Fatah-the party of the flamboyant Yasser Arafat, 1970s airplane hijackings, leather jackets, flashy cars, and the Oslo Accords-than Hamas, the party of regimented clerics, 1990s suicide bombings, close-cropped beards, modest houses, and an unwavering refusal to compromise with Israel.

Much like Israelis, Palestinians, having watched the Oslo Accords fall apart over more than a decade, are in the midst of an identity crisis. They saw the Palestine Liberation Organization-long the leader of violent struggle against Israel, and dominated by Fatah-recognize Israel and denounce violence, without winning a Palestinian state. And they saw PLO elites enriching themselves as new violence and economic failure drove down living standards for ordinary people.

''The PLO was the Palestinian national identity. Now, in the popular consciousness, the PLO means corruption, using power," said Mohsen Abu Ramadan, who heads the Arab Center for Agricultural Development in Gaza. ''It created hatred, frustration, depression."

But Hamas, said Abu Ramadan, a political independent who has studied economic corruption under Fatah, has its own problems. The newly empowered Islamist party, he said, appears no more willing than Fatah to accommodate other world views; it failed to form a coalition government, and it has pursued its hard-line policies at the expense of pushing more people into poverty.

''You belong to your party more than you belong to Palestine," he said, sitting on the beach-side terrace of the Deira Hotel in Gaza as Israeli artillery shells thundered in the distance, imagining how he would scold Hamas leaders. Instead of a Palestinian identity, he said, they believe in ''a huge identity-Islam."

Fatah and Hamas supporters break down roughly along secular-versus-religious lines. While many Fatah supporters consider themselves religious in a traditional sense, most are allergic to the notion of a political and social order ruled by religious precepts.

Izzat Abdelhadi, who heads a consortium of Palestinian nonprofit groups, said western-style organizations like his have failed to build the grass-roots support enjoyed by Hamas-linked religious charities that serve the poor. But he still finds it unthinkable to work with those religious groups. ''We are not Islamists," he said.

Yet however much the political divisions are rooted in religion and culture, the street battles aren't over religious precepts. Rival clans and armed gangs-loosely but not exactly correlated to party membership-are locked in a primal battle for patronage jobs, influence, and physical control of neighborhoods that has only intensified with the economic crunch. In this environment, a gunman's political affiliation tends to be based on loyalty to his militia hierarchy, not the nuances of his views on Islamism or the use of violence to resist occupation.

At the Rafah funeral, the leader of the band of men wearing Yasser Arafat bandannas, who gave only his nom de guerre, Abu Abdullah, was a case in point. He said he personally agrees with Hamas that ''resistance" should be carried out everywhere against Israelis, even in Tel Aviv-not only in the West Bank and Gaza as the prisoners' agreement proposes. But he said he would vote for the prisoners' document anyway, because that's what Fatah says to do. ''We are confident in our party and our leaders," he said.

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Whatever the result on July 26, the referendum could be rendered meaningless by the player with the most powerful vote: Israel.

The Israeli government has offered no support for the prisoners' initiative-even though it's the first time that Hamas or Islamic Jihad leaders have signed a statement backing a two-state solution. Israeli officials point out that the document meets none of the three conditions set by the United States and other international players to lift the boycott: renounce violence, recognize Israel, and respect previous international agreements such as the Oslo Accords. And even as Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announces that he will meet soon with Abbas, other Israeli officials denounce the president as ''irrelevant."

Palestinians believe chaos on their streets provides Israel with convenient cover to proceed with plans to unilaterally define its final borders and annex more of the West Bank.

In his barbershop in Ramallah, Muhammad Hammad laid out the options the way he saw them. If the referendum passes, and the international community accepts that as de facto recognition of Israel, perhaps civil servants will get paid, the economic noose will loosen, and Palestinians will win vague promises of a peaceful settlement-but one that probably still won't return enough land to satisfy them.

If it doesn't pass, he speculated, the United States and Europe will shrug their shoulders and say the Palestinians deserve their fate.

''We are destroyed either way," Hammad said.

''Fatah and Hamas are both destroying the Palestinian people," said one of his customers, Nizam Samarra. ''The only difference between them is the means of destruction they use."

Anne Barnard covers the Middle East for the Globe. E-mail abarnard@globe.com. Globe correspondent Sa'id Ghazali contributed from Ramallah; Barnard reported from Gaza and Ramallah.