The experiment was a success: The Palestinians are killing each other

Amira Hass

The experiment was a success: The Palestinians are killing
each other. They are behaving as expected at the end of
the extended experiment called "what happens when you
imprison 1.3 million human beings in an enclosed space
like battery hens."

These are the steps in the experiment: Imprison (since
1991); remove the prisoners' usual means of livelihood;
seal off all outlets to the outside world, nearly
hermetically; destroy existing means of livelihood by
preventing the entry of raw materials and the marketing of
goods and produce; prevent the regular entry of medicines
and hospital supplies; do not bring in fresh food for
weeks on end; prevent, for years, the entry of relatives,
professionals, friends and others, and allow thousands of
people - the sick, heads of families, professionals,
children - to be stuck for weeks at the locked gates of
the Gaza Strip's only entry/exit.

Steal hundreds of millions of dollars (customs and tax
revenues collected by Israel that belong to the
Palestinian treasury), so as to force the nonpayment of
the already low salaries of most government employees for
months; present the firing of homemade Qassam rockets as a
strategic threat that can only be stopped by harming
women, children and the old; fire on crowded residential
neighborhoods from the air and the ground; destroy
orchards, groves and fields.

Dispatch planes to frighten the population with sonic
booms; destroy the new power plant and force the residents
of the closed-off Strip to live without electricity for
most of the day for a period of four months, which will
most likely turn into a full year - in other words, a year
without refrigeration, electric fans, television, lights
to study and read by; force them to get by without a
regular supply of water, which is dependent on the
electricity supply.

It is the good old Israeli experiment called "put them
into a pressure cooker and see what happens," and this is
one of the reasons why this is not an internal Palestinian
matter.

The success of the experiment can be seen in the miasma of
desperation that hangs over the Gaza Strip, and in the
clan feuding that erupts almost daily there, even more
than in the battles between Fatah and Hamas militants. One
can only wonder that the feuding is not more frequent, and
that some bonds of internal solidarity have been
maintained, which saves people from hunger.

In contrast to the feuding between clans, Sunday's battles
in Gaza and campaigns of destruction and intimidation,
mainly in West Bank cities, were not the result of a
momentary loss of control. They are generally viewed as
battles between two militias, each of which represents one
half of the population, but they were initiated by groups
within Fatah to put a few more nails into the coffin of
the elected leadership.

The security forces of the Palestinian Authority - in
other words, of Fatah, or in still other words, the ones
that Mahmoud Abbas is in charge of - are hiding behind the
genuine distress and protests of public employees who have
not been receiving regular salaries. And they are doing so
despite the fact that everyone knows that the failure to
pay salaries is not a managerial failure, but is above all
due to Israeli policy. These forces were dispatched in
order to sow organized anarchy, as taught in the school of
Yasser Arafat.

And why is this, too, an Israeli matter? Because those who
dispatched these militants have a shared interest with
Israel in regressing to a situation in which the
Palestinian leadership collaborates with the appearance of
holding peace talks, while Israel continues its occupation
and the international community sends hush money in the
form of salaries for the Palestinian public sector.

And there is another reason why this is also an internal
Israeli issue: Whatever the outcome, the Palestinian
feuding and the risk of civil war directly affect about 20
percent of Israeli citizens, the Arabs. They affect the
Arabs, and also those segments of the Israeli public that
have not forgotten that Israel will remain the occupying
and ruling force over the Palestinians as long as the goal
of establishing a Palestinian state in all of the
territories occupied in 1967 is not realized.