Behind The Gaza Breakdown

By Chris Toensing
TomPaine.com

".....The U.S. and Britain have backed this maneuver, whose legality the American media persist in casting as “unclear.” But according to Nathan Brown, a scholar of Arab constitutions, the Palestinian Basic Law is “extremely clear and definitive” that Palestinian legislative terms are four years long. Full stop. The Palestinian president, Brown writes, “has no more basis for early parliamentary elections than President George W. Bush has for ordering new Congressional elections if he does not like the result.”

Couple this fact with Fatah’s complicity in Washington’s attempts to unseat Hamas—such as back-door funding, already in October, for the Islamists’ putative electoral opponents—and the deeper contours of the ongoing Hamas-Fatah clashes in Gaza come into focus. The U.S. might like to see the fighting escalate; when Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert last visited Washington, Bush reportedly pressed him to allow the Badr Brigades, a Palestinian armed unit based in Jordan, into the West Bank. Do the two largest Palestinian factions have the stomach for civil war? Or, instead, will Hamas return underground and step up attacks on Israel, hoping for Abbas to assume the role of Israeli-U.S. proxy policeman played by Arafat during the 1990s? The Hamas politburo head promises the latter scenario, if his party is not permitted to govern. So Israel and the U.S., who limned the Palestinians’ current plight, will also sketch the outline of the sequel."