The Palestinian question: What now?

A Good Article
By Mark Perry, Conflicts Forum
Via uruknet.info

".....Tony Karon likens the defeat of Mohammad Dahlan’s U.S.-backed Preventive Security Services to an earlier American intervention from decades ago: the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco. His analysis is brilliant, but in truth Karon may have understated the breadth of the defeat — if that’s possible......

The bloody fight that ended last week was not, as widely reported, a civil war between Hamas and Fatah. It was a showdown between the paid militia of a highly unpopular Fatah commander and the forces of a united and popular movement that had already overwhelmingly defeated Fatah through free and fair elections in January of 2006.......

Hamas has in fact retained its popularity while Fatah is riven by divisions. In Gaza, as Charles Levinson who covers the Middle East for London’s Sunday Telegraph wrote on Friday in his blog, Conflict Blotter, "Compared to the past week things now feel blissfully peaceful. It seems many who write me think we should fear Hamas now that it is in control, but the reality is that the big threat to foreigners and journalists down here is not and never was Hamas."......

....As Daniel Levy writes, "The emerging plan is known variously as promoting Fatahland, while punishing Hamastan, or West Bank first, or feed the West Bank/starve Gaza." More than anything, this is an expression of wishful thinking on the part of those who are apparently eager to herald the collapse of the Palestinian national movement......

.....and these Fatah loyalists who are not supporters of Dahlan continue to work with their counterparts in Hamas. A Fatah militia has been defeated, but rank and file Fatah members are not being lined up against walls, or herded into camps. Newspapers are not being closed or businesses shuttered. Schools are not being told what to teach and there is no purge. This is not an Islamic revolution but simply a political party attempting to defend itself against the militia of an unelected warlord backed by foreign powers. Not only is life returning to normal, people are now breathing much easier. The instability and violence that marked life in Gaza over the last few months is gone, in large part because the soldiers of the Preventive Security Services are gone......

.....Last year, Hamas polled majorites — sometimes large majorities — in the West Bank’s major cities during the parliamentary elections. They still retain their rooted strength in those cities. Nor will the arrest of large numbers of Hamas activists in the West Bank, ordered just two days ago by Abu Mazen, convince Palestinians that what really happened in Gaza was a "Hamas coup" — as the White House would have it. The argument that Hamas is making to the Palestinian people — that only Israelis and those answerable to the Americans put Palestinians in jail — is having an impact among the people on the street. These aren’t the Palestinians that the Western media pays much attention to but these are the people who count......

So here is what will happen. The United States will fail to deliver. Some money will trickle in, but not nearly enough. The little that does trickle in will be spent unwisely. Israeli may remove some outposts, but only a few, and the settlements will continue to expand and settler roads will continue to be built and Palestinians will continue to die. Israelis will die too. A Palestinian security guard will be trained and it will march smartly through the streets of Ramallah. If it should exchange fire with a militia led by Hamas it will just as smartly be defeated. And if there is an election in "Fatahstine," Hamas will win, while at the White House, Tony Snow will talk about how the outcome was engineered in Tehran. And nineteen months from now, in the waning days of the Bush Administration — with American foreign policy in tatters — Elliott Abrams and Keith Dayton will proudly stand alongside a smiling President Bush as he honors them, the newest recipients of the Medal of Freedom."