Time Bomb

From The New York Times:

Several hundred people, most of them Fatah supporters, have been camped out at Erez, saying they fear for their lives unless they are allowed to escape through Israel to the West Bank.

. . . Israel, which closed the checkpoint on Thursday, has said it will not allow a crossing by the group, which includes some women and children.

More broadly, Gaza has been cut off for four days now. While aid officials say the situation is not yet dire, Israel will not deal with Hamas, even at the low level of coordinating trucks through checkpoints.

“Hamas is a terrorist organization,” said Shlomo Dror, a spokesman for the Coordinator of Activities in the Territories, the Israeli government agency that deals with the Palestinian areas. “They can’t say on the one hand that they want to destroy Israel, and on the other ‘we need your help.’ We won’t help Hamas. From our point of view, let them fail.” [Emphasis mine]

. . . With Gaza almost wholly dependent on the outside world for food, and with 1.1 million of its 1.5 million people receiving some sort of food assistance, the clock is ticking toward crisis.

If Israel can't find a way to get refugees out of Gaza and into the West Bank, then an unwillingness to coordinate with Hamas will translate simply as an unwillingness to deal with Palestinians, period. If Mahmoud Abbas and his new West Bank Fatah government want to isolate Hamas and gain ground among Palestinians then they need to work with Israel to get refugees out of harm's way in the western territory.

Additionally, it seems the US should take an active share of the responsibility for relocating Gazan refugees, since it was the US who pushed for Palestinian elections against Israel's better judgment.

Despite deep Israeli misgivings, the United States encouraged Abbas to hold Palestinian legislative elections -- and Abbas invited Hamas to participate, believing he could beat them at the polls. But Hamas won, giving Hamas control of the cabinet and of the powerful prime minister's post that had been created at the behest of the United States.

The Bush administration, in pushing for democratic elections yet rejecting the outcome, has sold the moral high ground out from under democracy and created a further morass in the Middle East. This will be as difficult to untangle as anything else in the region, and absolutely everybody except Hamas stands to lose in the short term.

"The less we try to intervene and shape Palestinian politics, the better off we will be," said Robert Malley, an expert on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with the International Crisis Group. "Almost every decision the United States has made to interfere with Palestinian politics has boomeranged."

Yup.

Writing Headlines

The headline might as well read "Two-State Solution Dead; Bush's Mid-East Policies All Failures." Glenn Kessler takes a look at the newly redefined Palestinian Territories and what happens next.

Another Government in Name Only

I've got a lot more reading to do before I understand what's going on in Gaza, but somebody kick me if this doesn't sound about right. After 15 months of sanctions against the democratically elected (but not US approved) Palestinian government in Gaza, during which time Palestinians have endured the kind of humanitarian crisis which only serves to fuel fundamentalist extremism and a "by-any-means-necessary" sense of virtue through terrorism, the US is now ready to lift the sanctions and let aid flow back into the region because the Fatah party of Mahmoud Abbas can't stand up to the militant hardliners of Hamas. This on the condition that Abbas, who's been effectively deposed in Gaza, as far as I can see, establish a new Fatah government that will work with American, European and presumably Israeli interests to soothe tensions and return to the jolly old days of the Oslo accords or something along those lines.

Is the US government officially on crack? At what point did our policy makers fail to see that this is exactly what would happen if we deprived the region of the chance to eat, to earn, and to work progressively toward democratic solutions? To deny the authority of a democratically elected Palestinian government was the first indication to Palestinians that the US had no real intention to deliver democracy to the Middle East. Instead, by imposing sanctions and cutting Gaza and the West Bank off from modern standards of free societies, US policy vindicates those who always assumed that the only answer to a troubled region is a one state solution which takes Israel, America's proxy in the Middle East, off the map.

And what will the US do now? It appears our intention is to prop up a wildly diminished government facade by allowing international aid to reach Palestinians only now that the radical threat presented by Hamas has assumed control of Gaza. Perhaps the US hopes to solidify power in the West Bank, allow the Fatah party to regroup and support a military re-acquisition of Gaza. It smacks of desperation, however, and suggests to me that US decision makers truly do not know what to do now. And we all know what we do when we don't know what to do: stay the course, redouble our efforts, and assure the world at large that we know what we're doing even while all evidence points to the contrary.

UPDATE: This article in the New York Times offers a good take on what Gaza looks like now, and on the likelihood of Palestinian reunification anytime soon.