(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
[Palestine] After a week of shame in which Palestinians shot at Palestinians in Gaza, Hamas won the streets. President Mahmoud Abbas immediately declared Hamas' armed forces outlawed and appointed a new crisis government in the West Bank, despite the fact that the majority in the Palestinian parliament is still controlled by Hamas. What some media in the West call a "Hamas coup" is, for many Palestinians, a coup carried out by Fatah. One does not have to be particularly drawn to local conspiracy theories to feel that it is something other than the smell of democracy spreading in the hills above Ramallah, where the Palestinian political bodies are located.
Just days after Hamas invaded the Palestinian parliament in January 2006, Hamas Fatah and other parties organized in the Palestinian liberation front PLO asked to be in power. Hamas knew that they were not welcome in European capitals or around a possible negotiating table with Israel, they needed the PLO and Fatah to deal with the diplomatic contacts of the Palestinians. But Fatah refused. In March 2006, the Hamas government formed alone, with Ismael Haniyeh from a refugee camp in Gaza as prime minister. Haniyeh was described as moderate and belonged to the more pragmatic part of the Islamic movement. In 2005 he was involved in negotiating a ceasefire between the Palestinian factions.
The new government was met with boycotts from the EU and the US. Israel had already begun to confiscate customs duties and taxes they impose on behalf of the Palestinians, who do not even control their international borders. In Gaza and the West Bank, the authorities stopped paying regular salaries to public sector employees.
A secret coup
Three months later, Gaza was well into economic crisis, with the West Bank a while behind, members of Fatah and Hamas in Israeli prisons announced a common political platform. The so-called "capture document" called for the Palestinian parties to work together for a Palestinian state. Days after the publication of the document, Israel attacked Gaza in the wake of the abduction of soldier Gilad Shalit, which immediately led to Palestinian charges of sabotaging the political process.
But the Catch document lived on. When an Israeli military operation against Gaza replaced a new one in November of that year, the negotiation of a unifying government began in earnest. The final agreement was reached only in March this year, when the Palestinian territories had been on fire for a year, with the result that the standard of living had fallen noticeably, and with one of the world's fastest shrinking economies. In the most vulnerable areas, Gaza and the confined cities of Jenin and Nablus in the West Bank, the struggle for daily bread had long since manifested itself in criminal gang activity, often disguised as political faction. The Finance Minister of the new unifying government, economist Salam Fayyad, traveled freely to the West in a desperate attempt to open the cranes. Some drops were promised from some European countries, including Norway, otherwise Fayyad's reception was nicely said lukewarm.
But some taps have been open since Hamas' election victory at the start of 2006. The office and security forces of President Mahmoud Abbas have received funding. In this way, Western countries have been able to upset the balance of power between the Palestinian governing bodies, which are made up – apart from Abbas – by the Hamas-controlled parliament, and thus two governments that emerge from the parliament. In addition, the United States and Egypt have provided military support to Fatah security forces, under the command of Mohammed Dahlan, one of the strip's most notorious men. Dahlan and his power apparatus are accused of being behind much of the recent unrest in Gaza. Dahlan was Yasser Arafat's security chief in Gaza when the Palestinian Authority cracked down on Hamas in the late 1990s.
Just weeks before the last wave of violence, 300 well-equipped soldiers entered the scene from Egypt. On June 13 and 14, people in Gaza saw the backside of this force, retreating, from Hamas. On June 15, Hamas declared that they had control over Gaza. The response from Ramallah came swiftly, the remnants of the unifying government in Gaza were deposed, the president declared that a new crisis government would be formed, without Hamas.
The fact that the president overthrows a government that springs from a popularly elected assembly to establish a crisis government based on a minority in the people's assembly would in most democratic countries be described as a coup d'etat. But Abbas' appointment of Fayyad as the new prime minister of a Fatah-dominated government was not called a coup in the Western media. Instead, CNN let a story about Hamas' coup in Gaza roll and go across the screen. Arab media have failed to take sides. Fayyad's new government was quickly embraced by the EU and the US, which have announced the final lifting of the boycott of the Palestinians. The message was clear: Now that you have a government we can work with, rather than the one you have chosen, we are lifting the siege, as the international boycott is popularly called.
radicalization
Paradoxically, the laws Abbas refers to, which give the president dubious opportunities to oust governments, are the same laws the West for many years sought to wrest from the previous Palestinian president – Yasser Arafat. The legislation itself is a survival from the days of the British Protectorate.
In the "Arab street", opinions about who has couped who shared. What most agree on is that both Fatah, Hamas and the Palestinian people have lost out on the events of recent weeks. The worst situation is in Gaza, which will continue to be under siege for an uncertain future. In addition to the restrictions they have already been living with for some time, Israel has announced that it will cut off the supply of gasoline, and possibly other vital goods still flowing through Israel to Gaza. All Palestinians have lost. They have lost on the human plane, the internal strife has gone across families and villages. And they have lost on the political plane. For many Palestinians, Abbas' crisis cabinet is the final confirmation that democracy is little more than a euphemism for Western donors. For Palestinians, the events of recent weeks are a cabinet of political terror.
Must contact Hamas
The development of political institutions and the fragmentation of political power have stopped. For Fatah, this means that Palestinian politics will once again become more or less an internal Fatah issue, while small parties lurk on the outskirts of a one-party state. For Hamas, the setback could lead to more radical forces taking over for the more moderate ones who have shown the way in the last two years. In the worst case, it means a resumption of Hamas' most feared tactic, suicide bombers against civilians. The dismantling of Palestinian democracy opens new doors for far more extreme groups than Hamas.
Palestinian politics is also regional policy, the Palestinian diaspora, especially in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, follows the events. The major camps in these countries are divided between the Palestinian factions and the parties, a breakdown in Palestinian politics means trouble here as well. As in Gaza, the battle between Fatah and Hamas, and conspiracy theories about Israel and the United States' involvement in the fighting, fuel more extreme groups. One of these is Fatah al-Islam fighting its own war against Lebanese troops in a Palestinian refugee camp in northern Lebanon. In order to prevent the polarization of Palestinian politics, the president can make it clear that the crisis government is temporary and is printing new elections to parliament. Abbas could then risk Hamas winning again, and so we are back to the start. Regardless, Abbas must contact Hamas, who is in fact sitting with a good portion of the electorate, and possibly share power with the Islamists if there is to be a lasting solution to the ruling chaos. And if the Palestinians want to give Hamas new confidence in a possible government or elsewhere, the rest of the world must respect that.
