It looks quite unseemly. All of sudden the West and Israel are embracing the new Abbas-appointed Palestinian government - and in the process people like Condi Rice spouting forth about democracy. Wait a minute! The Hamas-dominated Palestinian Government was democratically elected and has now, on one view at least, being wrongly displaced by President Abbas.
That Palestinian has been pitted against Palestinian goes without saying. What has caused this appalling state of affairs? Karma Nabulsi, fellow in politics and international relations at St Edmund Hall, Oxford University, seeks to address the issue in a piece in Guardian Unlimited.
"There is nothing uglier and more brutal to the human spirit, nothing more lethal to that universal hope for freedom, than to see a people struggling for liberty for such a long time begin to kill each other. How and why did we get here? Above all: how do we get out of here? These are the questions everyone watching events unfold in Gaza and the West Bank are asking themselves. But before answering them, it is essential to understand just what we are witnessing.
This is not at its heart a civil war, nor is it an example of the upsurge of regional Islamism. It is not reducible to an atavistic clan or fratricidal blood-letting, nor to a power struggle between warring factions. This violence cannot be characterised as a battle between secular moderates who seek a negotiated settlement and religious terrorist groups. And this is not, above all, a miserable situation that has simply slipped unnoticed into disaster.
The many complex steps that led us here today were largely the outcome of the deliberate policies of a belligerent occupying power backed by the US. As the UN envoy for the Middle East peace process, Alvaro de Soto, remarked in his confidential report leaked last week in this paper: "The US clearly pushed for a confrontation between Fatah and Hamas, so much so that, a week before Mecca, the US envoy declared twice in an envoys meeting in Washington how much 'I like this violence', referring to the near-civil war that was erupting in Gaza in which civilians were being regularly killed and injured."
On the current issues in Gaza and the West Bank and the fallout, Rami G. Khouri, director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut and editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, published in the IHT under the headline "Palestinian incompetence, Western hypocrisy" writes:
"It's hard to know who appears more ludicrous and despicable, the Palestinian Fatah and Hamas leaderships allowing their gunmen to fight it out on the streets of Gaza and the West Bank, or an American administration saying it supports the "moderates" in Palestine who want to negotiate peace with Israel.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice phoned Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Thursday to underline American support for "moderates" committed to a negotiated peace with Israel, such as Abbas. She also called leaders of "moderate" Arab states to rally their support for Abbas against Hamas.
Surrealistically, this was happening when Hamas forces were routing Fatah's security forces to take control of all public facilities in Gaza, and Abbas was proving that the sort of Arab "moderation" he represents has little anchorage in reality any more.
Abbas declared a state of emergency and dismissed the Palestinian government, but the facts on the ground are that the Palestinian government is a fiction, and his state of emergency is a state of imagination. The "moderation" of Abbas and his Fatah movement was a noble nationalistic cause three decades ago. But Fatah's own incompetence and creeping corruption - especially after taking control of the West Bank and Gaza after the Oslo accords of 1993 - have turned the movement into an embarrassment that is little more than a pathetic poster child and crippled errand boy for the U.S. State Department."
That Palestinian has been pitted against Palestinian goes without saying. What has caused this appalling state of affairs? Karma Nabulsi, fellow in politics and international relations at St Edmund Hall, Oxford University, seeks to address the issue in a piece in Guardian Unlimited.
"There is nothing uglier and more brutal to the human spirit, nothing more lethal to that universal hope for freedom, than to see a people struggling for liberty for such a long time begin to kill each other. How and why did we get here? Above all: how do we get out of here? These are the questions everyone watching events unfold in Gaza and the West Bank are asking themselves. But before answering them, it is essential to understand just what we are witnessing.
This is not at its heart a civil war, nor is it an example of the upsurge of regional Islamism. It is not reducible to an atavistic clan or fratricidal blood-letting, nor to a power struggle between warring factions. This violence cannot be characterised as a battle between secular moderates who seek a negotiated settlement and religious terrorist groups. And this is not, above all, a miserable situation that has simply slipped unnoticed into disaster.
The many complex steps that led us here today were largely the outcome of the deliberate policies of a belligerent occupying power backed by the US. As the UN envoy for the Middle East peace process, Alvaro de Soto, remarked in his confidential report leaked last week in this paper: "The US clearly pushed for a confrontation between Fatah and Hamas, so much so that, a week before Mecca, the US envoy declared twice in an envoys meeting in Washington how much 'I like this violence', referring to the near-civil war that was erupting in Gaza in which civilians were being regularly killed and injured."
On the current issues in Gaza and the West Bank and the fallout, Rami G. Khouri, director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut and editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, published in the IHT under the headline "Palestinian incompetence, Western hypocrisy" writes:
"It's hard to know who appears more ludicrous and despicable, the Palestinian Fatah and Hamas leaderships allowing their gunmen to fight it out on the streets of Gaza and the West Bank, or an American administration saying it supports the "moderates" in Palestine who want to negotiate peace with Israel.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice phoned Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Thursday to underline American support for "moderates" committed to a negotiated peace with Israel, such as Abbas. She also called leaders of "moderate" Arab states to rally their support for Abbas against Hamas.
Surrealistically, this was happening when Hamas forces were routing Fatah's security forces to take control of all public facilities in Gaza, and Abbas was proving that the sort of Arab "moderation" he represents has little anchorage in reality any more.
Abbas declared a state of emergency and dismissed the Palestinian government, but the facts on the ground are that the Palestinian government is a fiction, and his state of emergency is a state of imagination. The "moderation" of Abbas and his Fatah movement was a noble nationalistic cause three decades ago. But Fatah's own incompetence and creeping corruption - especially after taking control of the West Bank and Gaza after the Oslo accords of 1993 - have turned the movement into an embarrassment that is little more than a pathetic poster child and crippled errand boy for the U.S. State Department."
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