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2 The death of the two-state
solution By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Last week's developments in Gaza
culminating in Fatah's defeat by Hamas resulted in
the formation of two Palestinian governments, one
led by Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Gaza and the
other by Fatah's Salaam Fayad in the West Bank.
Call it a nightmare, a fiasco, fragmentation, but
not temporary, as all the vital signs indicate
that the political partition of the West Bank and
Gaza is a fait accompli, unlikely to
reverse short of an all-out
Israeli military invasion and
reoccupation of Gaza.
According to the
liberal Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, that is
precisely what Israel's new Defense Minister Ehud
Barak, who is also the new chairman of the Labor
Party, is planning, a "military operation in Gaza
within weeks". According to the report, Barak's
aim is to destroy Hamas militarily. Then what?
Keep Gaza indefinitely occupied, or hand over the
authority to the much-discredited Fatah operatives
from the West Bank?
If Hamas plays its
cards right, such as by refraining from any
attacks on Israel, then it will be difficult for
Barak and other Israeli leaders to justify a
unilateral reinvasion of Gaza. Already, in his
first interview with the European press since
trouncing Fatah, Haniyeh has taken credit for
bringing "stability" to Gaza after many months of
growing chaos.
Indicating Hamas'
willingness to abide by a two-state solution,
Haniyeh has stated: "We have agreed to respect all
the past agreements signed by the Palestinian
Authority." But of course, that does not include
the latest "presidential" decrees of the
Palestinian Authority's Mahmud Abbas, outlawing
Hamas' military wing, Izaddin Kassam, and
appointing Fayad to replace Haniyeh.
So
with two prime ministers in two locations
representing two different political orientations,
one Islamist, the other secularist, the new status
quo in Gaza is better viewed as the harbinger of a
brand-new reality, the virtual death of the
two-state solution for the foreseeable future and
its replacement by a three-state reality, to the
extent that we can call the proto-governmental
conditions in West Bank and Gaza statist, that is.
A three-state solution, in which Gaza and
the West Bank are not lumped together into a
single Palestinian state, would allow them to go
their own separate ways. Most debate over
Palestine's future centers on the one-state
(Israel rules the West Bank and Gaza) and the
existing two-state options.
At present,
Israel controls the borders of Gaza and the West
Bank and the airspace, thereby choking Palestinian
statehood into a shell of reality. At the same
time, the occupying power continues with its
policy of land acquisition, establishing
settlements, maintaining the "annexation" wall,
constructing settlement roads, restricting the
movement of Palestinians, exploiting Palestinian
water, practicing extrajudicial "target killings"
condoned even by its high court, and imposing a
financial and economic siege.
It is
therefore highly ironic that Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert, whose government is directly responsible
for the violence gripping the occupied
territories, as confirmed by a recent United
Nations report, by refusing to honor the will of
Palestinian voters, who exercised their democratic
rights last year to bring Hamas to power, is now
shedding crocodile tears for the Palestinians,
promising "to do what can to upgrade the quality
of life in the West Bank".
Predictably,
the US government has sheepishly followed Israel's
script for action against Hamas, by condoning
Olmert's decision to make life harder on the
Gazans by limiting fuel and electricity supplies.
The humanitarian crisis in Gaza will, therefore,
worsen in the coming weeks if not months as a
result of US-Israeli retaliation, which is
tantamount to "collective punishment" of the 1.5
million Palestinians living in Gaza, in direct
contradiction to the Geneva protocols.
Even some Israeli pundits, such as Uzi
Benziman, reluctantly admit that "Israel
contributed to the Gaza conflict". That is putting
it mildly. Israel played the game of "fragmenting
the enemy" to the best of its ability, hoping to
reverse Hamas' political and military fortunes,
only to see those hopes dashed by one element it
did not adequately count on: the determination of
the Gazan people to stand by Hamas and support it
against corrupt Fatah politicians and commanders
irrespective of the external and internal
pressures.
Most likely, the Hamas
"revolution" will not engulf the West Bank any
time soon and the Fatah-Israel bandwagoning to
forestall the spread of Hamas' victory will
succeed, by combining the stick of an anti-Hamas
witch-hunt and the carrot of economic incentives,
such as Israel's promise to "de-freeze" the
half-billion-US-dollar tax revenues it withheld
from the Hamas-led government for more than a
year.
Legally, Olmert's decision is
challengeable in light of the uprooting of Fatah's
political influence and infrastructure in Gaza and
the inadvisability of allocating for the West Bank
the taxes extracted from Gaza. The Hamas leaders
would be wise to explore the legal channels to
freeze Olmert's decision. As improbable as it
sounds, it is hypothetically feasible for Arab
Israeli lawyers hired by Hamas to seek a court
injunction with respect to the Israeli
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