Page 2 of 2 The death of the
two-state
solution By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
government's planned release of tax
revenues to Abbas' government in the West Bank,
which has a proven record of corruption and
embezzlement.
Hamas' Islamic mini-state
will be targeted for destruction in various ways,
and it can survive the onslaught only if it shows
the necessary acumen that requires a great deal of
political realism.
Israel, on the other
hand, is unlikely to introduce a sea-change in
its
hitherto oppressive, annexationist policy with
respect to the West Bank, in spite of the current
rhetoric promising to help set up the area "as a
model" for Gaza. For one thing, this requires a
freezing or reversal of the disturbing expansion
of Jewish settlements that has more than doubled
since the 1993 Oslo Agreement. Israel will
continue to impose its will on the Palestinians,
isolating their communities, refusing a final
status for the occupied territories, giving lip
service to the cause of peace while, in reality,
establishing facts on the ground that increasingly
make a lasting agreement impossible.
The
Palestinian Authority in West Bank has urged
Israel to heed the US "benchmarks" suggested by
General Keith Dayton, who is responsible for
training Palestinian forces, ie, a massive removal
of Israeli checkpoints, as well as the release of
Fatah activists. And yet it is far from clear that
Olmert and Barak will have much use for those
"benchmarks" except as token steps aimed at
enhancing Fatah's local image and making it look
as if real, tangible benefits have been delivered
to the average Palestinians living in West Bank.
Meanwhile the economic strangulation of Gaza will
continue and Israel will do whatever it deems
necessary to cripple Hamas' rule in Gaza.
Will Hamas survive the economic hardships
and advance the cause of its mini-state? The
answer to this question depends partly on its
diplomatic prowess and its ability to muster
support from the Arab world, particularly Egypt,
which has a huge vested interest in the future of
Gaza, in light of the close rapport between Hamas
and the Islamic Brotherhood in Egypt. With the
issue of an international buffer force at the
Egypt-Gaza border shelved (for now), Egypt has a
golden opportunity to play a proactive role in
making the Gaza mini-state a viable entity.
Saudi Arabia too, which brokered the March
unity-government agreement between Fatah and
Hamas, may pitch in some financial support to keep
the Hamas political infrastructure in Gaza
floating, partly as a result of competition with
Hamas-friendly Iran, and partly in response to
what UN officials tried to impress on the visiting
Olmert - the looming humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
For the moment, Israel has promised to
continue supplying water, medical supplies and
food to Gaza through its territory. With
sufficient international pressure on Israel to
make good on that promise, Hamas will probably
succeed in surviving the financial and economic
squeeze, particularly if the internal sense of
efficacy of its government, by the average Gazan,
remains high, and it does not fall prey to the
Fatah symptoms of corruption and nepotism. In that
case, Gaza will be a "model" for the West Bank and
not the other way around.
The US and
Israel are determined to prevent such a scenario,
but then again, as Robert Malley of the
International Crisis Group has rightly noted,
"Almost every decision the US has made to
interfere with Palestinian politics has
boomeranged."
The US could consider
calling for an international force at the
Gaza-Israel border, hardly in the cards as long as
Washington's Palestinian policy is purely dictated
by Israel. In the absence of serious fissures in
that regime of political influence, Washington is
now desperately trying damage control by vesting
all its hopes on the Palestinian Authority in West
Bank, as if this will somehow change the facts on
the ground in Gaza.
It will not, and the
sooner the US and its European allies wake up to
the new reality and adjust their policies, whereby
a de facto recognition of the Hamas proto-regime
in Gaza follows suit, the better. Hamas is in Gaza
to stay, and perhaps not even Barak's military
machine can dislodge it.
Kaveh L
Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After
Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy
(Westview Press) and co-author of "Negotiating
Iran's Nuclear Populism", Brown Journal of World
Affairs, Volume XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with
Mustafa Kibaroglu. He also wrote "Keeping Iran's
nuclear potential latent", Harvard International
Review, and is author of Iran's Nuclear
Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.
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