The past few days have brought terrible news from the Palestinian territories. Shootings on the streets of Gaza have followed hard on Hamas’s military takeover of that wretched and overcrowded strip of land. Meanwhile the deep rifts within Palestinian society have been exacerbated by the imposition of two rival governments for the West Bank and Gaza.
An international response to these woeful events is now coming into view. But the path signalled by the US and Europe looks dangerously close to an attempt to micromanage and to pick sides in an internal Palestinian dispute.
The west’s attitude has been hypocritical. First, the US and Europe encouraged elections, but when Hamas won, they cut off direct aid. Now the European Union is likely to resume direct aid to an emergency government set up by decree. The justification is that Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian Authority president, has instituted a government of technocrats that the west now wants to see succeed, even though its authority does not extend beyond the West Bank.
Behind the new international consensus is the goal of making the West Bank an exemplar of the benefits of co-operating with the west and renouncing terrorism. There is also a desire to limit contacts with Gaza to providing humanitarian aid and ensuring that essential staff are not left destitute. The champions of this approach are the US and Israel, but, as the biggest donor to the Palestinians, the EU also matters.
Alarmingly, countries such as the UK and France now seem to be scaling back their earlier insistence that Mr Abbas’s new government be as inclusive as possible. But reconciliation is crucial. The EU and the west must send the strongest possible message that Fatah should not take advantage of the new situation to settle old scores with Hamas on the West Bank.
Hamas has much to answer for. Its putsch in Gaza was brutal. But the movement won the last Palestinian elections because Fatah was seen as incompetent and corrupt. Even the US has acknowledged that Hamas’s political wing – as personified by Ismail Haniya, the former prime minister – is preferable to the Hamas gunmen now roaming the streets of Gaza.
The harsh reality is that the Middle East will never be stable until the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is resolved. The more Hamas supporters are isolated, the more radical they will become – and the less likely the prospect of peace. That is the danger of a western policy that deepens the divide between Palestinians rather than reconciles them.
Source : www.ft.com
0 comments:
Post a Comment