This summer was a disastrous one for Palestinians. After months of stalled negotiations, their Hamas-Fatah unity government was fractured in June. Fighting broke out between the two factions, and when the smoke cleared militant group Hamas had taken control of the Gaza Strip, while Fatah retained the West Bank.
As the governments of Israel and the West become ever more involved in the dispute between Hamas and Fatah, Gazans have become the victims of not only a crippling Israeli occupation, but the political maneuverings of leaders from all sides who seem unwilling to do anything to help them.
Despite the fact that 1.5 million Gaza refugees live in intense poverty, the West, Israel, and even Fatah have cut off aid to the region since Hamas took over. As long as Hamas is in power, it seems Gazans will be left to wallow in their misery. While leaders pass blame around like a live grenade, who is really responsible for the disaster in Gaza?
The finger must be pointed at Hamas. In clinging to the doctrine of military resistance against Israel, they condemn their people to defeat. It is time for them to realize that armed struggle against Israel is ineffective and has failed to emancipate the Palestinians.
But the United States and the European Union are also complicit in Gaza’s troubles. They demand that Hamas must renounce violence once and for all in order to receive aid, yet they make no such demands of Israel. The Jewish state receives billions of dollars’ worth of military aid each year, using it to build an army that has killed innocents on a scale that Hamas can only dream of.
The U.S. and E.U. must end their economic and diplomatic boycott of Gaza and acknowledge the unfortunate reality that Hamas is a democraticallyelected major player in the region. No solution can be reached without their inclusion.
Israel too is contributing to the suffering of Gaza’s refugees. They have effectively sealed off the borders to the Gaza Strip, bringing the region’s already meagre economy to a standstill. Palestinians are dying at border crossings because they can’t access proper medical care on the outside. Electricity, supplied to Gaza by an Israeli company, has been periodically shut off, plunging hundreds of thousands of people into darkness for days at a time.
But what is truly astonishing is that even Fatah, which under Yassir Arafat became synonymous with the Palestinian cause, will do nothing to aid Gaza.
While Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas is touted by Israel and her allies as more “moderate” than Hamas, what they really mean is that he is more likely to do what Israel wants. While at university, Abbas speculated in his doctoral thesis that the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust might have only been a few hundred thousand, and that Zionists had inflated the number to gain sympathy for a Jewish state. This is not the kind of person Israel would normally praise as “moderate.”
Despite these clearly anti-Semitic leanings, Abbas has become Israel’s go-to guy in Palestine, for the sole reason th at he does what Israel wants. Adhering to the old strategy of divide and conquer, Israel has demanded that he not attempt to heal the rift between Hamas and Fatah, and Abbas has obliged. In August, he even took the unprecedented step of quashing a UN draft resolution expressing concern about the humanitarian disaster Gazans are facing under the economic boycott.
Since his defeat by Hamas in the 2006 elections confirmed that he does not have the support of the majority of his people, Abbas’ only legitimate claim to leadership is that he is the only Palestinian with whom Israel and the U.S. will negotiate. Now, he will apparently do anything he can to maintain that position, even if it means abandoning Gaza.
The world may one day grant Palestinians leaders who are capable of bringing them out of the darkness they have been mired in for 60 years, but for now they are surely nowhere to be found.
