Not an internal Palestinian matter

By Amira Hass
Not an internal Palestinian matter
10.04.2006 | Ha'aretz

By Amira Hass
The experiment was a success: The Palestinians are killing each
other. They are behaving as expected at the end of the extended
experiment called "what happens when you imprison 1.3 million human
beings in an enclosed space like battery hens."

These are the steps in the experiment: Imprison (since 1991); remove
the prisoners' usual means of livelihood; seal off all outlets to the
outside world, nearly hermetically; destroy existing means of
livelihood by preventing the entry of raw materials and the marketing
of goods and produce; prevent the regular entry of medicines and
hospital supplies; do not bring in fresh food for weeks on end;
prevent, for years, the entry of relatives, professionals, friends
and others, and allow thousands of people - the sick, heads of
families, professionals, children - to be stuck for weeks at the
locked gates of the Gaza Strip's only entry/exit.

Steal hundreds of millions of dollars (customs and tax revenues
collected by Israel that belong to the Palestinian treasury), so as
to force the nonpayment of the already low salaries of most
government employees for months; present the firing of homemade
Qassam rockets as a strategic threat that can only be stopped by
harming women, children and the old; fire on crowded residential
neighborhoods from the air and the ground; destroy orchards, groves
and fields.

Dispatch planes to frighten the population with sonic booms; destroy
the new power plant and force the residents of the closed-off Strip
to live without electricity for most of the day for a period of four
months, which will most likely turn into a full year - in other
words, a year without refrigeration, electric fans, television,
lights to study and read by; force them to get by without a regular
supply of water, which is dependent on the electricity supply.

It is the good old Israeli experiment called "put them into a
pressure cooker and see what happens," and this is one of the reasons
why this is not an internal Palestinian matter.

The success of the experiment can be seen in the miasma of
desperation that hangs over the Gaza Strip, and in the clan feuding
that erupts almost daily there, even more than in the battles between
Fatah and Hamas militants. One can only wonder that the feuding is
not more frequent, and that some bonds of internal solidarity have
been maintained, which saves people from hunger.

In contrast to the feuding between clans, Sunday's battles in Gaza
and campaigns of destruction and intimidation, mainly in West Bank
cities, were not the result of a momentary loss of control. They are
generally viewed as battles between two militias, each of which
represents one half of the population, but they were initiated by
groups within Fatah to put a few more nails into the coffin of the
elected leadership.

The security forces of the Palestinian Authority - in other words, of
Fatah, or in still other words, the ones that Mahmoud Abbas is in
charge of - are hiding behind the genuine distress and protests of
public employees who have not been receiving regular salaries. And
they are doing so despite the fact that everyone knows that the
failure to pay salaries is not a managerial failure, but is above all
due to Israeli policy. These forces were dispatched in order to sow
organized anarchy, as taught in the school of Yasser Arafat.

And why is this, too, an Israeli matter? Because those who dispatched
these militants have a shared interest with Israel in regressing to a
situation in which the Palestinian leadership collaborates with the
appearance of holding peace talks, while Israel continues its
occupation and the international community sends hush money in the
form of salaries for the Palestinian public sector.

And there is another reason why this is also an internal Israeli
issue: Whatever the outcome, the Palestinian feuding and the risk of
civil war directly affect about 20 percent of Israeli citizens, the
Arabs. They affect the Arabs, and also those segments of the Israeli
public that have not forgotten that Israel will remain the occupying
and ruling force over the Palestinians as long as the goal of
establishing a Palestinian state in all of the territories occupied
in 1967 is not realized.