After Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, Palestinian unity government on rocks
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Version 0 of 1. GAZA CITY — Looking across a traffic-clogged intersection of this city in a rare pocket that has been untouched by war, a tall police officer considered his list of enemies. At the top, he said, was the “unity government,” which in June joined the two main Palestinian political factions. A reconciliation agreement in April between the two parties — Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, and Fatah, which has the majority of its support in the West Bank — was supposed to bring about a shared government under the umbrella of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and mean that the officer and 40,000 other Hamas workers in Gaza would finally get paid after being shortchanged for months. But it didn’t work out that way. “There is no credibility with” the new government, seethed the officer, who said his job did not allow him to comment publicly on politics. “Mahmoud Abbas is lying,” he said of the Palestinian Authority president. “For seven years, he has been asking for unity, for reconciliation, but once he took over the government, nothing happened, nothing of the promises made, and I haven’t gotten paid.” Such anger — as well as the backlogged paychecks — is one of the many challenges facing the Palestinian unity government, which is mired in political infighting, allegations of an attempted coup, and anxiety over disarming and reconstructing Gaza after this summer’s war between Hamas and Israel. Just three months after its creation, analysts say, the technocratic government based in the West Bank city of Ramallah appears on the verge of collapse. At a news conference in Cairo on Saturday, Abbas threatened to dissolve the unity government, accusing Hamas of running a “shadow government” in Gaza. “Hamas must recognize that the West Bank and Gaza are a single unit, with one legal system and one weapons policy,” he said. Hamas senior leader Khalil al-Haiya pushed back against Abbas’s assessment in an interview Sunday with a TV station in Gaza. “We want the reconciliation only,” he said. “Nothing more.” But if that doesn’t happen, as some fear, the rupture would end the most significant attempt Palestinian leaders have made to bridge what has in many ways become two Palestinian populations, divided by geography, politics and recent history. On one side is Hamas, the Islamist movement that has governed Gaza since it violently seized power in 2007. Considered a terrorist organization by Israel, the United States and the European Union, it doesn’t recognize the Jewish State’s right to exist and has warred against the nation three times in the past five years. This summer’s two-month battle killed more than 2,000 Gazans but appeared to bolster Hamas’s popularity. On the other side is the secular Fatah party, which dominates the Palestine Liberation Organization and galvanized its power in the West Bank after Hamas booted it from Gaza. Led by Palestinian Authority president Abbas, it eschews violence for diplomacy; its members recently represented Palestinians in U.S.-backed Mideast peace talks, which collapsed in the spring. The two sides, which have tried and failed numerous times to reconcile, are now more defined by their differences than their similarities, analysts said. And despite the importance of reconciliation, which would allow Palestinians to articulate a unified position in talks with Israel, those differences have hampered every attempt. “I do not expect to see progress in reconciliation,” said Ghassan al Khatib, vice president of Birzeit University in the West Bank. “There is no common ground; these are not the kind of parties or factions that can come together.” More troublesome, a Gaza academic said, is that the potential failure of the unity government could sow deeper distrust and resentment. “If it doesn’t succeed now, we can say goodbye to Palestinian reconciliation,” said Mkhaimar Abusada, a political science professor at Al-Azhar University in Gaza. The ostensible union between Fatah and Hamas was born of desperation rather than mutual understanding. Both sides needed something the other had. The ouster of Islamist Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi and the rise there of Abdel Fattah al-Sissi’s military-backed government meant that Hamas lost a powerful ally and gained a powerful enemy. The border crossing from Gaza into Egypt, a key exit for residents of the coastal strip — which is under a partial siege by Israel — creaked closed. Money dried up. Workers weren’t getting paid. Hamas needed a new friend. Meanwhile, analysts said, Abbas wanted Fatah back in Gaza and perhaps saw Hamas’s weakness as something to leverage. Abbas “hasn’t been there in seven years,” Abusada said. “He hasn’t made one trip, not one.” But in April, the two factions announced a reconciliation deal, killing the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. “This evening, as peace talks were about to take place, Abbas chose Hamas and not peace,” read a statement released by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office. “Whoever chooses Hamas does not want peace.” Then in July, one month after Abbas had sworn in the government, the Hamas-Israel war erupted, and appeared to draw the two Palestinian sides closer together — but only for a time. “The period of the war was an exception,” Khatib said. That exception was marred in mid-August, when Israeli’s domestic intelligence agency announced it had uncovered a Hamas plot to ignite an uprising in the West Bank and depose the Palestinian Authority. The alleged evidence: dozens of interviews with arrested Hamas operatives in the West Bank, and the seizure of rockets, rifles and more than $170,000. “You are smuggling money and ammunition into the West Bank, not for a confrontation with Israel but to carry out a coup against me,” Abbas told Hamas leader Khaled Meshal in a meeting last month, according to a Lebanese report that Abbas later confirmed. In recent weeks, the relations have become even more strained. Abbas criticized Hamas’ public execution last month of 18 Gazans accused of collaborating with Israel and alleged that there were more. “Hamas conducted atrocities during the war in Gaza, also at its end when it executed 120 people without trial,” Abbas said Saturday in Cairo, according to Israeli news reports. So while the government lurches from one crisis to another, several Gaza police officers huddled outside a line of stores in Gaza City on a recent afternoon. They said their pay — or lack of it — had become an afterthought. “The unity government has done nothing for us,” said one traffic officer, who said he had seven children and loans. “It’s too difficult to deal with. It just considers us a bunch of terrorists.” Ruth Eglash in Jerusalem and Hazem Balousha in Gaza City contributed to this report. |