Palestine
On The Brink Of Civil War?
By Nigel Parry
20 December 2006
The
Electronic Intifada
Since the Palestinian elections
on 25 January 2006 brought a resounding Hamas victory, Fatah and its
US and Israeli allies have been working to destabilize the democratically-elected
government.
Hamas truly did deserve a
chance at power after a year of unilateral ceasefire in the face of
Israeli assassinations of its leaders, massive Israeli confiscation
of Palestinian land, and the ongoing daily brutality of Israel's military
occupation. And it certainly deserved the opportunity after seven years
of Fatah's abject failure during the "peace process", leaving
nothing but a legacy of continuously-colonized land while Fatah officials
blatantly embraced self-serving corruption and overt pandering to US
and Israeli interests.
Following the elections,
in the spring, Israel began a process of starving Gaza via blockade
to communicate to its one million residents that their vote didn't count.
Just so the West Bank was not left out — and Gaza really got the
message — Israel encouraged the international community to cease
aid to the Palestinian Authority. In the summer and autumn, Israel launched
two massive military campaigns in Gaza, resurrecting its mid-Intifada
policy of overtly destroying official Palestinian Authority infrastructure
-- now under the control of Hamas -- targeting ministry building after
ministry building and plunging the wider population into chaos with
massive demolitions of civilian infrastructure including bridges, roads,
and power plants.
The obvious and ultimate
end to this brutish and fundamentally anti-human means is civil war.
You can only squeeze an entire population for so long, and employ the
combined political might of the United States with Israel's military
might — to attempt to shore up a failed, corrupt party against
a democratically-elected government — before the fault lines you
encouraged start rumbling and the ground starts shaking. And civil war
is the obvious direction things are heading towards.
Rattling the cage
With the help of one faction
of Palestinian prisoners, the US prison administrators and Israeli prison
guards are rattling the cage and encouraging the brawl. Today, as if
to demonstrate how the conflict between the US-Israel-Fatah alliance
and Hamas has spiraled to new lows, news reports quote Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice declaring that she intends to ask Congress for
tens of millions of dollars to "strengthen the security forces"
of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Thus, putting more guns in the
hands of the people that were not elected. And of course, this was not
the first US payoff to Abbas for this very same purpose.
The current strife was preceded
by several events whose exact details are murky. In Palestine, it is
often hard to discern whether violence sparked from a tribal or political
motive because the overall pressure cooker effect of the ongoing Israeli
occupation's violence, on every Palestinian soul, has the effect of
blurring the precise line where rage reaches for the gun. Yet the obvious
and desperate impetus to act swiftly to intervene and address the primary
concern of reducing violence on the ground goes unheeded.
Palestinians are reeling
from a century of systematic destruction of their way of life at every
possible level. Instead of pouring gasoline on the fire, as the US-Israel-Fatah
coalition has been doing, and instead of debating the price of petrol,
as the international community has busied itself with throughout the
entire history of this conflict, we need to recognize that events are
fast reaching the straw breaking the camel's back moment.
"Interesting
times"
It is odd, in this world
of space flight, laser vision correction, and million dollar marketing
campaigns that precisely target frighteningly exact demographics, that
few seem to grasp that 'business as usual' in the Middle East can only
be destined to lead to more suffering, death, and loss of hope, and
that the time to act was yesterday.
The oft-quoted Chinese curse
condemns us to "live in interesting times". The universal
blessing that all people of conscience should hope for, while watching
current events unfold in Palestine, is that our world's future is one
that is characterized by peace and creativity rather than by the war
and destruction that seems to be the prevailing diplomatic tool of choice.
Whether that sea change can come or not is patently not a matter to
leave up to the diplomats.
Nigel Parry
is a cofounder of the Electronic Intifada.
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