Rapprochement with Israel and confrontation with Hamas are not likely to resolve the present Palestinian stalemate. Doaa El-Bey sees what might work instead At a time when Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has refused to open a dialogue with Hamas, he accepted to talk with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in the Sharm El-Sheikh meeting which expressed its support for Abbas. Meanwhile, Israel was hailed for accepting a conditional release of the foreign aid that has been frozen since the election of Hamas in January last year. Bilal Al-Hassan wrote that inter-Palestinian fighting over Gaza took the Palestinian issue to a dead end because a geographic division was added to the political differences between Fatah and Hamas. The two parties have a different perspective of the situation: Hamas said that it seized control of Gaza in order to clean it of the security bodies which allegedly worked according to an external agenda that posed a danger to their party as well as to Fatah. Thus, their party is ready now to open dialogue with Fatah in order to rearrange security in Gaza and return the situation back to normal. However, Fatah viewed Hamas control of Gaza as a premeditated battle against Palestinian legitimacy and categorically refused to open a dialogue with Hamas. As a result of the absence of dialogue, as Hassan elaborated, a strange coalition was formed between the present emergency government and the US in which Israel could be the main remote player. "The picture of inter- Palestinian fighting is grim. There is no hope for any future because there is mutual rejection between the two main parties," he wrote in the London-based daily Asharq Al-Awsat. The last and only hope could come from the Arab countries in which one or more than one state could initially arrange to meet each party separately in order to listen to its point of view. Then a meeting that takes in all the parties could come at a later stage. He did not mention how the Arab role that failed to resolve inter-Palestinian differences in the past could now do the job at hand. Mahmoud Al-Mubarak regarded the latest Palestinian crisis as an indication of the inadequate understanding of democracy. He viewed Mahmoud Abbas's decisions to stop the application of the constitution, extend the state of emergency without consulting with the legislative council and gather all the authorities of the elected legislative council under his control as proof of a deficient understanding. "The situation on the ground says that Arab governments accept democracy as long as it conforms with their policies and keeps them in power. If it doesn't, it would be crushed even at the expense of citizens," Al-Mubarak wrote in the London-based daily Al-Hayat. Thus, in order to thwart Palestinian democracy, the expected scenario according to Al-Mubarak, is not hard to anticipate -- Abbas would declare Hamas a terrorist organisation and close all the doors of dialogue with it. Then he would call for early legislative elections. As a terrorist organisation, Hamas would be deprived of participation, something that would start a civil war which would reach unprecedented levels. Abdul-Rahman Al-Rashed ruled out that a confrontation with Hamas would resolve the Palestinian issue. Instead it would serve Hamas's interests and prolong the suffering of the Palestinian people. He wrote in Asharq Al-Awsat that if the parties attending the Sharm El-Sheikh meeting decided to deal only with Abbas and ignore the democratically elected Hamas government and its Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, then they should leave Hamas and Gaza alone at present. He added that the meeting should not focus on an action plan against Hamas in Gaza, but on ways to boost peace. "It is high time to reform the Palestinian Authority whose performance and policies have always been subject to criticism in the Palestinian streets. By so doing, it would regain the confidence of its people who elected Hamas only because it wanted to vote against the authority," he wrote. Al-Rashed concluded that if the new government succeeded in regaining the confidence of its people, then the credit should go to Hamas for two reasons: it helped the Palestinian Authority resolve its problems on the one hand, then let thaw frozen foreign aid that represents more than half the income of the authority on the other. There were no developments that caused optimism this week. There are no signs that the Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa will succeed in his mission in Lebanon. His failure showed that the Lebanese crisis could not be resolved within Lebanon. "The contradictory stands of the opposition groups that initially accepted settlements then rejected them showed that the decisions of the opposition are taken outside Lebanon and are influenced by external calculations," Elias Harfoush wrote in Al-Hayat. Resolving the situation in Darfur seemed far from achievement this week. A meeting on Darfur held in Paris and attended by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was not attended by either the Sudanese government or the African Union.
