With the roadmap nowhere on the horizon Mahmoud Abbas's priority now is domestic reform, writes Graham Usher in Jerusalem One week after the failed meeting with Ariel Sharon on "coordinating" the Gaza disengagement, the Palestinian leadership is grappling with the home front. For Palestinians this means addressing the blight of the four Fs -- fassad (corruption), fawda (chaos), falatan (lawlessness) and fitna (internal strife). "When there is no political horizon, people see only what is in front of their eyes -- and that is disintegration," says a Palestinian Authority official in Nablus. Last week Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, held meetings with long established PA governors, newly elected PA mayors as well as the Palestinian factions to reintegrate his authority. In all he has vowed the priority of his government is to end lawlessness, corruption and chaos whenever they appear. Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qurei, has taken to holding cabinet meetings out of the tree-lined suburbs of Ramallah to the hotter climes of Hebron, Nablus and Gaza City. The purpose is to feel the pulse of areas where the PA is conspicuous largely by its absence. On 28 June Qurei announced his willingness to form a "liberation cabinet", made up of all factions, in continuous session, meeting alternatively in Gaza and Jenin and empowered to ensure a "calm and orderly" Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the four northern West Bank settlements. It will be buttressed by a new 5,000-strong police force to buffer the PA from the settlement areas. This Palestinian spring has so far garnered a mixed harvest. In Nablus, Qurei promised its besieged residents law, order, a new hospital, a youth club, $40 million to repair its ruined infrastructure and a deal in which hundreds of fugitive militiamen would be absorbed into the PA security forces. He was met with gunfire and a tossed grenade from dissident fighters in Fatah's Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades (AMB) outraged that "officials live in luxury while we, who gave so much to Palestine, have gotten nothing". In Jenin -- a critical town to control given its proximity to the four to-be- evacuated West Bank settlements -- on 23 June a full-scale battle erupted between the PA and the AMB, leaving one police officer dead and ten AMB men arrested. The apparent spark was the detention of an AMB man following an ambush on Jenin law-maker, Jamal Shati. Dozens stormed a local police station. Thousands attended the funeral as much in protest at the disorder as in grief for the officer. And in Gaza Hamas dismissed Qurei's invitation to join the "liberation cabinet" as a publicity stunt and ruse to conceal the fact that the PA "is incapable of managing the settlements after the [Israeli] withdrawal". The Islamists are also mobilising patrols to buffer the settlements and to show there are now two elected authorities in Gaza, not one. The only area where some success has been seen is the restoration of calm, declared by the factions in March. Last week, an Islamic Jihad ambush killed two settler children near Hebron in retaliation for Israeli sweeps that saw 61 of their people arrested, mostly in the Hebron area. The Israeli army also killed three Palestinians in Gaza, allegedly for trying to attack settlements. But generally the violence is down following talks between Abbas and the factions. "The truce is holding," says Taysir Nasrallah, a Fatah leader in Nablus. "But it rests on the most fragile of foundations." The PA's focus on calm and public order is born of the realisation that nothing is going to move in the political process on the side of the disengagement, and will only do so afterwards if the PA can demonstrate governance in the "liberated" areas. "The most important thing for us is to prove to everyone we deserve a state. Gaza will be the model of the Palestinian state," says Jibril Rajoub, PA National Security adviser. Governance, believes the PA leadership, is the key that will not only stem the popular tide that is drifting inexorably towards Hamas. It will generate international pressure to extract from Sharon those things that alone will make Gaza governable, at least in the short-term: Palestinian control over the borders crossing and access to Israel, the West Bank and the world through the re-opening of the safe passage and Gaza sea and airports. Movement on these issues is crucial to Abbas's standing in Palestinian opinion, says Palestinian analyst and pollster, Khalil Shikaki. "If the PA, Abu Mazen [Abbas] and Fatah do not add anything to disengagement other than what has already been accomplished, if disengagement is not seen as part of the PA's diplomatic strategy, then the PA cannot own the disengagement. But Hamas can own it. It can say the Gaza withdrawal was the result of its strategy of armed resistance rather than the PA's strategy of diplomatic negotiations. And this is what Hamas will say the closer we get to parliamentary elections and as long as disengagement does not bring Palestinian jobs, freedom of movement and access to outside markets, including Israel's."
