Less than a week into his presidency Mahmoud Abbas is facing his first political crisis, writes Graham Usher in Jerusalem Mahmoud Abbas's period of grace "didn't even get three days, not even three hours," he complained to Israel's left-wing Yahad (formerly Meretz) leader, Yossi Beilin, on Monday. Beilin was heading an Israeli "peace delegation" to break his government's quarantine on the new Palestinian president following an attack in Gaza that left six Israelis and three Palestinians dead. The two men met in Abbas's Ramallah headquarters beneath a portrait of Yasser Arafat. It was a fitting banner. Rarely has Abbas felt so much like his predecessor -- caught between an unaccountable armed resistance on the one side and an Israeli prime minister whose every move appears calculated to divest him of any semblance of national authority on the other. Abbas's gracelessness began the morning after his election victory, and not only because of the lower-than-expected voter turn-out and accusations of fraud that accompanied the result. Hamas resumed rocket attacks in and out of Gaza, continuing a low intensity and asymmetrical conflict in the Strip that, during the previous month, had left 41 Palestinians and six Israeli soldiers dead. Two days later an Islamic Jihad member killed a settler outside Gaza's Morag settlement. And on 13 January a three-man operation by Hamas, the cross-factional Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) and Fatah's Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades killed themselves and six Israelis after storming Gaza's main commercial Karni crossing point into Israel. Hamas said the hit was "a message to the Israeli enemy, definitely not to Abu Mazen (Abbas)", while a PRC spokesman said it was "further proof that the enemy will leave Gaza under fire from the strikes of the resistance". But only the blind could fail to read the sub-text: that whatever mandate Abbas had received in the presidential elections it did not extend to his call to end the "militarised Intifada", at least to those who wage it. Nor did it mean any change to Israel's attitude to the Palestinian Authority. On the contrary, following the attack Ariel Sharon drew from the same armory that he had deployed (uselessly) against Arafat. He froze all relations with the new Palestinian leader. He shut down Karni and therefore Gaza, since the northern Erez crossing has long been closed to all but a handful of Palestinians while the southern Rafah crossing has been closed since Palestinian guerrillas ambushed an army outpost there on 12 December (leaving between 7,000 to 10,000 Palestinians stranded on the Egyptian side of the border). Finally he rolled Israeli tanks into Gaza City and Khan Younis refugee camp, leaving a trail of 16 Palestinians dead, including a 51-year-old woman and a 10-year-old boy. The resistance fought back, pitching missiles onto settlements within the Strip and at Israeli towns beyond it, leaving several Israelis wounded, one critically. The name of this old/new Israeli game is pressure: "pushing Abbas into a corner, to drive him to confront the terror organisations," in the description of Israeli analyst, Aluf Benn. Pressure rarely worked with Arafat. It has even less chance with Abbas -- not because he is strong but because, like Arafat, he is weak. The weakness was shown in the Arafat- like responses Abbas made to the squeeze. To ward off a full-scale Israeli incursion, he enlisted the PLO executive to demand a "stop to all military actions that harm our national goals and give Israel the excuse to obstruct Palestinian stability", while quietly conditioning the call on Israel ending its military operations. He also got the PA cabinet to instruct Palestinian police to "prevent attacks", though with little evidence that the police in Gaza were actually preventing them. It was "a small but positive sign", said an aide to the Israeli prime minister. For now it is the only sign Abbas is likely to make. Instead -- he told Beilin -- he will "intensify efforts to reach a comprehensive [Palestinian] cease-fire, unconditional on Israel's behaviour, but as a Palestinian national interest". Few would question that a comprehensive cease-fire is in the national interest or that most of the Palestinian factions, including Hamas, are ready to sign on to one. But it is a non-starter if it's unconditional, says senior Hamas leader in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh. "There must be conditions, which the Zionist enemy must abide by in exchange for such a truce," he told the Palestinian-Israeli bitter-lemons website on 16 January. These include "a halt to incursions and attacks, a halt to assassinations and the release of prisoners and detainees". But Sharon is no more interested in a mutual cease-fire now than he was in the past. Even before the Karni attack the most he offered was "quiet for quiet". In the aftermath he appears poised between two roads to ensure Palestinian docility ahead of his army's planned disengagement from Gaza. The first preferred road is to get the PA to do the job for him, exporting what is now an external Palestinian-Israeli confrontation into an internal, intra-Palestinian one. Whatever the occasional bluster from this or that PA commander, few Palestinians believe Abbas has the capacity, legitimacy, will or incentive to take up that fight. The second road is to allow the Israeli army to do the job "without restrictions". This could mean penetrative incursions into southern and northern Gaza to secure the widest possible buffers for the settlements. In the worse case, it could mean the total re-conquest of Gaza to crush the resistance, if not permanently, then at least for the duration of the disengagement. Sharon and his army are now seriously contemplating this, desperate to avoid compounding their contest with the settlers by a fight with the Palestinians. It would of course entail an enormous cost in human life, mainly among the Palestinians. But the main political victim would be Abbas and the moment of grace his election victory appeared to herald.
