Assailed by Israel from without, the PA leadership is self-destructing from within, writes Graham Usher from Jerusalem History will judge what lessons Israel will take on board from the Or Commission's investigation into the killings of 12 Palestinian citizens of Israel during the "internal Intifada" of October 2000. There is no need for history concerning Israel's policies towards those other 3.2 million Palestinians under its charge in Gaza and the West Bank. These policies are current, military and openly declared as a "new and different chapter" by Israel's Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz. They consist of severing all contacts with the Palestinian Authority (and therefore all obligations under the roadmap); round-the- clock arrest and search raids in West Bank Palestinian cities and villages; warnings that Yasser Arafat may "soon" have to be banished and Gaza invaded; and, above all, a relentless war against Hamas at "all levels of its leadership". Since a Hamas suicide bomber killed 21 civilians on a Jerusalem bus last month the Israeli army has killed 15 Palestinians in six "targeted" assassinations in the Gaza Strip. The latest dead were Hamas activists Khader Husari and Munsar Knita, slain by missiles fired by helicopters into a teeming side street in Gaza City on 1 September. Thirty other Palestinians were wounded, some seriously, all of them civilians. Israel says the assassinations will continue "every few hours" until and unless the PA acts against the militias. The PA protests it cannot act as long as the killings continue, and is clamoring for international intervention. Without such intervention, or indeed condemnation, it takes measures that leave Israel indifferent and Palestinians outraged: tipping earth into tunnels allegedly used to smuggle weapons from Egypt into Gaza, freezing accounts of Islamic charities whose services are universally viewed as helping the poor and mobilising what remains of the PA police forces to thwart the launching of Hamas Qassam rockets at Israeli towns like Ashkelon. Meanwhile, Mofaz says the army is already dusting down plans for a "ground" invasion of Gaza should the rockets continue. Attacked from without, Palestinians see only self-destruction within. The most graphic sign of decay is the snarling, self-indulgent fight that has again erupted between Arafat and his appointed Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) over powers of appointment and control of the police forces. On Thursday Abbas is due to present parliament with a report on his government's first 100 days in office and may well seek a vote of confidence for its continuation. It is unclear whether it will be granted, given his government's failure to sustain the Palestinian ceasefire, implement meaningful reforms or in any way relax Israel's crippling occupation. To avert such a showdown -- and the threat of Abbas's resignation -- over 200 Palestinian politicians, academics and public figures have urged their warring leaders to bury their differences and "head off all attempts ... taken by the enemy, mainly the government of the Israeli occupation, to sabotage our national unity". Most Palestinian observers believe some sort of compromise will be reached, even if few think it will hold. It may be true that Arafat and Abbas "hate each other now", in the view of PA parliament Speaker Ahmed Qrei (Abu Ala). But it is no less true that each man's political survival is inextricably tied to the other. And survival is the only strategic goal the PA and they now have. There are also attempts to resuscitate the corpse of what was once the Palestinian ceasefire, with quiet meetings between Hamas and PA officials in Cairo. Hamas and other sources now acknowledge that the Jerusalem bus bombing was a rogue operation unauthorised by the leadership. But they insist that any new truce must be reciprocated with "guarantees" that Israel will end the assassinations. Israel wants disarmament up front, verifiable and total. Faced with its own Sunni Islamist resistance in IraqWashington is unlikely to demur. Ordinary Palestinians watch these Byzantine intrigues with growing desperation. Mohamed is a Palestinian taxi driver from Abu Dis, a Palestinian village of 30,000 in occupied East Jerusalem. Concrete walls 10 metres high and hundreds of metres long divide them from their businesses, churches, mosques and families in the rest of East Jerusalem. Abu Dis lies near the latest stretch of Israel's security barrier. Mohamed is convinced that it will cage him and his kin as ruthlessly and irreversibly as it has caged the Palestinian towns, villages and farmlands along the West Bank's northern border with Israel. He sums up the current Palestinian "confusion" thus: he does not believe the roadmap can go anywhere but wants the Palestinian factions to renew the ceasefire if only to stop the construction of the "Berlin wall". As for Abbas and his 100 days of reform, he shrugs his shoulders. "Abu Mazen is like a photograph from yesterday's papers. He means nothing to us here."
