A delicate balance

It is no secret that the PLO and the Palestinian Authority leadership are participating in the boycott of Gaza, in the hope that this will turn the population against Hamas. A recent declaration by President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) gives an idea about the general drift. Local newspapers quoted him as saying that he is for opening the Rafah border crossing to Egypt, provided it is not under the control of Hamas.
Who is in control and who cooperates with Hamas is the key to the boycott. But this is not as straightforward a matter as it may appear at first sight, since a delicate balance will have to be made between the continuation of basic services to the population and boycotting Hamas if it controls them. This is the dilemma facing the PLO and PA leadership: keep the siege against Hamas without losing the support of the million and a half that live in Gaza, or risk generating a humanitarian crisis that might put an end to the boycott of Hamas.
The balance is difficult to keep, and the result is a series of crises related to basic services: electricity, hospital services, garbage collection and soon, treatment or disposal of waste water which most likely will be dumped in the sea if the boycott continues.
More recently, Fatah supporters in Gaza, who have by no means disappeared, have resorted to tactics reminiscent of those of the first intifada, including civil disobedience : demonstrations, marches, strikes and most recently, Friday prayers in the streets and not in mosques controlled by Hamas. One would wish those had been the tactics throughout the second intifada as well.
In a sense therefore, the people of Gaza are held hostage in this tug of war between Hamas and Fatah, and it is they who are paying the higher price. It is not without some irony that both sides are vying for the hearts and minds of the very victims of this struggle.
But the boycott by itself is not likely to bring Hamas down. This I think is well understood by the PA and PLO leadership. For what brought Hamas to power in the first place were the failures of the PA, especially on two counts: rampant corruption in some quarters of Fateh and the PA and failure of the political process with Israel and the continued occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
It is therefore no accident that the PA and PLO leadership is trying to remedy the situation, in so far as it can, by seeking to achieve a political breakthrough with Israel that it hopes is sufficiently convincing to the Palestinian public, thus turning the tables on Hamas. The strategy then, is the old two-pronged pincer maneuver: boycott and siege, combined with a determined effort to achieve clear political results.
This is a high-stakes game. If there is one moral to be drawn from the failure of the Oslo process and the Camp David talks that were held in July 2000 it is that no new political process is likely to succeed without first agreeing on where the process is going, the end result or final status issues as they were called by the Oslo agreements. This indeed is Abu Mazen s strategy. Since he was elected in January 2005, he has never tired of repeating his opposition to another open-ended process replicating the failed one.
In a sense therefore, the PA leadership, and Abu Mazen especially, are putting their careers on the line. It s a make-or-break-situation. There is also a double tragedy here: the Palestinian public, in Gaza especially, is held hostage in the struggle between Hamas and Fatah. But equally, the PA leadership is itself hostage to Israeli and US intransigence for it is they who can tip the scales, not through siege and boycott, but by putting an end to the 40-year old occupation, the last vestige of settler-colonialism in the world today.- Published 3/9/2007 © bitterlemons.org
George Giacaman is a political analyst and teaches in the MA Program in Democracy and Human Rights and the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at Birzeit University. A collection of his writings from the second intifada will appear in 2008. This commentary is published by DAILY NEWS EGYPT in collaboration with bitterlemons-international.org. .