Meanwhile in Ramallah...

Focus on Gaza, ruled by Western bête noire Hamas, has in recent months drawn attention away from the siuation in the West Bank, where our 'good Palestinians', Fatah, hold sway.

Now that the two Palestinian territories have split into Hamas-governed and Fatah-governed enclaves, the Western strategy is to show the Palestinians the rewards of obeying the master and the costs of disobediance. So, the public in Gaza are denied food and medicine (with Fatah's collaboration) until they learn to have a government more to our liking. And the West Bank is given the rewards that flow to those who kneel before Washington.

Or so the plan goes. In fact, as Arthur Nelson reports from Ramallah in the West Bank, the demonstration model is not looking quite as attractive is its supposed to.

"More typical events in the last week have included a mysterious explosion, continued Israeli army raids, and a major downtown gunfight between PA ’security’ forces in balaclavas and youths from the city’s Amari refugee camp. The violence, unheard outside Ramallah, is at once cause, effect and byproduct of a pervasive gloom that has settled over ‘Fatahland’ like smog."

"In private, moderate former cabinet ministers now compare the government of PA president Mahmoud Abbas to France’s Vichy regime under German occupation. In public, meanwhile, West Bank trades unions affiliated with Fatah are battening down the hatches in an increasingly bitter dispute with the PA that has already sparked a two-day national strike this month."

"Without western aid, the PA would surely collapse, and that might be a bad thing. But the funnelling of donor dollars here is socially engineering an alternative Palestinian capital, cut off from the rest of the West Bank, and the world. The strings attached to the aid economy – market liberalisation and a crushing of the Intifada’s resistance dynamics – only reinforce the sense that Palestine has become a truncated, failed police state before it is even sovereign"

"Opposition to this trend is far from easy. The activists of Hamas, still the majority party in the elected Palestinian Legislature, are in hiding, or in jail. Police violence is endemic. Protests, such as those against Annapolis and Bush’s visit, are routinely suppressed with force. Fatah functionaries stand guard in Hamas mosques to ensure that free religious assembly does not turn into anything more civic-minded."

While the focus remains on the Palestinians writhing under our boot in Gaza, who may or may not be living up to the high moral standards we demand of them, the crimes of our allies in the West Bank go unreported, unlamented and ignored. But when, as seems increasingly likely, Fatah splits into collaborationist and nationalist camps, and bloodshed ensues, it will be no less calamitous for the Palestinian people or for the cause of peace than the Hamas-Fatah violence of 2006-07. The West's strategy of pummelling the Palestinians into submission, imagining that a point will come when they surrender their fundamental rights, is of course doomed to fail. The question is how much damage will be done to the Palestinian society, and how much blood will flow, before our governments recognise the futility (if not the abject immorality) of this course of action.