Fatah Accompli

When Palestine fractured along party lines – Gaza turning to ultra-militant and profoundly anti-Israel Hamas and the West Bank to the more moderate Fatah – the West flatly rejected the authority of the Hamas and threw its support to the Fatah-led West Bank. Hamas used its newly found land base to launch attacks and lob missiles into Israel. Israel pushed its forces into Gaza more than once and created an international incident by firing on and boarding a Turkish ship bound for Gaza. And as I have recently blogged, as the time when the issue goes before the UN General Assembly is only few months away, the moment to recognize a new independent Palestinian state appears to be imminent.

But Israel stands fast against relinquishing its West Bank Jewish settlements and transferring power over its capital and holy city, Jerusalem (equally holy to Muslim, Jew and Christian), to a separate state over which it retains no dominion or control. Seeking some form of guaranteed borders and enduring peace, Israel is clearly not ready to let go over territories from which it expects militant strikes to be mounted against her people. It is a perfect storm that just got a lot choppier.

That Hamas and Fatah were at each other’s political throats served Israel’s grand plan. Worried over its future relations with the new military caretaker government in Egypt – a country that had maintained a working peace treaty with Israel through the Sadat and Mubarak years – and despite assurances from Egypt’s new leaders that the treaty would be observed, Israel was squirming at every suggestion that its relationship with Egypt would no longer be a simple maintenance of the status quo ante. But what was about to unfold shattered any illusion in Israel or the West that the new Egypt would adhere to the favorable pro-Western policies of the ousted Mubarak regime.

Warming to both the Muslim Brotherhood and the anti-American government in Iran, the new military leaders were clearly charting a new course for Egypt’s future, away from the West and evolving more as a regional power with its own agenda. When Egyptian authorities brokered a new Palestinian unity between previously warring Hamas and Fatah factions, moving toward new elections in a reunified Palestine, the writing was on the wall for both the recalcitrant Netanyahu government in Israel and the ever-waning power of the United States.

The US loss in prestige in the Middle East was precipitous, both in its failure to achieve any movement from Israel toward a peaceful separation of Palestine into an independent state and in its seemingly failed military efforts in both Iraq – where the removal of a Sunni minority government effectively pushed Iraq squarely into the Iranian sphere of influence – and Afghanistan – where Taliban forces have achieve heightened levels of control over most of the country.

While it is unclear if the truce between Hamas and Fatah will hold, both the US and Israel have flatly rejected the involvement of Hamas in any going-forward Palestinian government, a position that may be politically unsustainable and one that has virtually no regional support. Hamas, which drew heavy support from Syria, may have felt weakened by the protests against its championing government there. Hence the time for the rapprochement seemed to be ripe, and Hamas played on Fatah’s own frustration with the progress of the US-led peace process. Hamas does not seem to favor negotiations with Israel, while Fatah still believes may bear fruit with the increased pressure from the “unity” government effected by the joining of Hamas and Fatah.

The guarantee of peaceful co-existence that seems at the heart of Israel’s demands appears as elusive as ever, but Israel’s hand in the dispute appears to be weaker than it has in years. It also appears that American influence in the region is slipping away. The United States looks like a nation in nascent decline, her political leadership locked in a struggle that threatens impasse at every turn, an economy in shambles looking more than ever like a country headed for the double-dip recession and a nation whose failed military policies are viewed in the region as varying aspects of a big and out-of-control bully.

I’m Peter Dekom, and it saddens me to watch as a seemingly hopelessly deadlocked Congress has never been less able to create a sustainable and credible foreign policy in the Middle East.