Bernard Wasserstein: The divided states of Palestine

Suddenly there are two Palestines: a Hamas-ruled Gaza and a Fatah-controlled West Bank. It seemed to happen overnight but the roots of this division extend back far into Palestinian history. In the inter-war period, when Palestine was ruled by Britain under a League of Nations mandate, the Arab elite was divided into rival coalitions of notable families.

One, headed by Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, was traditionalist Muslim in outlook, suspicious of modernisation and Western values, and militantly hostile to Zionism and British imperialism. The mufti developed a countrywide network of power based on his control of Muslim religious institutions and trusts. He accused the Jews of designs on Muslim holy places. His followers rioted at the Western Wall in Jerusalem in 1929 and rose in revolt in 1936. Even with massive troop reinforcements and brutal repression, it took the British three years to bring the rebels to heel.

A second coalition was headed by the mufti's chief rival, Ragheb Bey Nashashibi, for long the mayor of Jerusalem. He was a more pliable character who got on better with the British and the Zionists. Whereas the mufti wore old-fashioned robes and the traditional headgear of the hajji (pilgrim to Mecca), Ragheb Bey always appeared in a smart business suit. He and his supporters were widely (and in many cases correctly) suspected of being financially beholden to the Zionists. Pro-mufti newspapers accused Nashashibi and his supporters of being "pack animals of imperialism". During the revolt the mufti's men resorted to bullyboy tactics, assassinations and intimidation to cow their rivals.

After the Israeli victory in the 1948 war, what remained of Arab Palestine was divided into two disconnected fragments. In the Egyptian-occupied Gaza strip the mufti set up a short-lived "All-Palestine Government" which drew support mainly from the refugees who had flooded in from elsewhere in Palestine. Meanwhile, what became known as the West Bank was annexed by King Abdullah of Transjordan who installed Ragheb Bey and many of his supporters in positions of authority.

Between 1948 and 1967, Gaza, with its refugee majority, sealed off from Israel and Egypt, was economically prostrate. The West Bank, where the pre-1948 settled population still formed a majority, was a little better off; its elites formed a modus vivendi with the Hashemite rulers of Jordan, and, except in the refugee camps, some semblance of normal social life continued.

The irruption of Israeli occupation into both areas in 1967 consequently evoked somewhat different reactions. In the early 1970s, resistance to Israeli rule was fiercest in Gaza until it was viciously suppressed by Ariel Sharon. By contrast, the Israelis encountered little serious impediment in the West Bank during the first two decades of the occupation. Gaza remained the poorest region of Palestine; housing conditions were grim; population density, fertility rates, and family size were among the highest in the world. Traditional clan loyalties remained a basic element in social outlooks. Much of the population depended for survival on international aid.

The first intifada was sparked off in Gaza in 1987 and then spread to the West Bank. Hamas, which emerged in Gaza during the first intifada, found its inspiring leader there: the quadriplegic cleric, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin. In several ways he resembled the mufti. He dressed in traditional garb and thought in pre-modern categories. His movement was based on Islamic institutions that also offered social services. His popularity was heightened by inflammatory religious oratory and his programme combined rigid piety with fierce rejection of Zionism, the West and any accommodation with enlightenment principles. He drew support from the most alienated and desperate sections of society.

The short-lived Israeli-Palestinian peace agreements of the 1990s offered Gazans some prospect of improvement in their conditions of life. But the promised airport and seaport in Gaza never came into being and the Israeli commitment to facilitate free passage between the two segments of the Palestinian state-in-the-making was never fulfilled. Even before the construction of the Great Wall of Palestine in the West Bank, Gaza was surrounded by a security fence that turned it into a seething cauldron without a safety valve.

As the Oslo process faltered, Hamas denounced the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority as compromisers and traitors. The PLO leaders who returned from exile in the mid-1990s to lead the authority were regarded rather like the communist leaders who returned to Germany from Moscow in 1945 as outsiders who had done well out of the wars. They were secular in outlook, schooled in the precepts of Marx rather than Mohamed. With the notable exception of Arafat, they exchanged their battle fatigues for business suits. Like the Nashashibis a generation earlier, they were accused by their opponents of selling their political souls for self-enrichment. Men such as Muhammad Dahlan, the Fatah security chief in Gaza, a sophisticated and charming thug, were widely (and often accurately) denounced as tools of the CIA.

Palestine today consists of two pitiably unviable entities, governed by two deeply unpopular movements. The mayhem, carnage and gang warfare in Gaza are unlikely to earn Hamas much new kudos. Mahmoud Abbas's pathetically belated and futile response demonstrates yet again his inadequacy as a leader.

The Israelis can do little in the short run to harm Hamas or help Abbas. In theory, Israel could at any moment switch off the electricity and water supplies in Gaza and render human existence there totally unlivable rather than merely unbearable. In practice, such action is a doomsday machine that would have such awful consequences, for Israel as well as Gazans, that it cannot be contemplated.

Israel, no less than Palestine, is a society riven by divergent visions. Beyond the obvious differences between religious and secular, between Ashkenazim (Central and East European-origin Jews) and Sephardim (Jews from the Balkans and the Muslim world), and between Sabras (Israeli-born Jews) and immigrants, lies a more profound schism in the Israeli psyche. This is the split at the historic heart of Zionism.

Some Zionists were pessimists, sempiternally suspicious of the non-Jewish world. Taking the Nazi genocide as their central point of reference, they saw a Jewish state as a fortified redoubt into which Jews might retreat and defend themselves from the unremitting and ineradicable hostility of Gentiles.

Others cautiously took a more optimistic view of human nature, viewing a Jewish state as a vehicle through which the Jews could gain a respected place among the nations. The advocates of the former view were those who called for the construction of the Great Wall of Palestine, the monstrous "security barrier" that is now nearing completion. The foremost current champion of this trend is the leader of the opposition Likud Party, Benjamin Netanyahu. The most articulate exponents of the alternative view are intellectuals in Israeli universities and creative artists such as the novelists Amos Oz and David Grossman.

The Israeli political class, no less than the Palestinian, is in the throes of a severe crisis of confidence. Over the past few months the president, the army chief of staff, the police chief and the ministers of justice and finance have all left office in various degrees of ignominy. In the wake of the disastrous Lebanese war last summer, Ehud Olmert is currently the most unpopular prime minister in Israeli history. He clings to power by his fingernails but the centre-right Kadima party, which he heads, is expected to suffer the fate of every centrist party in Israeli history and disappear by the next election.

Both Israel and Palestine, therefore, stand in urgent need of the kind of far-reaching political renewal that could be produced only by courageous leaders able to create broad coalitions in support of new initiatives. Can current desperate circumstances generate such leadership? Last week, after six years of political eclipse, Ehud Barak bounced back as leader of the Labour Party. He was a disastrous failure as prime minister in 1999-2001. But Yitzhak Rabin performed little better in his first premiership in 1974-7, yet Rabin returned as defence minister and, in 1992 as the prime minister who led Israel to her first agreement with the Palestinians. Can Barak too learn from his mistakes? He is notoriously insensitive in his dealings with colleagues and can be mulishly stubborn in negotiation. On the other hand, he is a bold strategic thinker. And as the incoming defence minister later this month, he will have a powerful base from which to launch his bid to regain the premiership.

Is there a potential negotiating partner on the Palestinian side? One intriguing candidate is Marwan Barghouti, the most prominent figure among the younger generation of Fatah leaders. He has been imprisoned by the Israelis since 2002 and, as a result, is not tarnished in the public eye with the catastrophic failures of most of the rest of the Palestinian leadership. If released, he would probably be the most popular politician in the West Bank and perhaps among Palestinians elsewhere too. A Hebrew speaker (he learned the language during an earlier term in jail in Israel), a secularist and a pragmatist, he might be an effective interlocutor with Barak.

One idea jokingly floated last week was the "four-state solution". Two Palestinian states, Gaza and the West Bank, plus two Jewish ones: the first based in Tel Aviv and the secular, cosmopolitan, wealthy, overwhelmingly Jewish coastal plain; the other inward-looking, religious, and poor, based in Jerusalem with its periphery of West Bank settlements. There is, after all, precedent in history for the simultaneous existence of two Jewish kingdoms in the country. Many religio-nationalist Jews would happily float Tel Aviv off into the Mediterranean just as some middle Americans would like to launch New York into the Atlantic.

The dead hand of history has steered the two peoples to their present impasse and beckons them towards civil war and Balkanisation. But gallows humour aside, political realities are likely to drive both sides back towards the two-state Oslo road. Notwithstanding their internecine quarrels, Palestinians retain a fundamental sense of themselves as a distinct collectivity with a common destiny. And the same is true of Israeli Jews.

On a microscopic scale, the separation of Gaza and the West Bank resembles that between East and West Pakistan in 1971. But the new state of Bangladesh had a powerful patron in neighbouring India. Hamas-controlled Gaza can look only to Iran and, to a lesser extent, Syria. Such support as they can offer lies more in the realm of rhetoric than practical action. In their tiny sliver of territory, hemmed in by Israel and Egypt, Gazans have no conception of themselves as a nation and no prospect of forming an independent state.

The West Bank, which imagines itself the Piedmont of the Palestinian Risorgimento, is by no means solidly behind Fatah. Hamas boasts considerable support in Hebron and Nablus and among the minority of the population who still live in refugee camps. But the palpable failure of Hamas in government since its election victory in January 2006 has led to general despair. "A plague on both your houses" is the most common view.

Among Israelis the crude notion that all they need to do is destroy their enemies and, if necessary, defy the world has lost credibility. The settler movement is less popular now than at any point in the past 40 years. If a sense of limits is the first step towards political understanding, the Israeli public has, albeit belatedly, begun to acquire a political education.

In spite of all the sound and fury of the of the new Islamic republic in Gaza and notwithstanding the provocative actions and words of the Israeli far right, both Israel and Palestine are today post-ideological societies, exhausted and disillusioned by profound historic failures, and in search of new leaders who can liberate them from past traumas and present miseries.

Bernard Wasserstein is professor of history at the University of Chicago

Further reading: 'Israel and Palestine: Why They Fight and Can They Stop?', Profile Books, £7.99

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