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A Palestinian man walks by a group of masked gunmen standing on a fountain in the center of Nablus during a rally Tuesday. (AP)
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| By Israel Insider staff and partners February 16, 2006 |
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The world had big dreams for the Gaza Strip after the Israeli pullout: a seaport, an airport, bus convoys to Judea and Samaria, and open border crossings that could help lift Palestinians out of crushing poverty.
But with Hamas militants' impending takeover of the Palestinian Authority following their election victory, fragile understandings painstakingly brokered by the United States are in deep peril, with the focus now on survival, not prosperity.
Most of the deals require coordination between Israel and the Palestinians, including a Palestinian commitment to prevent terrorists from infiltrating border crossings. It's difficult to envision Hamas, which is pledged to Israel's destruction, taking on that task.
It's even harder to imagine Israel sitting down with Hamas to implement the accords, once seen as key to Gaza's success and essential for creating the conditions to jump-start stalled peace talks.
There is now little talk of agreements mediated by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Nov. 15 granting Gazans an open border with Egypt, facilitating exports, setting up bus convoys, easing movement in Judea and Samaria, approving construction of a harbor and opening discussions on an airport.
With all but one of the accords still stranded on paper, progress appears doomed as long as Hamas refuses to renounce its terrorist ideology. Israel might seek to use the crossings and other issues to force Hamas to change its ways.
Hamas said Wednesday it will put together the next Palestinian government by early March, with top posts going to its own people - a scenario that seemed likely to trigger an Israeli boycott of the Palestinian Authority.
Acting Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Tuesday "all contacts" with the Palestinians will be reviewed once Hamas joins the government, until now dominated by the Fatah Party of President Mahmoud Abbas.
Hamas leaders say they will respect accords that serve Palestinian interests.
"All of these passages or crossings serve our people," Ghazi Hamad, publisher of Hamas' weekly newspaper, told The Associated Press. "I think there is no problem for coordination with Israel on these things."
Unless the militants renounce violence and recognize Israel, previous agreements will be meaningless. Israel "will not be having political negotiations with people who think we should all be killed," Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said.
He called Hamas' conditional promise to respect past accords "a lot of verbal gymnastics, a lot of double speak."
"How would it sound if I as an Israeli official said to you that we accept all the signed agreements except the ones we don't like?" Regev asked.
The accords brokered by Rice were in trouble even before the Palestinian election.
Of all the understandings, only the Rafah crossing - allowing Gazans to travel to Egypt under the supervision of European inspectors - was implemented.
Planning Minister Ghassan Khatib, who led the negotiations for the Palestinians, said, "I had no signs to leave me with any optimism that things were about to move.
"We reached a point where we stopped talking about these things," he told the AP.
Khatib said Rafah was achieved because it didn't involve Israelis, only Palestinians, Egyptians and Europeans. He said a Dec. 15 deadline for the bus convoys was missed because of Israeli security concerns.
A Dec. 31 deadline to increase the number of cargo trucks going through the Karni crossing between Gaza and Israel also passed, despite the arrival of sophisticated scanners from the U.S. to speed inspections.
The deadlines were missed when Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister who suffered a devastating stroke Jan. 4, was in power. Many believe his stand-in, Olmert, would have been more amenable to pushing the agreements forward - had Hamas not won the Jan. 25 election.
Today's emphasis is not translating Israel's pullout from Gaza last summer into a better future for the Palestinians, as had been hoped, but averting the financial collapse of the Palestinian Authority.
Israel is threatening to cut off US$50 million in monthly tax transfers to the authority. Hundreds of millions of dollars in aid from the U.S. and the European Union - the lifeline of the Palestinian economy - is also in jeopardy.
More than a hundred tons of Palestinian tomatoes, strawberries and peppers spoiled recently when Israel closed the Karni crossing for three weeks, citing a security threat, and the Palestinians refused to accept an alternative crossing.
During the closure, the Palestinians used drills provided by Israel to "dig deeper and deeper" to try to detect a tunnel and "American experts shuttled between the sides, taking photographs," Khatib said.
It was a typical exchange between Israel and the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority - rife with both tension and cooperation - but it is unlikely to be repeated in the era of Hamas.
AP contributed to this report.
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