Ziad Asali; Lebanon Daily Star, 30.06.06

The present crisis in the West Bank and Gaza reflects not only divisions between Israel and the Palestinians, or those between secular nationalists led by President Mahmoud Abbas and the Islamist movement Hamas, but also profound divisions within Hamas itself.
 
These divisions were dramatically exposed by the capture of an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, during a raid last Sunday on an Israeli military base near Gaza by Palestinians aligned with elements in Hamas, and the killing of an Israeli settler. As a consequence of Israel's brutal military assault on Gaza, the Palestinian people are once again undergoing in incalculable suffering.The raid was intended to undercut the negotiations that Prime Minister Ismail Haniyya, a member of Hamas, was conducting with Abbas over Palestinian strategy for dealing with Israel. Now that Shalit is being held, presumably in Gaza, Haniyya has been put in an even more difficult position than before.
 
Haniyya was pursuing talks with a great sense of urgency, and had reached an agreement with Abbas on the formation of a national unity government. The threat of assassination, with the Israeli military already striking at Gaza, may have convinced many Hamas leaders of the wisdom of striking a deal with the secular Fatah.
 
Most reports in both the Israeli and Palestinian media suggest that the raid against the Israeli base was authorized not by the Hamas leadership on the ground in Gaza, but by more radical Hamas leaders outside of Palestine, most notably the Damascus-based Khaled Meshaal, without consulting the leadership in Gaza. Hamas leaders inside Gaza have been calling for the release of Shalit, to no avail.
 
What has been dramatically exposed in this dangerous turn of events is a fundamental split within Hamas, with two competing priorities - the cause of Palestinian nationalism on the one hand, and a brand of political Islamism dedicated to a new, revolutionary regional order, on the other.
 
Central to Hamas' platform since its founding in 1987 has been the idea that these two agendas are complementary, and that the path to Palestinian national liberation comes through the implementation in Palestinian society of the ultra-conservative social and political agenda of the Muslim Brotherhood. In fact, there was always a strong potential contradiction between the competing agendas of nationalism and revolutionary political Islam, and in the end one must win out over the other.
 
Hamas could juggle these two agendas for as long as it was an opposition party that represented no more than 20 percent of the Palestinian people. Following the elections last January in which the movement won a majority of seats in Parliament, however, the exigencies of national leadership made this contradiction increasingly untenable.
 
It is becoming clearer that the Hamas leadership is dividing between those, primarily in Gaza and the West Bank, who are essentially nationalists willing to begin to take the steps needed to join the secularists in seriously pursuing independent statehood alongside Israel, and those mostly located outside of Palestine, who are more committed to a religious ideology that is in fundamental contradiction with the goals of statehood.
 
Indeed, some Hamas leaders are acting as if they might even prefer to avoid resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, since the pan-Islamic movement and those states supporting its activities stand to benefit more from keeping the cause alive and the conflict going than by ending it.
 
An additional complication is that the more radical Hamas leaders outside of Gaza and the West Bank are in control of the funds provided by Iran and others. This ensures if not their primacy, at least their ability to act independently of the Hamas leadership in Gaza, as demonstrated by the crisis over the captured Israeli soldier.
 
What is happening is an attempt to subordinate the Palestinian cause and national movement to a broader Islamist regional program and the states exploiting this. The late President Yasser Arafat had many flaws as a leader, but he did succeed in wresting the Palestinian cause away from the agendas of specific Arab states and from Arab nationalism in general, while insisting on the primacy of Palestinian decision-making. 
Palestinians need to recognize that if, having freed themselves from the grip of the interests of Arab states, they allow themselves to become pawns in a regional Islamist strategy, this could well signal the end of the Palestinian national movement.
 
Israel and the United States make a serious error in declining to distinguish between different factions within Hamas, while blaming all Palestinians, Abbas included, for the actions of extremist groups. But Palestinians are also making a mistake in seeking a false united front that only ends up promoting leaders whose agenda is not geared toward the single, overriding aim of national independence for Palestine.
Palestinians cannot allow themselves to become proxies or bargaining chips in someone else's game. They must speak and act for themselves, and their national policies must reflect the support of the vast majority of Palestinians for ending the conflict by establishing an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza, alongside Israel.
 
Ziad Asali is president of the American Task Force on Palestine. He wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR.