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Under stress, Palestinian territories pull apart
Fracture lines are political, cultural, economic
GAZA CITY - Ali Hussein is making money, quite a bit of it, which places the low-key sales manager in a small minority in this economically depleted city.
The company he works for is the sole provider of videoconferencing equipment in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the separate parts of an elusive Palestinian state whose connections today run mostly through broadband and cellphones. More than 100 clients, including universities, trade associations and government ministries, have turned to him for links to the classrooms, offices and committee rooms in the West Bank that they can no longer visit.
"These two places should be one," Hussein said. "In the meantime, there's us."
Since withdrawing from Gaza a year and a half ago, the Israeli government has severed this coastal strip from the West Bank. The Palestinians have fractured politically at the same time. Many Gazans have embraced Hamas, the radical Islamic movement that won national elections in January 2006, while the West Bank has remained more loyal to the once-dominant Fatah party.
The ensuing power struggle has battered Gaza as Palestinians in the two territories have veered further apart, making the emergence of a viable state even more difficult.
Long the poor provincial cousin of the West Bank, Gaza has been further impoverished in the past year by Israeli border restrictions and an international aid embargo. Unemployment and poverty rates have jumped sharply in the strip, a largely resourceless 140-square-mile stretch of sand dunes, warrens of gray tenements and roads cratered by Israeli artillery shells and neglect. Eight in 10 of Gaza's 1.4 million residents now rely to some extent on U.N. food aid.
The West Bank, whose roughly 2.5 million Palestinian residents have long enjoyed greater freedom to work, study and travel abroad, has also slid, but not nearly as dramatically.
Nearly 500,000 Palestinians living in what is now Israel fled to the West Bank and Gaza during the 1948-49 war that accompanied the nation's founding. Israel occupied Gaza and the West Bank in the 1967 Middle East war and began building a network of Jewish settlements inside them. Israel placed few restrictions on Palestinian travel between the two regions, whose distinct politics, culture and economies grew closer.
In signing the 1993 Oslo accords, Israel pledged to treat the West Bank and Gaza as "a single territorial unit" and guaranteed "safe passage" for Palestinians traveling between them. The arrangement functioned sporadically before collapsing after the second Palestinian uprising began in September 2000.
Israel withdrew from its settlements in Gaza in September 2005, in part to establish a southern border that was simpler for its military to defend. In a deal brokered by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Israel agreed to begin bus convoys between the West Bank and the strip by December 2005, but the agreement was never implemented because of Israeli security concerns.
Shin Bet, Israel's security service, reported that Palestinians fired 1,726 crude rockets from Gaza last year -- more than four times as many as in 2005. Two Israelis were killed and 163 wounded in the attacks, which persist today despite several intensive Israeli military forays into the strip last year that killed nearly 400 Palestinians.
"I am not one of those who say there are two Palestinian peoples, but there are two mentalities, two geographies, two economies, that make the places different," said Shin Bet's director, Yuval Diskin. "We have very strong security interests in not allowing strong ties between Gaza and the West Bank. If you open channels between the areas, you will see an increase in terror in the West Bank."
Intent to divide
Since leaving Gaza, Israel has maintained control over the crossings into Israel, the strip's airspace and coastal waters, and the population registry used to assign Palestinian identity cards and travel documents. The West Bank remains a closed military zone, which Gaza residents have been denied permission to enter since Hamas's election.
Palestinian officials say the growing separation is designed to prevent an economically sustainable state from emerging in Gaza and the West Bank.
"This is clearly Israel's intent," said Mohammed Dahlan, a powerful Fatah lawmaker from Gaza who has negotiated with Israel over the years. "It's not just a question of besieging Gaza, but of separating it from the rest of the world."
During factional fighting over the past year that killed more than 100 Palestinians in Gaza, Dahlan rallied his armed supporters against Hamas's militia, making clear that his goal was to challenge the Islamic movement for control of the strip. But the better-trained Hamas gunmen beat Fatah's more numerous ones, in the assessment of Israeli security officials and the Islamic movement.
"We are able to say that Fatah's effort to erode our government has ended," said Mushir al-Masri, 30, a Hamas lawmaker from northern Gaza.
Gaza has emerged as the seat of Palestinian political authority since the victory of Hamas. During its nearly one year in power, the movement has imprinted its uncompromising vision of Islam on the government at a time when foreign donors, who cut off aid following its election, are demanding that it renounce its founding charter and recognize Israel.
Dahlan, who wields great influence in the Fatah-controlled security services he helped build more than a decade ago, has been recruiting, training and arming fresh forces since the two parties agreed last month in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, to stop fighting and form a power-sharing government.
"Hamas is living as if Gaza is the most important geographical unit in Palestine -- its own kingdom of Gaza," said Dahlan, 45, who grew up in the central Gaza city of Khan Younis. "To me, the West Bank and Gaza are the two lungs of Palestine. We cannot live without one of them."
Apart from some reprisal kidnappings and vandalism by Fatah in the West Bank, the factional fighting has remained rooted in Gaza. Israeli security officials say Hamas's battlefield strength gave it the upper hand in the Mecca negotiations. Although it ceded control of some important ministries, the Islamic movement has refused to soften its stance toward Israel, as Fatah officials have demanded.
"The Israelis are trying to create a split reality on the ground," said Ahmed Bahar, 58, a Hamas founder who is now the deputy speaker of parliament.
On the walls of Bahar's office hang posters of Aziz Duwaik, the Hamas speaker of the Palestinian parliament who is one of 38 West Bank lawmakers in Israeli prisons. Nearly all of them are Hamas members, arrested for belonging to an illegal organization, and their imprisonment has concentrated power in the hands of their Gaza counterparts.
In a meeting hall one recent morning, four Gaza lawmakers chatted with four legislators from the West Bank by videoconference -- the weekly meeting of parliament's economics committee. "I can assure you we are one geography and one people," Bahar said. "With one culture and one enemy."
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