A Silver Lining in Gaza?

Violence is never far from the surface of Palestinian society, but it’s rarely so plainly self-destructive as the emerging civil war between Hamas and Fatah. The murderous struggle for power that has divided Gaza and the West Bank into Hamastan and Fatahland looks like the last nail in the coffin of any chance of two states, at least any time soon.

But it’s rarely acknowledged that, even before the factions started dropping their opponents’ chefs off tall buildings, the Palestinian territories were nowhere near ready for statehood. It’s common to assume that there is some kind of wilful refusal on the part of the West to allow the recognition of the two-state solution, a stubborn, spiteful reluctance to do what’s right. It is no such thing.

New states need time and effort to help them stand alone, to be able to enforce their authority, to defend themselves and fit into the international system. In the years following independence, Israel needed the military support of France and Britain, and to be propped up financially by West Germany. East Timor, the last state to gain its independence, needed the midwifery skills of both the Australian military and the UN, and it stills needs their assistance, five years on.

Any new state needs a national identity that gives its people an attachment to its territory, a government that can enforce its authority across the whole of that territory, institutions that work, and, usually, the support of a sponsor. A state that lacks these, is, regardless of who recognises it and however many fine words are said in its support, will fail, in one of the numerous ways that states can collapse, divide, be undermined, or invaded.

The usual concept for a Palestinian state - recognition of a unified nation consisting of Gaza and the West Bank, with the two joined by a corridor of land exchanged with the Israelis, and the whole state governed from the West Bank by a unified government - is a recipe for failure.

The territories are not a proper country, but are an artificial cobbling-together of two unconnected areas of the old mandated Palestine. The West Bank and Gaza’s only connection is that both identify themselves as not being nations in themselves, but as territories full of refugees from their real country. It is as nonsensical as if Wales and Scotland were to form a union, governed from Edinburgh, based solely on their Celtic ethnicity and their hatred for the English.

Only it’s worse than that, since Wales and Scotland have history, institutions and identities that don’t depend on their common enemy. The Palestinians don’t. When Israel was created, many of the Palestinian refugees fled from Israel to what was then Transjordan, now Jordan, and which then controlled the West Bank. Others went north to Lebanon, south to into Egyptian-occupied Gaza, and others scattered further. But those who would come under Israeli occupation in 1967 saw themselves not as nations under occupation, but as exiles facing their expeller.

Unlike the hundreds of thousands of Jews of Arabia who were expelled from their homes at around the same time, the Palestinian Arabs never made a new home in the their new home. Partly this was because the Arab states were, at least until 1973, deadly serious about wiping out Israel as a state; the Palestinians kept as refugees to repopulate an Arab Palestine, and as a handy, if callous, propaganda vehicle for diverting the anger of their restive peoples.

As a consequence, the Palestinians still have very little that is not part of a broader Arab or Islamist identity, or dependent on their status as refugees from Israel. The territory that the West wants to see become their state is not what they see as their real home. In short, there is no nation of Palestine that fits with where the Palestinians live, an identity that binds a people with their soil. Instead, the Palestinian identity is one that’s constantly looking over the border into their past, or looking across the Middle East to what they share with their co-religionists.

It’s fairly obvious that any model of Palestinian statehood will, if it’s to be permanent, need Palestinians to see their nation as the one that’s under their feet, not as the one that’s over the border. For those who like looking for flashes of silver tucked inside the darkest clouds, the separation of the Palestinian territories into two statelets could be the first stage in this process. It could bring about the evolution of two giant refugee camps into proper little countries.

Separated, not just by geography but by different ideologies and different national stories, the two statelets start to look more like nations, rather than just holding camps. Of course, it does not seem much of a step forward to have a statelet controlled by Hamas, one that is drifting closer into the orbit of Iran, that may allow itself to be used as a forward base full of rockets and human shields, and that is in no position to have civilised relations with any other state, but there is at least a glint in that undeniably nasty thundercloud.

For without progressing from the politics of exile, there can be no viable Palestinian state. Without a real sense of nationhood that connects the Palestinians to their homeland, it’ll be virtually impossible to establish them a successful new state. In an area as pressurised as that between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, it’s impossible.

The question is whether the de facto separation of the two statelets can ease of the Palestinians’ transition into a post-refugee nation. My guess is that it has a reasonable chance, if only because that progress was all but impossible under the old, cobbled-together model of statehood, a model that institutionalised the politics of exile. It’s true that any good that may come from this nasty little episode of bloodletting will take years at least, more likely decades, and it’s also true that predicting anything with any certainty in the Middle East - except war, hatred and sandiness - is a mug’s game.

But breaking the link between Palestinians' roots as exiles and their future as self-governing citizens is essential. Actually achieving this is a possibility for the long run, no more. But though Keynes’ famous words of scepticism pointed out that “in the long run we’re all dead”, in Gaza and the West Bank at the moment, that maxim is becoming equally applicable to the short run. Anything that gives a real chance of stability to the region, however remote that chance may be, ought to be taken seriously.