Symptoms of Decay in Occupied Palestine

Abbas: falsely accuses Hamas of facilitating and nurturing the rise of al-Qaeda in Gaza (rather than blaming this on Israel's and the West's brutal and despair-inducing siege); he liquidates any remaining semblance of an independent judiciary and replaces civil with military courts, while NGOs in Palestine accuse him of creating a military dictatorship.

Fayyad: calls for 'intense and active cooperation' with Israel, criminalizes the resistance and dubs it 'catastrophic', and states that it (not Israel) has 'destroyed our national project completely' (CNN, 28 June). Fayyad represses civil society, with Hamas' NGOs threatened with license revocation and mosques curtailed by political repression; and he also refuses to pay all staff of the Palestinian Authority appointed since December 2005, i.e. those appointed since Hamas' electoral victory in January 2006, thus severely diminishing the livelihood of 20,000 Palestinian families in one stroke of the pen.

Israel: looks on in glee as its policy of divide and annex has borne its poisonous fruits; Sharon's dream, as Akiva Eldar put it in Haaretz (30 June), has come to pass: Gaza is a disengaged Hamastan, severed from the West Bank, which is cantonized, crisscrossed by settlements, Jewish-only bypass roads, and walls, with no access to 40 % of its own lands and no outlet to the outside world; Olmert throws a bone: 250 Fatah prisoners to be released (out of 10,000 Palestinian prisoners altogether), and $120 million of Palestinian tax money is returned (out of $700 million held), conditional on Abbas' continued boycott and suffocation of Hamas. More...