|
|
April 2, 2004/Nisan 11 5764, Vol. 56, No. 28
What will happen after Israel's pullout?
GIL SEDAN
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
JERUSALEM - The 1.3 million Palestinian residents of Gaza stand at a historic crossroads, but they don't know which way to go.
There are loud and passionate battle cries, but little hope. There are conflicting powers, but no real leaders.
Israel's killing of Hamas leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin has tipped the scale of popularity in Gaza in favor of Hamas.
However, the PLO - which reigns through the Palestinian Authority - won't simply hand over power to Hamas once Israel withdraws from the strip, as Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has pledged to do.
"Fifteen years ago, Hamas counted for about 10 percent of the population," said Matan Vilnai, a Knesset member from the opposition Labor Party. "Now it accounts for 50 percent."
No one knows the exact balance of power between Hamas and the secular Palestinian militant groups.
Gaza is a complicated place, and an Israeli withdrawal is likely to make it even more so, at least in the near term.
A pullout of Israeli troops and settlers is an opportunity for Hamas to take control in the strip, but the militant Islamic group does not want to burn all bridges with the Palestinian Authority.
Rather than preparing themselves earnestly for the day after Israel's withdrawal, the Palestinian powers in Gaza are busy competing with each other to determine who will take charge.
"This is very much contrary to the legacy of Sheik Yassin," Sheik Abdullah Nimmer Darwish of the Islamic Movement in Israel told JTA.
"He wanted to avert internal strife at all cost," Darwish claimed - though Hamas had been building up its power in defiance of the Palestinian Authority long before Yassin was killed on March 22.
Darwish, a resident of the Israeli Arab city of Kafr Kassem and a relative moderate in Israel's Islamic Movement, is concerned about what will happen in Gaza now that Yassin is gone.
Darwish did not directly criticize Yassin's successor in Hamas, Abdel Aziz Rantissi, who shares Yassin's intransigence toward Israel. Rantissi's inflexibility is a cause for concern among some moderate Palestinians, in Israel proper and in some Arab capitals elsewhere in the Middle East.
That's partly why some 225 prominent Palestinians issued a call for non-violence between Israelis and Palestinians after the killing of Yassin. The group twice published a statement in the official P.A. daily newspaper, Al Ayyam, urging restraint and peaceful protest instead of violent revenge for Yassin's killing.
The statement also blamed Israel for escalating violence.
"We feel Sharon has dictated his agenda on both sides, condemning the Israeli people to acts of retaliation and more suicide bombings, and he has also forced the hand of the Palestinian organizations to exact revenge," said Hanan Ashrawi, one of the signatories.
But the statement also implied criticism of Hamas by rejecting the terrorist group's declared policy of "open war" against Israel.
It's not the first time prominent Palestinians have made moderate public statements. But last week's statement was significant because it came just after the killing of Yassin, which was universally condemed in the Arab world.
|
