THEY came for Omar Maswadeh at half-past midnight. They broke furniture at his home in the West Bank town of Hebron, blindfolded him, shoved him in a car. They kept him in solitary, hooded and with his hands tied, in the painful seated shabah position that Israeli courts have outlawed. Two days later they came for his brother Alaa and his cousin Yusri. After holding the young men for two to three weeks each, they charged them with membership in Hamas's “executive force”, a militia that the Islamist party created in Gaza but never actually managed to form in the West Bank. Then they let them go.
That strategy looks dubious. One reason is that the current repression of Hamas in the West Bank looks like a repetition of the Fatah-Israel collaboration in the mid-1990s, when Hamas was trying to disrupt the Oslo peace accords between Israel and the late Yasser Arafat's Fatah. Then, the PA's “preventive security” forces developed a reputation as ruthless jailers and torturers of Islamists. It rebounded on them. A decade later Palestinians—many because they were fed up with Fatah's corruption and ineptitude—voted Hamas into power. And the Fatah-Hamas blood feud exploded in June in Gaza—to Fatah's loss.
Even if Mr Abbas and Mr Fayyad manage to clean up Fatah this time, they may be bottling up radical Islamist anger that could burst out in the future. What is more, though Hamas is going underground politically and many charities are being closed, others continue to raise zakat, the Muslim tithe, for the social projects that built support for Hamas during its previous years in the wilderness. And though Hamas is indeed losing popularity in Gaza, thanks partly to its own heavy-handedness against Fatah, nobody has yet thought up a plausible method for removing it from power.
The other problem is that isolating Gaza undermines the policy of improving life in the West Bank. Many West Bank businesses enjoyed a healthy trade with the strip's 1.4m people. Fahim Zubeidi, head of quality control for Birzeit Pharmaceuticals near Ramallah, the capital, says the clampdown on Gaza has halved his company's sales there.
Even before that, sending goods to Gaza was hard. Delays at checkpoints in and out of the West Bank meant a lorry could take four days to complete a trip that would otherwise take no more than two hours each way. Sending a container there now costs 20,000 shekels ($5,000), as against $800 for transporting one to China, says a Hebron businessman.
Such obstacles litter the West Bank, too. Since the outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada (uprising) in 2000, Israel has built permanent checkpoints around most of the main Palestinian cities to protect the Israeli settlements nestled around them. The 45-minute journey from Ramallah to Nablus now takes Birzeit's supply trucks four or five hours. From Jenin, the West Bank's northern and most isolated district, 20,000 people may have emigrated south because it is so difficult to move around.
Israel says it plans to remove some of the nearly 600 checkpoints and roadblocks in the West Bank to help make life easier. But making a serious difference would mean getting rid of the big, fixed terminals through which West Bank travellers must pass and which break the territory into a patchwork of small, near-separate economic zones—and they, because of Israel's security, will be the last to go.
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