A gaggle of officious but otherwise friendly Hamas militiamen in smart camouflage-blue fatigues has replaced the solitary Fatah recruit who used to snooze at the first Palestinian checkpoint inside the Gaza Strip.
With them and thousands of their fellow Executive Force personnel deployed throughout the Strip, a measure of calm has returned after the violence that marked the Islamists’ power struggle with the secular Fatah party.
But Gaza’s 1.4m people have little else to celebrate from the first 50 days of Hamas rule in a territory that is more isolated than ever, both politically and economically.
Some can still raise a smile, however, when they note that the Palestinians have leapfrogged the two-state solution to their conflict by securing a three-state solution – Israel, Hamastan in Gaza and Fatahstan in the West Bank.
With unemployment at 40 per cent and rising, the biggest question facing most people is where the next meal will come from. The answer is increasingly that it will come in the form of a foreign food handout.
Hamas has said it will pay the salaries of 10,000 people in the largely unproductive public sector who were dropped from the payroll by the Fatah-supported government in the West Bank. But that scarcely compensates for the loss of three times as many wage packets in the dwindling private sector.
The paramount concern among what remains of the secular middle class is how far Hamas will go towards instituting Islamic rule. They swap alarmist tales of male sea-bathers threatened with arrest unless they don long shorts and T-shirts, although a glance at the heat-hazed Mediterranean shore indicates beachwear is no more conservative than in Fatah’s day.
Hamas, victorious in battle but stumped for an answer as to what to do with its new power, has so far opted for a soft approach to further Islamisation in an already conservative society.
As for the economic decline, Hamas officials blame Gaza’s plight on the trinity of Israel, the US and Europe, to which they have now added their new enemy, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president in the West Bank.
“We are not responsible for the embargo or the siege,” says Fawzi Barhoum, a Hamas spokesman. “Israel and the US and Europe are responsible. What surprises us is that Abu Mazen [Abbas] is now involved in that.”
Mr Barhoum, a neatly bearded medical graduate in white shirt and black tie, is one of the respectable faces of Hamas, a movement branded terrorists by much of the international community and latterly “murderers” by Mr Abbas.
“We are a Palestinian movement, not al-Qaeda. We don’t want to be isolated from the US and Europe. Moderate Islam in Turkey gives a good picture of the Islamic model,” says Mr Barhoum, referring to Turkey’s ruling AKP.
Gazans with little affection for Hamas are not persuaded by such blandishments. “The people of Gaza are effectively hostages,” says Imad Abu Dayya, head of a local training institute, “and are threatened with a loss of their human rights.
“Hamas are grassroots people. They can survive for a long time on cucumbers and tomatoes. But they have to decide whether they’re moderates or revolutionaries and they need to state their vision clearly to the public.”
Mr Abu Dayya and others are even more scathing about Mr Abbas and his refusal to negotiate with the Islamist regime that now dominates their lives. “Abbas should sit down with Hamas rather than buy a US agenda that’s been around for 50 years,” says Mr Abu Dayya of US efforts to restart a peace process that would exclude Hamas. “President Bush needs to dismantle terror, not fight it, and that involves not attacking the dignity of the poor.”
Mahmoud al-Jarami, a secularist and former member of the Marxist Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who is co-operating with the Hamas regime as a senior foreign ministry official, believes the rival Gaza and West Bank governments have their strengths and weaknesses but that ultimately the government appointed by Mr Abbas in Ramallah is illegitimate. “Abu Mazen is not an emperor who can decide for himself.”
Like Mr Abu Dayya, he fears the Palestinian president is being dragged into an imposed deal with Israel that will be rejected by the Palestinian people. “We were promised a state by 1999, then by 2005. Now Mr Bush is trying to sell us a new illusion.”
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