FIVE years after Western governments sought to turn the West Bank into a model of statehood for peace-minded Palestinians, the Palestinian Authority (PA) that runs it is being cast adrift—possibly with dramatic consequences. The cafés of Ramallah, the Palestinians’ fledgling seat of government near Jerusalem, have been bereft of chattering aid workers from the West since the American administration withdrew its support in the wake of President Mahmoud Abbas’s controversial bid for full statehood at the UN in late 2011. As a result, Mr Abbas may solicit political and material help from elsewhere.
Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, always ambivalent about the merits of Palestinian statehood on the West Bank (let alone Gaza), seems to have cooled on the idea; many of his coalition partners have always seen it as a threat to their vision of a Greater Israel extending east to the Jordan river. Whereas he once promised to build an “economic peace” with Palestinians, now he threatens economic sanctions against them, intermittently withholding the customs revenues that Israel collects on Palestine’s behalf, which, with foreign donor aid, make up 80% of the PA’s budget. Europe, with its own economic crisis, has drastically cut its aid. America’s Congress, to punish Mr Abbas for his UN bid, has withheld two-thirds of its $600m annual support programme.
Even before the UN bid, the PA was short of cash. Its prime minister, Salam Fayyad, once the darling of Western donors, is threatening hefty tax increases on businesses, hitherto his biggest backer, and may slash the PA’s payroll. The PA’s security forces may struggle to contain the protests that could erupt.
As the PA’s fortunes in the West Bank have waned, those of Hamas, the Islamist movement that runs the Gaza Strip, have waxed. After Hamas won a Palestinian election in 2006, America and Israel, with broad Western endorsement, sought to stifle the place, to display the benefits that would accrue to the West Bankers by co-operating with Israel. But Gazans withstood the siege, partly by burrowing tunnels to Egypt. With Hamas’s Muslim Brother friends there on the rise, Gaza is looking a lot more prosperous. “We’re the ones now under siege,” says the owner of Che Che, a hubbly-bubbly café in Ramallah.
With the region’s winds blowing the Islamists’ way, Mr Abbas may be tiring of trying to persuade the West to give him a state. The Americans are still bent on vetoing any early bid. Mr Abbas has refused to resume negotiations with Mr Netanyahu until Israel stops building Jewish settlements on the West Bank. In September the mediating Quartet (comprising the United States, Russia, the UN and the EU), gave Israelis and Palestinians three months to submit maps for a two-state deal. The Palestinians have complied but the Israelis argue that the clock starts ticking only once the two sides actually meet.
So Mr Abbas is earnestly pondering the prospect of conciliating Hamas and reuniting the two halves of his severed realm. In Cairo on December 22nd he presided over a meeting of a “temporary leadership forum”, a new body of a dozen factions, including Hamas, which will steer the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), the Palestinians’ paramount decision-making body that until now has resolutely excluded Hamas, largely because it has rejected the PLO’s decision to recognise Israel.
Hamas and Fatah, bitter enemies for many years, are still not close to a full rapprochement. And Israeli and Western governments might withhold even more cash from the PA if Hamas were to join it while still failing unequivocally to recognise Israel or to disavow violence. But Khaled Meshal looks keener to reach out to Mr Abbas—and to make emollient noises about Israel. He recently agreed with Mr Abbas that “the current phase [of policy towards Israel] be confined solely to peaceful resistance acceptable to the international community”. Some Hamas people have aired the idea of dropping the name Hamas, an acronym for “the Islamic Resistance Movement”, rebranding it as the less jihadist-sounding Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. After all, says a Hamas leader in Gaza, “we never left it.”
Hamas’s ideological shift is partly because of geography—and events elsewhere. The group clearly thinks it sensible to edge out of the shadow of the beleaguered Syrian regime, its main sponsor, and become more friendly with Egypt’s new order, where the Muslim Brothers are on the rise. Three-quarters of Hamas’s people are said to have left turbulent Damascus. Hamas has quietly opened a fledgling office in Cairo. The next Hamas-Fatah meeting is to take place in Jordan, whose king banished Mr Meshal in 1999. Hamas has infuriated its other big sponsor, Iran, with the news that Gaza’s prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, on his first foreign tour in four years, may hobnob with some of Iran’s sworn enemies.
Messrs Abbas and Meshal have agreed on a new election commission to prepare for Palestinian elections in 2012. But unity is still far off. Western governments are still loth to see Mr Abbas dish Mr Fayyad, a longstanding precondition of Hamas for agreeing to team up in a unity government. Moreover, Israel could make life even more unpleasant for West Bankers if the PA were to include Hamas. All the same, a dramatic shift in the Palestinians’ political centre of gravity is in the offing.
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