The Israeli navy’s turning away of a Libyan ship carrying 3000 tons of humanitarian aid for the blockaded Gaza Strip has once again drawn the suffering of Palestinian civilians to world attention. Tel Aviv’s strict enforcement of the economic embargo presages a return to full-scale hostilities and shows that little has thawed in the antagonism-laden Holy Land, where the six-month-long ceasefire between Hamas and Israel is nearing breakdown.

Lingering mistrust and a spiral of security incidents between the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) and Hamas guerrillas since the 5th of November have shut all windows of relief for Palestinian civilians, who are veritable pawns caught in a clash of fundamentalisms. An Israeli government spokesman defended his navy’s action by arguing that although the Al-Marwa ship bound for Gaza claimed to be ferrying blankets, powdered milk and food, “Libya is a hostile state to Israel and what guarantees do we have that the boat is not carrying weapons and explosives for Hamas?” To make matters worse, ceasefire mediator Egypt is miffed with Hamas for consorting with the Muslim Brotherhood, a fundamentalist group proscribed by Cairo.

During the optimistic early phase of the ceasefire, Israel had thrice allowed a few relief vessels from Cyprus to dock in Gaza. But mounting military tensions with Hamas led to tightening of the screws. The UN has used phrases like “slow death” and “human catastrophe” to describe the chokehold on Gaza that Israeli sanctions have imposed. The situation is akin to that of a boiling pressure cooker where something has to give in to release the compression. For Gazans, that something is ominously familiar- war. The contrast between comatose Gaza and reviving West Bank could not be sharper. In the Fatah-dominated West Bank, IDF and the Palestinian Authority’s security arms are cooperating closely and their political leaderships are negotiating the contours of an independent Palestinian state. The IDF is forcing Jewish settlers to vacate Palestinian land and relocate into Israel proper. The sight of obstinate Jewish settlers hurling stones and chemical substances at the IDF in the contested city of Hebron is striking because these methods used to be the intifada tactics of Palestinian civilians.

The Israel-Fatah joint endeavour to rout Hamas from the West Bank has opened up serious contradictions within Israeli society and polity. Reflecting the fluidity of the changes is the outgoing Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, who averred after announcing his resignation that Tel Aviv must withdraw from most of the occupied territories and compensate Palestinians for lands it would keep under any peace deal. More infuriating to the Israeli right was his specific comment that “we must give away some parts of Jerusalem and allow inclusion of 270,000 Arabs within its Walls.”

Freed from the responsibility of speaking for the establishment, Olmert sounded like a quintessential liberal peddling the ‘land for peace’ formula. Understandably, his sensational remarks kicked up a furore among conservative and radical Jews. General elections are barely a couple of months away and the hardliner Benjamin Netanyahu is the frontrunner, indicating that the majority of Israelis are not ready to restore the status quo ante of 1967 as Olmert would like.

If Israel finds itself splintered between future-eyed liberals and present-focussed hawks, the Palestinian self-determination project too looks desultory. On November 30th, Hamas’ police used force to beat back Muslim pilgrims from leaving Gaza across the Egyptian border for the annual Haj pilgrimage since these Gazans got visas from the rival centre of power, the West Bank-administering Fatah.

Saudi Arabia, the US-allied host country of Islam’s holiest sites, accepts only Mahmoud Abbas’ pro-Western faction as the legitimate representative of the nascent Palestinian state. Therefore, Gazans had no option but to coordinate with Fatah in order to make the pilgrimage. For this “crime”, Hamas set up 16 police checkpoints along the Egyptian border and resorted to beatings to push back the devotees, who were castigated as “traitors”. As if the unfolding humanitarian and security crises were insufficient, the bitter infighting between Fatah and Hamas has fractured the Palestinian “self” and placed insuperable hurdles before the American-backed ‘two state solution’ roadmap.

Confidantes of US President-elect Barack Obama wrote in the Washington Post of a ‘four-point plan’ to resolve the conflict, two of which have a bearing upon the Fatah-Hamas fratricide. The first is that Palestinian refugees displaced in earlier wars would be compensated in lieu of exercising the right of return to pre-1948 Israel. The 5-million-strong Palestinian Diaspora, which is scattered in neighbouring Arab countries, has been an uncompromising backbone of the Hamas movement. Denying its right to return would be outright repudiated by Hamas, blackening the legitimacy of such a final settlement.

The second ‘Obama plan’ point is that the future Palestinian state would be “demilitarised”, with international (possibly US) forces stationed to man the new borders so that Israel’s defence needs are respected. To say the least, the recipe would be anathema to a fundamentalist Islamic outfit like Hamas, which might dig in for a Hezbollah-style insurgency to drive out the “infidels.” As the powers-that-be in Washington, Tel Aviv and Ramallah get closer to a deal in time to come, the Hamas factor will be the biggest “spoiler” from the Western angle and the strongest “bulwark” against a sell-out from the Islamist perspective.

Human rights and peace are wilting under the absence of unified singularity of lines in both parties to the conflict as well as the burden of sanctions on Gaza that have misfired. With no evidence of military or political weakening of Hamas, which enjoys bounteous Iranian patronage, the crisis in Gaza exemplifies how economic sanctions as instruments of foreign policy are often not ‘smart’. Just as the American embargoes of Cuba, Burma, and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq hurt civilians more than their targeted rulers, the blockade of Gaza goes down as another failure with gross ‘collateral damage’ as its sole achievement.