April 03, 2007	Tuesday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 14, 1428

NEW YORK: Factional fighting, political bickering and a failure to establish law and order have turned Gaza into a symbol of Palestinian shame and are pushing the Palestinian national movement toward collapse, according to prominent Palestinian intellectuals.

“What has come to pass in Gaza is embarrassing and shameful,” said Rashid Khalidi, director of Columbia University’s Middle East Institute and a widely respected author of books on Palestinian history.

“You may be seeing the collapse of the Palestinian national movement. It might take us back an entire generation,” he said in an interview.

“There has been a failure of leadership and it is time that Palestinian leaders looked at their own weaknesses instead of blaming everything on Zionism, imperialism and other outside forces.”

Khalidi’s bleak assessment is gaining currency in Gaza and the West Bank as well as the far-flung Palestinian diaspora.

In his airy office in Gaza, Raji Sourani, director of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, said in a recent interview that “officials with the mind-set of a banana republic are causing tremendous damage to the Palestinian cause.”

In an angry essay in the Palestine Chronicle, an online publication, author Ramzy Baroud complained the Palestinian leadership was permeated by ideological exclusivism, cronyism and corruption and therefore “as ineffective as ever before.”

Hani Habib, a political analyst in Gaza, said Palestinians had begun to doubt their ability to achieve statehood and “completely lost faith and trust in their leaders.”

Almost 100 people were killed and more than 300 wounded in Gaza earlier this year in fighting between the secular Fatah movement and Hamas, an Islamist party considered a terrorist organization by the United States, Israel and the European Union.

KILLINGS, KIDNAPPINGS CONTINUE: Hamas trounced Fatah in elections for the Palestinian parliament in 2006. Tension between the two groups flared into violence late last year and although full-scale fighting ceased under a Saudi-brokered agreement in February, killings and kidnappings have continued.—Reuters