TOWARDS the end, during George Habash’s bouts of pain, his doctors in Amman used to half-joke that he was in fact empathizing with the agony of the people of Gaza. According to his wife, Hilda, the founder of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) had been keeping a close eye on events in the Strip.

 

As Habash lay dying, he may have found some solace last week in the fresh evidence that the spirit of resistance lives on among Palestinians.  Over the years, however, he may also have found plenty of cause for dismay in the fact that the radical strand in the struggle for Palestine, once epitomized by secular nationalist groups such as the PFLP (which in its heyday rivalled Yasser Arafat’s Fatah in terms of influence within the Palestine Liberation Organization), had been taken over by Islamists of the Hamas variety.

 

This is partly a consequence of the inefficacy of the path chosen by the PFLP, which long ago relied on high-profile hijackings to make its case and made common cause with like-minded terrorist groups in Germany, Japan and Northern Ireland. It is also a consequence of Fatah’s corruption and futile compromises. It’s easy to forget, however, given Israel’s refusal to contemplate so much as a truce, let alone talks, with Hamas, that 20 years ago the Jewish state facilitated the emergence of this Muslim Brotherhood offshoot as a means of queering the pitch for the PLO.

 

Habash never set foot in the “autonomous” occupied territories even when the opportunity to do so arose, lest it be interpreted as an endorsement of the Oslo process, which he strongly disagreed with from the outset. Hence, like so many of his compatriots, he died in exile.

 

It is purely coincidental, of course, that Habash’s final decline coincided with the breach of the wall that separates Gaza from Egypt – the only surprising thing about which is that it didn’t occur earlier. It is a perfectly logical response to the siege of Gaza, which reinforced the Strip’s status as a prison camp and heaped progressively greater misery on its 1.5 million inmates since Hamas defeated Fatah last year in their struggle for ascendancy over the densely populated sliver of territory. Israel had pulled out of the Gaza Strip nearly two years earlier, but remained the occupying power in every sense, with control over borders, airspace and all means of sustenance.

 

The sporadic firing of Qassam rockets from Gazan territory towards the Israeli town of Sderot provides an ongoing pretext for military incursions that claim far more casualties than the rudimentary Palestinian missiles. This is in no way to suggest that the Qassam attacks are justified: the point is that the response is invariably heavily disproportionate. Apart from the military forays, it consists of an economic squeeze that can only be categorized as collective punishment, a war crime under international law.

 

The humanitarian catastrophe has been created partly as a means of sharpening popular disenchantment with Hamas, but it appears to have produced the opposite effect. Last week large parts of Gaza were plunged into darkness as Israel suspended fuel supplies: given the dwindling reserves of water, food, medicines and other basic amenities, a disastrous situation suddenly became intolerable.

 

The siege has been maintained with Egyptian assistance, and there were minor clashes between desperate Palestinians and Egypt’s border guards a day before sections of the wall came tumbling down, and within hours a human trickle turned into a flood as Gazans rushed out of the prison Strip to purchase simple commodities that had been out of their reach for months. Despite an admonition from Condoleezza Rice, Cairo was nervous about resealing the border. Hosni Mubarak is generally more than willing to collaborate with the US and Israel, but he knows a clear-cut instance of cruelty towards Palestinians would further undermine his domestic standing.

 

Despite a steady stream of warnings from the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) about the unfolding disaster, Gaza’s plight has been ignored at the international level, chiefly on the basis that the territory is under the control of Hamas. Even Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas – who ought to know better, but is as keen as Mubarak to maintain his credentials with Israel and the US – has been refusing to talk to Hamas unless the latter cedes control of Gaza. Whatever one’s opinion of Hamas’s ideology or its stance towards Israel, its apparent willingness to negotiate stands it in better stead morally than its relentlessly uncompromising rivals and foes.

 

Predictably, recent events have prompted some Israelis in positions of power to suggest that the sudden permeability of the Gaza Strip’s border with Egypt provides an ideal opportunity for Israel to divest itself of all responsibility for the territory, effectively throwing it into Cairo’s lap. It would, of course, take an enormous amount of US-Israeli pressure for Mubarak to accept this unwanted gift, and in the face of further confusion over Gaza’s status, the dim prospects for a two-state solution would inevitably recede further.

 

Some countries frequently give the impression of being their own worst enemies, and Israel (like Pakistan) clearly falls in that category: had it reciprocated appropriately when the PLO under Yasser Arafat made the huge psychological leap two decades ago of accepting Israel’s existence as an inevitable neighbour, the Middle East may have been a very different place today. The mistakes in the interim have not been Israel’s alone, but as the occupying power it is obviously required to make the biggest concessions in facilitating a peaceful settlement.

 

Its recalcitrance at almost every step along the way has been aided and abetted by its chief sponsor, and arguably never more so than during the Bush presidency. Tragically, there are few prospects of a change of direction under George W.’s successor: as the US academics John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt pointed out earlier this month in an article in the Los Angeles Times, none of the leading presidential candidates is willing to offend the omnipresent Israel lobby. “A genuine friend,” they point out, “would tell Israel that it was acting foolishly, and would do whatever he or she could to get Israel to change its misguided behaviour.”

 

The power of the lobby in the academic world was demonstrated last week when Arun Gandhi, a grandson of the Mahatma, felt obliged to repent and resign as president of the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence at the University of Rochester after commenting in a blog that Jewish identity is “locked into the Holocaust experience”, which Jews “overplay … to the point that it begins to repulse friends”, and condemning Israel’s “culture of violence”.

 

George Habash understood this culture and thought it appropriate to respond in kind. The Israeli writer and peace activist Uri Avnery, too, is under no illusions. “The breaking to the Rafah wall was an act of liberation,” he noted at the weekend. “It proves that an inhuman policy is always a stupid policy: no power can stand up against a mass of people that has crossed the border of despair.” One can only hope that the majority of his compatriots will acquire a comparable clarity of vision before everything falls apart.

 

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