The recent bloodshed in Gaza has disappointed Muslims across the Middle East as they dread that this will jeopardise their hopes for a Palestinian state as their own regimes, encountering another regional crisis, remain powerless.
While Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas swore in his new emergency cabinet in the West Bank and Hamas gunmen strengthened their rival centre of power in the Gaza Strip on Sunday, onlookers in the region debated over whom to blame.
A newspaper salesman here in Cairo, Ahmed Radwan, perceived the Fatah-Hamas showdown in Gaza as nothing short of “a disaster”.
The ruthlessly gory factional fighting last week claimed more than 110 people.
Gharib al-Sayyed, 43-year-old accountant, told that it was incorrect to see the struggle as one between secular and Islamist forces in Palestinian politics. Lamenting for the tragic killings, he said:
The fight in Gaza is not between Islamist and secular. It is a struggle between the corrupt Fatah regime, and a movement (Hamas) that people trusted and elected democratically...
Omar Khamis, who heads a sports club in the Baqaa Palestinian refugee camp just outside Amman, said that both sides are armed, both wish to flex their muscles and each considers himself the law. This is wrong. He insisted that a nation with two leaderships will fail.
As strong opinions poured out from all sections of the populace, media gurus trying to make sense of the “new reality” in the Palestinian territories, realised there are many dimensions to the story.
In Jordan, veteran political analyst Musa Keilani admonished that the Palestinian community was disintegrating, taking down with it hopes and dreams of independent statehood. Keilani wrote in the semi-official Jordan Times:
If the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 was a catastrophe and the 1967 war was a setback, what is happening to the Palestinians today is much worse
However, it was not difficult to read the writing on the wall. The need and importance of a peaceful dialogue was palpable. An editorial in Egypt’s state-owned Al-Gomhuria newspaper said that there is no alternative to dialogue between Hamas and Fatah.
A peaceful and self-reliant Palestine remains a far-fetched reality while the battling factions struggle to realize that smoothening their differences and talks hold the key.
Image Credit: Anarkismo
