In a sharply critical Washington Post commentary, David Aaron Miller squarely lays the blame for Gaza’s mess on Palestinian leaders:
With Gaza a mess and their internal affairs in disarray, the Palestinians confront perhaps the deepest crisis and largest question for their nationalist hopes: how to maintain a monopoly on force. From its inception, the Palestinian national movement has never had its “Night of the Long Knives.” Such a reckoning would have allowed Fatah — its dominant faction — to impose control and articulate a coherent national strategy. But Fatah, highly decentralized and ministering to its dispirited, dispossessed refugee constituency, chose to accommodate rather than confront. Indeed, it allowed smaller groups of varying political persuasions to undertake terrorism and violence that put the entire national movement in the dock.
Today that situation is worse than ever. Yasser Arafat’s real transgression was not his unwillingness to accept what Ehud Barak offered at Camp David (no Palestinian leader could have done that and survived), it was his willingness to allow his monopoly over the forces of violence in Palestinian society to dissipate and to acquiesce in, if not encourage, terrorist attacks by the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and Hamas. Abbas’s effort to create “one authority, one gun” has morphed into no authority and many guns.
Whether it’s called a “Night of the Long Knives” or the Palestinian Altalena moment, Israel, like Miller, is still waiting.
