JERUSALEM, March 8 (UPI) -- During one of the clashes between the Palestinian Fatah and Hamas parties, President Mahmoud Abbas decided to go to Gaza and faced an odd reaction.
"What is he coming here for?" some Hamas members asked. "Who invited him?" recalled Shalom Harari, a prominent Israeli analyst of Palestinian affairs.
Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, is also head of the nationalist Fatah Party. Harari took the comments as indicating that some members of the Islamic Hamas consider the Gaza Strip their turf, a Hamasatan.
This week, Harari and Ghassan Khatib, a former Palestinian minister who is now Vice President of Bir Zeit University, talked of signs that Gaza and the West Bank are drifting apart.
"We are seeing the beginning of two states. A state of Gaza under Hamas' control and the State of the West Bank governed from Ramallah,' Harari told foreign correspondents in Jerusalem.
"There is a very very dangerous process of separation in all levels, economic social legislative and political," Khatib told United Press International.
Gaza and the West Bank are part of historical Palestine and under the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan were to be linked some 20 miles southwest of Jerusalem. The Arabs attacked Israel to kill it and the plan, lost, and now Israel has a 22-mile wedge between the two territories.
The West Bank is slightly smaller than Delaware with 2.5 million Palestinians. The Gaza Strip is double the size of Washington DC and cramped with 1.5 million people. About a million of them are registered refugees.
Ramallah is more affluent, and Ramallah's residents seem more sophisticated, leading many West Bankers look down upon the Gazans. Gaza is poor with an average income of $800 a year and gunmen have been fighting in its streets.
Fatah controls the West Bank, partly with Israel's support. Almost every night Israeli soldiers arrest militants
In Gaza, Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, of the Islamic Hamas, delivers his weekly addresses from a mosque, not the parliament building, noted Harari. After a pilgrimage to Mecca, Haniyeh appeared for a meeting with Abbas wearing a red keffiyah held down by black rope. Abbas sticks to business suits.
The Gazan factions are preparing for a showdown. Fatah has more men. Abu Mazen recently received 3,000 M-16s guns from Jordan and 2,000 Kalachnikovs from Egypt (escorted by Israelis jeeps). However Hamas, that smuggles arms in tunnels from the Sinai, seems to have the upper hand.
In a briefing to diplomats and correspondents in Jerusalem, the Head of the Southern Command Maj. Gen. Yoav Galant maintained Hamas' men are more determined, believe in what they are doing, and are willing to sacrifice their lives for their cause.
Hamas has four brigades divided into companies, platoons and specialists in observation, sniping, explosives and anti-tank warfare.
"Everything is well organized... in a way similar to anti-tank commando divisions (rather) than a to terrorist organization,' Galant said.
Militants study in Syria and possibly Iran and although Hamas is not fighting Israel, at the moment, it is preparing attacks for the day it decides to resume clashes.
The two parties are trying to form a national unity government and their immediate goal, in last month's Mecca agreement, was to stop the bloodletting. However they have not solved any of their ideological and tactical differences nor who should be the interior minister, the man who controls the armed forces, noted Harari.
Khatib said Gazans are more religious and radical than the West Bankers but attributed it to the Gazans' economic situation. "There is a correlation between poverty and radicalism," he said.
He attributed the changing atmosphere to the fact that people cannot travel between the West Bank and Gaza. Bir Zeit University has no students from Gaza and the Islamic University in Gaza has none from the West Bank.
Employees of same government ministry -- one in Gaza and the other in the West Bank -- cannot work together nor interact except over the phone and the Internet. There is no exchange of expertise; no exchange of views, and members of the same party cannot hold joint conferences.
"With time it will become difficult for people to think alike and take joint decisions. Gradually you will see the economic situation and social (situation) become different," Khatib predicted.
According to the World Bank's latest report more jobs have opened in the West Bank so unemployment "remained roughly unchanged at 19 percent," but the number of jobs in Gaza shrunk and unemployment there soared to 36 percent.
According to Khatib there is already, "Growing discrepancies in the politics and discourse of Gaza and the West Bank."
Public opinion polls used to show differences between West Bankers and Gazans, but they were within the margin of error, he told UPI.
Not any longer. "In last 2-3 years we started noticing differences," he said.
A poll by the Jerusalem Media and Communications Center "indicated serious differences between the two publics on most issues," he reported.
And so, in the last JMCC poll, 43.4 percent of the West Bankers supported suicide bombings against Israelis but in Gaza 55.9 percent of the respondents favored it.
In an interview in bitterlemons.org, the Director of the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute, MAS, Samir Abdullah, said Israel imposed the separation "To impoverish Palestinians in order to weaken us.... People are left with little choice but to seek their fortune outside Palestine."
Yossi Alpher, the Israeli co-editor of billerlemons.org, said that was "simply incorrect."
Israel closed passages and transportation routes because of Palestinian attacks there. "The same Palestinians who take pride in such terrorist acts, do nothing to prevent them then turn around and blame Israel for reacting to protect itself," he said. Had there been a passage, Israel would have placed a tank and a platoon of soldiers at each end of the road and severed it, Alpher added.
