Trouble in Gaza

It's intriguing that a call for stationing international troops in Gaza should come from Israel, the country which in the course of its history always vehemently opposed such operations. Israel, however, didn't change its attitude about the Gaza Strip because it wants to support a peace-promoting initiative. The whole purpose of the exercise is to primarily pull the rug from under Hamas' feet by cutting their weapon supplies. Fatah, on the other hand, would keep getting armed, even from Israel itself.

It is, therefore, no wonder that Hamas rejected the idea of international forces and threatened to treat them as an occupying power. It would be a mistake for anybody -- whether in Brussels or Washington -- to think seriously about acting on Israel's offer.

Unlike south Lebanon, where a UN force (UNIFIL) has been trying for years to support the re-assertion of Lebanese state sovereignty, the Gaza Strip is no sovereign state. It is, instead, an area marked by a struggle for power. It would be unimaginable for either Europeans or Americans to have even the remotest interest in trying to maintain order there.

And even as a border patrol, the deployment would be useless. If the smuggling of weapons to the Gaza Strip were really to be cut off, then Egypt would be in the best position to do it: It controls the southern side of the Gaza border and should be able to prevent the smuggling of weapons from its territory.

In general, not only Egypt but also other Arab countries should get involved: The Arab League welcomed the formation of the Palestinian unity government; it has always treated the Palestine conflict as its central subject and it should have a strong interest in preventing the escalation of violence in Gaza -- especially after it presented its own peace plan in Beirut and Riad. The Arab League cannot allow all this to fall through because of the power struggle between Hamas and Fatah, let alone because no Arab leader has an interest in a Hamas-controlled unit in Gaza.

The Arab League should perhaps establish its own deployment force and send it to Gaza: its contingent would be in the eyes of Hamas and Fatah much less suspicious than the Europeans or the Americans, and the league could prove for the first time in its history that it's capable of more than making proclamations and passing resolutions. And if that did happen, one could count on Israel rejecting international troops again. That's not how Olmert's government imagined the whole affair.

Peter Philipp is a Middle East expert and Deutsche Welle's chief correspondent (tt)