Wasserman, the Boston Globe.

Nearly finished writing a piece on Palestinian reconciliation. At the moment, Abbas is walking tall.

All of this will have to be resolved where it began: members of the international community, notably the United States, will have to meddle. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that the Arabs hate the meddling of the West, the Palestinians want and need the Middle East Quartet (US, UN, Russia and the EU) in order to unify Gaza and the West Bank. Meddling can actually make peace as easily as it can break it. A glance in any direction—toward either expanding settlements in the West Bank or leveled buildings in Gaza—convinces most here that the Netanyahu government prefers a divided, and therefore feeble, Palestinian leadership. It is up to the great powers to, as Afif Safieh has phrased it, impose a solution whether Israel likes it or not. Every Palestinian I've met sure would.

And as it happens, Israeli citizens would like it, quite a bit: the last opinion poll of the Israeli public revealed that it is ready to end the unprompted spouts of al-Qassam rockets and negotiate a truce with the Hamas government.

So, to the simplistic question, “cui bono?” one could start by answering, “Israel.”

For Hamas it would be both an immediate victory and a long term defeat: in the immediate sense a unity government would allow Fatah to do all the things that Hamas is ideologically prohibited from doing, e.g. negotiating with Israel, while Hamas reaps all the practical benefits of a government that normalized Israeli-Palestinian relations. Although Hamas would not directly participate in peace negotiations with Israel, it has indicated that it would be willing to be part of a Palestinian coalition government with Fatah under which Fatah would negotiate the actual treaty.

However, rather than promising a permanent, and more potent, threat to Israel, throwing Hamas onto the world stage and bringing on the next election cycle could be the very thing that sends them packing. Either that, or the moderates in their group would finally win out, and the group would become just another Turkish-style political party with an Islamic inflection. With their popularity already plummeting, one would not expect the majority of Palestinians to continue to support a faction that promises them perpetual war rather than realistic compromise.

And obviously Fatah would be pretty psyched, retaining more power within the Palestinian Authority and continuing to receive endorsement from the IMF, World Bank and, depending on what happens in September, the United Nations.

Packing up for Britain in a few days.

Yesterday was a giving news day.

• Item 1: Upon walking into the office we learned of a new influx of gun-toting settlers to a village in the Jordan Valley. 
• Item 2: Midday the IDF showed up in a village in Hebron and teargassed a funeral. 
• Item 3: After lunch, a bomb exploded at Jerusalem's central bus station. 
• Item 4: As the sun began to set, I got a call from my editor to write up a story about two youth down the street threatening to set themselves aflame. 

Why might we have received these four stories on the same day? Follow the blood (don't slip):

On March 12th, someone snuck into a home in the illegal Itamar settlement, located in the Samaritan Mountains, and stabbed to death three children and their parents. This has prompted a few instances of retaliation by settlers in Hebron: on Monday one opened fire at a Palestinian funeral in Beit Omar while another stabbed a Palestinaian man in At-Tuwani. I imagine that the settlers in the Jordan Valley are a different face of this same retaliatory movement. They arrived at dawn on Wednesday in a group of 25, armed with rifles, claiming that they didn't want trouble—but they've come to kick the Arab shepards out of their homes.

The IDF showed up shortly after and told all the Arab villagers who've lived there for 15 years to pack up.

Later that day, the IDF saved any settlers the trouble of interrupting another funeral; since there are a wealth of settlements around Beit Omar, the village has seen increasing crackdowns, raids, and general harrassment. The Itamar killings have hardly lifted that fog of paranoia. So:

Earlier in the afternoon on Wednesday, during a woman’s funeral in Beit Omar, Israeli soldiers fired tear gas, stun grenades and rubber bullets at mourners leaving one man with slight injuries.

According to Muhammad Awad, spokesman for the National Committee Against the Wall, during the clashes other Israeli soldiers set up a checkpoint at the entrance to Beit Omar and searched civilians resulting in at least three arrests.

This is the right hand of Israeli policy. The left hand—which knows what the right hand doeth—is currently striking Gazans from the air and shelling them from afar. Saturday saw two dead civilians and Tuesday saw four. These attacks are in response to the 50 rockets fired by Hamas and its proxies on March 20th, which made a splash but didn't end up killing or injuring anyone.

Then yesterday an explosion rings out in West Jerusalem. It comes after many rumblings from Palestinian militant organizations about "response to Israeli crimes." But we do not yet know who is responsible for the Jerusalem bombing. One would suspect Islamic Jihad, but they have only praised the bombing, not taken credit. The same goes for Hamas. Praise, no credit. Why has no one taken credit?

I am not yet persuaded to conclude what the editor-in-chief at PNN wrote this morning (that English rendition is mine). I am aware of Israel's resort to false flags in the past—the Lavon Affair, its funding of Hamas during the PLO's heydey—and I've heard rumors that Wednesday bomb was remote-controlled from a cell phone, and that this is wholly foreign to Palestinian terrorist methodology (though I know it isn't to Hezbollah). But I don't know how likely it is that the Israelis wish to be the ones to inaugurate a new era of attacks in Jerusalem after eight years of quiet; by all accounts so far the bomb was hastily placed, and one can imagine the secret service organizing something a bit more impressive. But as usual, in the absence of information, conspiracy theories thrive. I suppose we'll have to stay tuned.

So: Innocent chldren are murdered in Itamar, which spurs other settlers to violence; they are protected by the IDF, which simultaneously knocks off innocents in Gaza; this lands a bomb in Jerusalem, which Hamas praises and Fatah condemns.

And the split between those two parties drives two boys in Bethlehem to threaten self-immolation if reconciliation does not occur.

But by the end of the day, their families talk them down, and the two boys leave the Mosque of Omar with sizzling hearts rather than smouldering skin. And the sun sets on another day in the Holy Land.

Something that is still happening.

Palestinians in Hebron, Ramallah, Bethlehem and Gaza City turned up in the thousands to reject the war for stewardship of Palestine, a war waged by Hamas and Fatah. Many in Palestine, particuarly young people, are evidently sick of having to deal with their nation's historic burden of piss-poor leadership that began with al-Husseini and continues today with Haniyeh and Abbas. On March 15, in the streets of these cities, protestors from GYBO and Palestine For Us repudiated that leadership and called for national unity via a Palestinian National Council.

In Gaza's central square, Hamas swiftly silenced that call.

On the day, members of Hamas shoved their way through the Unity demonstrators, who had been camped out for days, and hoisted the party's flag and chanted the party's slogans. They even went to the trouble of setting up louder speakers to drown out any attempt by the Unity people to carry out their demonstration.

Tell me that paragraph doesn't read like a dispatch from Ceaușescustan.

So the demonstrators moved to Kateebe square. Then, PNN reports, things got worse:

During the day, a strange phenomenon took place: journalists and cameramen working for local and international media outlets received text messages on their cell phones warning them to be careful about what they broadcast.

And worse:

As the sun started to set on Tuesday, the purpose behind the message became clear: security forces dressed like civilians and belonging to the Hamas-led government broke up the youth rally using batons and metal rods. Their tents were put on fire and the youth were chased all over Gaza streets. Journalists were also attacked, and their cameras and tapes were confiscated.

Sounds like another day in a one-party state.

Nothing quite so depressing went down here in the West Bank. In fact, in Ramallah and Bethlehem the demonstration hasn't ended: the protestors have stuck around under "unity tents." In Bethlehem's Manger Square, the head count has decupled from 9 to 100.

Joudat al-Sayah, one of the youths, told PNN, “We are staying until all our demands are met. We been here for three days so far and we are not leaving until our demands are reached.”