Contrary to the absurd claim of the rapporteur of the UN’s Human Rights Council, to whom Israel refused entry this week, the Gaza Strip is not facing a Nazi-like “Holocaust” at Israel’s hands. But the lot of the 1.5m Palestinians cooped up in this miserable scrap of desert is undeniably awful. Locked in on one side by Israel and on the other by Egypt, the Palestinians of Gaza have been subjected to an ever-tightening economic siege since the Palestinian Islamist movement, Hamas, booted the secular Fatah movement out of the strip in June 2007. The possible end this week of a truce between Hamas and Israel can only make things worse. As the truce has frayed, Israel has responded to the Palestinian rockets flying over the border by closing the crossings for long periods, depriving Gaza’s residents of many necessities of life (see article).
A house divided

If the lot of Gaza is awful, the condition of the Palestinians as a whole is not much better. Unlike Hamas, the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank stands by the decision the Palestine Liberation Organisation made a decade and a half ago to recognise Israel. Since the summit George Bush held last year in Annapolis, the PA’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, has been talking to Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert, about how to form a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. But they have not closed the gap on crucial issues such as borders, Jerusalem or refugees. And even if they had, it is not clear what such an agreement would be worth. Mr Olmert is a lame duck who will leave office after Israel’s election in February. Hamas calls Mr Abbas a lame duck too: his four-year term expires in January. Though he will probably stay on anyway, a Palestinian president who speaks only for the West Bank and not for Gaza is in no position to deliver peace.

Faced by this dispiriting stalemate, it would be understandable if Barack Obama concluded that he could do nothing big in Palestine when he becomes America’s president in January. There can certainly be no final deal while the Palestinians are split in half. Hamas is strong in the West Bank as well as Gaza and could easily blow up any deal it did not like. And for all its equivocation, Hamas still refuses to say plainly that it can ever accept the permanence of Israel. That is, by anyone’s standards, a deal-breaker, ruling out any sudden sprint to the two-state solution supported by almost everyone else.

Sprinting, however, is not the only way to move forward. A world blocked by the Palestinians’ internal rift should not conclude that nothing can be done. It should push the Palestinians to form a unity government, empowered to continue the peace talks even if Hamas reserves its final position. The Saudis and Egyptians have already tried this and failed, but the Arab states collectively could try again. One thing that hampered previous efforts was the hope inside Israel, America and perhaps privately inside the Palestinian Authority too that Hamas could be felled by the siege. But this is almost certainly a false hope as well as a callous policy. Extreme privation did not prevent tens of thousands of defiant supporters in Gaza this week from celebrating Hamas’s founding. For tactical reasons as well as moral ones, Israel should lift its economic siege. If the rocket fire continues, it will have to find a military answer.

As for Mr Obama, it is hard to imagine an incoming president better placed to reach over the heads of Hamas’s leaders and restore the waning belief of Palestinians in the power of diplomacy. He can do this in two ways, one immediate and one more sustained. Some time before Israelis vote in February, Mr Obama should spell out precisely the sort of peace America envisages: two states sharing Jerusalem, with a border very close to the pre-1967 armistice line, not one that lets Israel keep its settlement blocks deep in the West Bank. Just as Hamas needs to hear that Israel is not going to disappear, so Israel—especially if it elects a Likud government—needs to hear that America will not let it hold those settlements for ever.

Mr Obama’s more sustained task will be to make sure as diplomacy proceeds that both sides honour their agreements. Israel and the PA, for example, long ago signed a “road map” that included a demand for Israel to stop expanding its settlements in the occupied territories. By persistently ignoring that obligation, Israel has chipped away at the belief of even the most doveish Palestinians that they will ever gain the state they are promised. To restore their faith, Mr Obama has to stop Israel settling its citizens in places that are to become the new Palestine. That may require a painful clash with an ally. But there can be no better way to restore America’s credibility as a mediator, and woo Palestinians away from Hamas’s dark vision of war to the end between Muslim and Jew in Palestine.