Tony Blair finally steps down as Prime Minister of Britain this week, and speculation is afoot that he will coordinate efforts to bring peace to the Middle East. That task got that much more difficult this month with Hamas-Fatah hostilities in Gaza. In the main leader in its June 21 issue, The Economist (“Martyrs or traitors: the Arab predicament”) takes stock of the challenge: “In one brutal week Hamas’s swift destruction of Arafat’s Fatah movement in Gaza summed up a change that is spreading across a broad swathe of the Middle East. Secular nationalism of the sort Fatah stood for is coming to look like the weak force and radical Islam like the strong force. This poses a huge danger to a region already beset by violent conflicts. What is worse, Western policy is in danger of strengthening the wrong side by making the Islamists look like martyrs and the secularists like traitors.” America’s plan “is to keep Hamas penned up in its Gaza enclave and to shower love, money and weapons on Palestine’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, whose Fatah-dominated security forces are still more or less in control of the larger and more populous West Bank. The hope is that if Gaza fails under Hamas while the West Bank prospers under Fatah, Palestinian opinion will eventually swing back behind the moderates.” The problem is, “Any Arab leader who wins the label ‘moderate’ and is showered as a result of this with American love and money is in danger of being called a traitor.” As a countervailing show of sincerity, the US must be seen to be delivering on the demand for statehood.

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