The Economist: Hamas in Gaza - A proper state already

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While Mr Abbas seeks a virtual state at the UN, Hamas controls a real one

UNLIKE Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority—scattered under Israel’s occupation like inkspots on paper—Hamas, the Islamist group that runs Gaza, controls its territory, borders, security and trade. Depending less on capricious foreign aid, Gaza also enjoys “exceptionally high” economic growth, according to the latest World Bank report. Reconstruction has finally begun. Growth in the first half of 2011 slumped from 8% to 4% in Mr Abbas’s West Bank, but soared to 28% in Gaza.

Whereas Mr Abbas was willing to negotiate a demilitarised state with Israel, Hamas is bolstering its armed forces. Its Qassam Brigades are said to have packed their arsenals with weapons from Libya’s abandoned arms depots, smuggled in via Egypt.

The Arab awakening has also provided allies to defend against renewed Israeli operations. Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, promises to send military escorts to accompany aid flotillas to Gaza. Egypt has also improved its ties with Hamas.

Sensing the region is swinging its way, Hamas is dismissive of Mr Abbas’s outreach to the West. While the Palestinian president woos the UN, Hamas hobbles it. Hotheads snipe at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which provides for 1m-plus Gazan refugees, accusing it of turning into a security outfit, and labelling its few foreign personnel as spooks. When UNRWA suspended a union leader for suspected Hamas activity, staff went on strike.

With funds dwindling, UNRWA is struggling to retain its patronage network. It has cut 120,000 Gazans from its ration-books and 3,000 workers from its job programme, and this week announced that more emergency relief was in jeopardy. While the UN pleads with Israel to let concrete into Gaza to rebuild 20,000 buildings battered by Israeli bombardment, Hamas is overseeing a far greater flow of construction materials through the Egyptian tunnels.

NGOs acting as conduits for Western, especially American, funding have faced even greater wrath. When they balked at Hamas demands that they should register with Hamas ministries, submit financial reports and pay a fee (which, under America’s anti-terrorism laws, could be construed as sponsoring terror and cost them their funding), Hamas closed down the largest one, Sharek, on the pretext that its youth groups encouraged premarital sex. Hamas officials also pulled an acclaimed Gazan film about Israel’s 2009 war for portraying a woman walking past the invaders unveiled.

Hamas still needs Western funding too much to gobble up UNRWA entirely. Despite the cuts, UNRWA pours some $300m into Gaza. But Hamas wants the UN to work firmly under its auspices, as it would in a fully-fledged state. To offset the protests, UNRWA survives increasingly by operating on Hamas’s terms. It has suspended the introduction of Holocaust studies in its schools, and has made all its summer camps single-sex.

With such muscle-flexing enhancing Hamas’s state-building efforts on the ground, it is little wonder that the Islamists deride Mr Abbas’s bid for UN recognition of his piecemeal, virtual state. “A symbolic sham,” sneers Mahmoud Zahar, a Hamas leader in Gaza.