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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 17-May-06
Palestinian Authority and Hamas deploy rival armies in Gaza

Web Log - May, 2006

Palestinian Authority and Hamas deploy rival armies in Gaza

In open defiance of PA president Mahmoud Abbas, Hamas mounted an illegal 3,000 man militia force in Gaza, after a Hamas security force was vetoed by Hamas last month. In response, Abbas' Palestinian Authority is deploying its own several thousand man army in Gaza.

In both cases, the reason given for the deploying the armies is to police the Gaza Strip, where violence has been increasing steadily, ever since Israel withdrew its settlers and soldiers last summer.

"There has never been a grimmer situation," says analyst Aaron David Miller, a Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center.

Miller described what he calls the "four no's" of the degrading situation:

No trust between Israelis and Palestinians.

No effective and empowered contacts or negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians.

No governing set of principles, mutually acceptable or accepted by Israelis and Palestinians that constrain or regulate their behavior.

No third party willing and or able to play an effective and meaningful role in response to either crisis or opportunity.

As ominous as the four no's are, the formation of these rival armies is the most significant event of all.

As I've described in the past, random political events in the Mideast are "attracted" (in the sense of a chaotic attractor in Chaos Theory) in the direction of war, and for the last couple of years I've been describing on this web site the day to day political events moving the Mideast closer and closer to war.

Once again, the same sad story is being repeated. The formation of rival armies, sponsored respectively by two branches of government, even when they're called "security forces," moves Gaza significantly closer to civil war. Even with the best of intentions, these two armies will stumble over each other in their "peacekeeping" duties and create an "incident," but nobody is exhibiting the best of intentions. An incident could bring in other groups, forcing even civilians to choose sides, causing the situation to spiral out of control.

It's worth pausing for a moment, to compare this to the situation in Iraq, and to note that nothing like formation of rival government-sponsored armies in Iraq. I've frequently been very critical of politicians, journalists and pundits making moronic statements that Iraq is close to civil war. As I've been saying since 2003, a civil war since is impossible in Iraq, because only one generation has passed since the genocidal Iran/Iraq crisis war of the 1980s, meaning that Iraq is entering a generational awakening era, and a civil war is impossible at the beginning of a generational awakening era. In mathematical terms, political events are "attracted away" from war, and so any kind of civil conflict quickly fizzles out.

However, the Mideast is in a "generational crisis" era, since 57 years have passed since the end of the genocidal war between Arabs and Jews in the late 1940s when Palestine was partitioned and the state of Israel was created.

When the Mideast "Roadmap to Peace" was put forward in May 2003, I predicted that the Roadmap would / could never succeed, and that the Mideast would move closer and closer to war as soon as Yasser Arafat and Ariel Sharon were out of the picture.

Not everything is bad news, of course. Abbas recently met with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Putin promised $10 million in aid to Abbas. That's one small piece of good news (assuming, of course, that the promised money actually reaches Abbas).

But if you look back over the 18 months or so since Arafat died, you'd find it very hard to think of many political events that were good news, but you'd have no difficulty finding dozens of political events that moved the region toward war.

Conflict risk level for next 6-12 months as of: 9-Feb-2006

W. Europe 1 Arab Israeli 3

Russia Caucasus 2 Kashmir 2

China 2 North Korea 2

Financial 3 Bird flu 3

Key: 1=green 1=Low risk 2=yellow 2=Med 3=red 3=High 4=black 4=Active

The formation of rival armies is the latest, and in many ways the most dangerous. Right now the two armies have only a few thousand people each, but they're only going to grow.

From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, things are going as expected. Generational Dynamics predicts that the Mideast is headed for a new major genocidal war between Arabs and Jews. A civil war among the Palestinians is certainly one plausible scenario for leading into that war, since sooner or later Israel will be drawn into it. In fact, Generational Dynamics predicts that the entire region will be drawn into it, and that it will be one component of a new "clash of civilizations" world war, the first world war in six decades. (17-May-06) Permanent Link
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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 17-May-06 Palestinian Authority and Hamas deploy rival armies in Gaza

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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 17-May-06
Palestinian Authority and Hamas deploy rival armies in Gaza