Gaza's New Strongmen

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Defusing groups like the Salah ed-Din Brigades won't be easy. Unlike Hamas, they have no political program that Abbas can negotiate over. Abu Samhadana says his "main priority" is to gain sinecures for his men in the Palestinian Authority's security forces. So far, he has been offered jobs for 500. That's not enough, he says, and complains that the remaining 1,500 "will be like the rest of the Palestinian people--unemployed." The town of Rafah is particularly desperate: it has a 66% unemployment rate, compared with 25% among Palestinians in general, and 81% of its residents live in poverty. Israel demolished thousands of homes near the border to prevent militants from digging tunnels beneath them that could be used to smuggle weapons into Gaza. The meager refugee-camp blocks facing the border are a bullet-pocked mess of twisted rebar and shattered concrete.

Ultimately, Abbas' prospects for controlling the gunmen may depend on the health of Gaza's economy. Abbas has announced a few new infrastructure projects since the Israeli pullout, but they won't provide nearly enough jobs for the 20,000 gunmen operating in the Gaza Strip, according to Palestinian security officials. Abbas already has a bloated public payroll that eats up 62% of his budget, and World Bank officials are leaning on him to fire some of his nearly 60,000 security officers, not hire more. If economic opportunities stay bleak, the gunmen may well push Gaza deeper into lawlessness. Even Abu Samhadana is worried that his men, having realized their goal of ending the Israeli occupation of Gaza, may cause even more ruination to Palestinian society if their vigilantism remains unchecked. "We must all distinguish between weapons of resistance and weapons of chaos," he says. The question is whether it's already too late.