The anarchic situation in the Gaza Strip marks a new low in terms of the performance of Palestinian resistance organizations. From its beginnings in the 1960s, the movement has been depressingly vulnerable to petty internecine disputes exacerbated by conflicting loyalties to regional powers with little or no interest in liberating Palestinian land - but plenty of appetite for falsely aggrandizing their own images at home and abroad. Reduced to implements in the maladroit hands of cynical regimes, many of the Palestinian factions have been so badly diverted from their raison d'etre that one is tempted to ask whether their respective leaders even know where Palestine is - or was.

The Arab governments that have contributed to this sorry state of affairs deserve their share of scorn, but it is the Palestinian groups that are especially worthy of derision because the cause they have served so poorly is supposed to be their own. Instead they have loaned out their services to a plethora of disinterested police states concerned primarily with the short-term shoring up of their own security by pretending to back the right side in the Arab-Israeli dispute.

The result has been an inexorable decline in the fortunes of the movement. A few short years ago, the mainstream goal was a state on 22 percent of historic Palestine, itself a humiliating setback on many levels but palatable to many given the paucity of alternatives. Today even so paltry an "achievement" looks increasingly unlikely because even before the commitment of the US and Israeli governments can be tested by the usual uber-Zionist backlash, intra-Palestinian disagreements are helping to prepare the excuse that the Jewish state "has no partner" in the peace process. This plays conveniently into the hands of Israeli hard-liners and their supporters in America, subverting the one thing all Palestinians have in common - a longing for the restoration of their legitimate rights - to imbecilic feuds over how to proceed.

The current manifestation of this tendency is the power struggle between Hamas and Fatah, which has provided the Israelis with a pretext to besiege the Gaza Strip. Moves are now afoot to cobble together a new system for regulating Gaza's border with Egypt, but in yet another sign of how pathetic the situation is, it will be something of a breakthrough if representatives of the dueling factions can so much as agree to sit in the same room to discuss the logistics.

Neither of the parties is doing its constituents any favors by prolonging a dispute that has sown division and blighted the dreams of several million people. If even the extreme conditions now prevailing are not enough to convince them that they have to bury the hatchet, the chance for justice may be lost for several more years. Far from being on the verge of statehood, many Palestinians (especially those in Gaza) are now on the edge of starvation, their principal aim at present being to obtain handouts from the international community so they can have a few scraps of food to eat while their "leaders" call each other names. Haram.