At the beginning of February I spent two days in Gaza. People were still recovering from the shock—for some happy, for others terrifying—of the Hamas election victory. At a housing estate on the outskirts of Beit Hanoun, a town in the north of the strip, I and the small band of journalists I was hanging out with met a group of squatters.
Back in England, the word "squatters" is associated in most people's minds with loose and penniless confederations of pot-smoking layabouts who move into and take over unused property. This is often a deeply unfair depiction, but even the least salubrious of the breed would rarely do anything worse than stare at you vacantly and give off some ripe smells, or mutter darkly about the fascist property-owning classes.
You certainly wouldn't expect them to come up to you with a Kalashnikov. But Mustafa had a Kalashnikov. He posed with it for a while, under a piece of graffiti that said "Fatah." He and his fellow squatters, gunmen loyal to Fatah, the party that Hamas had just roundly trounced, had fought or been injured in the intifada and reckoned that Fatah owed them one. Or, to be precise, owed them flats. A sort of demob payment. Once it became clear that Fatah, having lost the election, might soon cease to be in any position to provide them with anything, let alone real estate, Mustafa and his friends took the flats over themselves—just as a precautionary measure, they explained, to make sure that justice was served. They were annoyed at the Hamas victory, and at corruption within Fatah, and at unemployment in Gaza, and at Israel's closure of the Karni goods crossing on the Gaza border, and a few other things. Somewhere in all this they tossed in a comment about how upset they were at the Danish cartoons insulting the Prophet Muhammad. I think we chuckled. It seemed like just another grievance to be added to the stew, like a dash of seasoning. I ignored it as irrelevant.
A couple of hours later I was waiting to leave Gaza at the Erez checkpoint when a convoy of SUVs with the EU's flag on the side roared up. The EU's foreign staff in Gaza were being evacuated after a bunch of armed men had begun doing threatening things outside their offices. The word on the streets was that the unrest was being stirred up by powerful Fatah people. Chief among these was Muhammed Dahlan, Fatah's main man in Gaza, who had taken a terrible fright at the extent of his party's defeat, and was trying to show that stability in Gaza depended on him. Only this time, it seemed, the gentlemen firing in the air outside the EU building were particularly upset about the Danish cartoons. One of the aid workers caustically remarked that it seemed as if the same people who were demonstrating had then provided the police escort up to Erez. Again, I didn't pay much attention; Fatah gunmen and the security services are often one and the same.
The next day I found myself in Nablus, in the West Bank. There, too, bands of Fatah men had been holding anti-Danish protests for a couple of days. And by now Hamas had reluctantly decided that it couldn't just stand back and watch. Hamas is, after all, the Islamic Resistance Movement, and yet here was this heathen Fatah rabble, to whom Islamic law had always been just so much decorative lettering, suddenly acting all indignant about insults to the Prophet. So Hamas had banded together with some of the local sheikhs and the mufti of Nablus, and called a press conference to burn the Danish flag.
Trouble was, between Hamas calling the press conference and actually holding it, the Danish prime minister had issued an apology, of sorts. When I and a local photographer arrived at the scene of the immolation, which was a basketball court in a quiet side street, we found a man with a spade-like beard holding a rather well-made Danish flag while photographers took pictures from every conceivable angle. I assumed that this was just a preliminary to the burning, in order that the whole terrible torture of the flag be captured from start to finish; but after we had all snapped our share, he simply rolled up the flag and put it away, and the assorted religious dignitaries proceeded to hold a lengthy discussion with the journalists and each other in stuffy classical Arabic about the proper way to make sure that the Prophet was accorded due respect in the godless wilds of northern Europe. It was later explained to me that out of consideration for the Danish apology, it had been decided not to burn the flag but to impart a more measured rebuke, and so the man had in fact been holding it upside-down.
But it seems that by then it was too late to stop the momentum. Three days later, Hamas and Fatah were leading joint demonstrations in Gaza; the following week another mob demonstrated outside the international observers' building in Hebron, forcing them to flee. I have no idea what other stories might have lain behind the explosion of the protests in other countries. But you'll note that only in a few have there been massive, violent demonstrations, and usually there are signs of incitement by one or another political force. (Hizbullah bussed people to the demos in Lebanon; in Syria and Iran, nobody holds protests without some kind of official approval). There is a clash of cultures here, yes, and also not a little hypocrisy on both sides about the treatment of each others' sacred personalities. But there are also political subtexts and dynamics that get completely lost in the 30-second frame of a TV broadcast. Unfortunately, thanks to the media and the politicians, this has turned into a much bigger confrontation than it had to be.
