Peace Among Palestinians is the First Step on the Road

Not for the first time, the Palestinians have been forgotten. All the international angst over the road map to Middle East peace has focused on the other players in the drama, with diplomats and commentators frantically looking for clues in Washington and Jerusalem. They search between the lines of a newspaper interview with Ariel Sharon, they decode George Bush's every utterance.

The latest Washington mutterings, for example, suggest there may be a new hurdle placed before US publication of the road map. Not only will the Palestinians have to ratify their new cabinet, hints one US administration source, they might have to issue an "unequivocal renunciation of terrorism and violence" - a whole new condition.

In all these discussions the Palestinians are taken for granted. It is assumed that, so long as the US and Israel do the right thing, the Palestinians will play their part. Just give them the document, runs the thinking, and they'll sign on the dotted line.

This week has shown why such presumptuousness may be dangerously off the mark. The Palestinians are not a parcel that can simply be delivered. They are as complex and fragmented as any other society, with at least three key faultlines - each of which makes the prospects for peace more frail.

The first division is the one exposed these past few days: the split within the Palestinian leadership. It was forced into the open by the US demand that Yasser Arafat appoint a new prime minister. His choice was the PLO veteran Abu Mazen, instantly written up the world over as a "pro-reform moderate". Abu Mazen submitted his cabinet, Arafat rejected it and what ensued was a stand-off broken only after intense international pressure on the Palestinian leader.

Much of this was little more than bureaucratic turf warfare, but it riddles and debilitates Fatah, the main Palestinian movement. "Fatah spends 99% of its time fighting each other and 1% dealing with Israel," says one European diplomat. This week's problem centred on older officials who resented Abu Mazen's promotion of younger men - like the proposed security chief Mohammed Dahlan - who, they felt, would be jumping the queue of seniority. Others feared the whole venture smacked of a foreign takeover, with the new PM installing the likes of Dahlan to curry favour with the US and Israel and to erode the influence of Arafat. These feelings still run high and it's possible that the Palestinian "parliament" will reject the new cabinet, despite Arafat's eleventh-hour blessing of it.

The irony is that Arafat himself, widely reported as the loser in this week's clash, may well emerge a winner. After two years branded as "irrelevant" by Israel and shunned by world leaders, Arafat's telephone rang hot with prime ministers and presidents this week, as they pleaded with him to let his PM pick his own team. (Tony Blair called him twice.) The lesson was clear: Abu Mazen can do nothing without Arafat's approval. The wily old fox is relevant again.

All of which has implications for the peace process. First, it's becoming clear that those Palestinians who are pro-reform are not necessarily more moderate towards Israel. Some are more hardline. Palestinian insiders say, for example, that Abu Mazen is less ready to compromise on Palestinian refugees' "right of return" than Arafat - and he is easily the most dovish member of his own cabinet. Second, what the past few days have proved is that Fatah is anything but a united force ready to make a deal with its historic enemy.

So much for the high politics. There is another civil war, between the men who lead Fatah and those who should be following it. "There's a generation of kids out there who listen to nobody," Dahlan tells associates privately. According to one on-the-ground account, these "kids" are typically 18 to 22 years old, living desperate lives in, say, Jenin or the Balata refugee camp. "They can barely write their own name in Arabic. They watch al-Jazeera and decide their own policy. They think 'fuck Arafat, fuck Fatah' and stage their own actions."

There is no command-and-control structure that would enable Arafat, Abu Mazen or anyone else to rein these people in. "The wires have been cut," says the close-up source. These young operatives "act in the name of Fatah", or its offshoots, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade or the Tanzim, "but they have no real connection to it," says one Palestinian official. Hence attacks like this week's on the Israeli town of Kfar Saba. "That was Al-Aqsa giving Abu Mazen the finger," he explains. The young guard were telling the old men, don't even think about trying to disband us.

This lack of control has historical roots - Fatah was always more a loose movement than a formal organisation - but it has been aggravated in the past couple of years. Israel's policy of "targeted killings" has removed the middle layer of Fatah leadership - the older, wiser heads who might have calmed down the young and angry. What might bring them back into the fold? Only a material change in their day-to-day lives, say those who know. If Israel withdrew from Palestinian cities and eased restrictions on movement, and if there was clear, diplomatic progress, then maybe this new generation would stop the terror. But an order from Abu Mazen? That won't do it.

Even if the Fatah top brass stopped their infighting, and won the obedience of the street, that would still leave the most serious Palestinian civil war - the gap between mainly secular Fatah and militant Islam. Hamas and Islamic Jihad can claim popular support of between 20% and 25%, yet right now they are shut out of Palestinian decision-making. They have no place in the Palestine legislative council, the parliament, and no presence in the official security apparatus.

Nor have they ever sat at the peace table with Israel - even though they are the enemy wreaking so much of the pain and terror on Israelis. It means that any deal Arafat or Abu Mazen might strike with Israel will struggle to be nationally binding, because one-quarter of the Palestinian nation will stand outside it. Crushing Hamas and Jihad by force and dismantling their infrastructure, as demanded by the road map, will not be easy: even most secular Palestinians would not support it.

Could the Islamists ever be won over, to support or even take part in the peace process? Most Israelis and Americans assume not; they regard Hamas and Jihad as beyond-the-pale fanatics, not susceptible to reason. But European officials with close knowledge of the movements are not so sure. They suggest that if Fatah agrees to some domestic power-sharing - perhaps through municipal elections - treating political Islam as a real movement with a genuine constituency, then the Islamists will play their part. Hamas's spiritual leader, Sheikh Yassin, has said that he would accept a "hudna", a truce, with an Israel withdrawn to its 1967 borders. So it's not impossible - but it is necessary. Says one secular Palestinian: "Whatever you think of them, they're not going away."

What's needed, then, is a peace process among Palestinians - among their leadership, between young and old, between Fatah and Hamas. If those wounds can be healed, then a peace process with Israel has a chance. Frail, dependent on the goodwill of countless others - but a chance.