U.S. may focus on West Bank while isolating Gaza

By Arshad Mohammed and Carol Giacomo - Analysis

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. response to the Hamas takeover of Gaza may be to lavish support on the West Bank while trying to isolate Hamas in the coastal strip, a strategy that could further radicalize the Islamist movement, analysts said on Friday.

Hamas' military victory demonstrated the failure of the U.S. effort to strengthen Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah in his power struggle with Hamas, which the European Union, the United States and Israel view as a terrorist group.

It leaves the United States with fewer options to pursue comprehensive peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians and makes the idea of a two-state solution even more remote because Palestinians are now split between a Fatah-led West Bank and a Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.

Analysts said the most appealing option for the United States may be to concentrate on a "West Bank first" policy, doing everything it can to promote Abbas and to nurture Israeli peace talks with him.

"After the dust settles, I think U.S. policy will be to hold up the West Bank as an example of what happens to people who cooperate and to hold up Gaza as an example of what happens to people who don't cooperate," said Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East program at the CSIS think tank.

But Alterman said such a strategy may backfire because of Fatah's ineffectiveness at governing and because an isolated Gaza Strip could become a more radicalized place that could launch attacks on Israel and export violence in the region.

"We could see Gaza be the font of a much more militant radicalism than we have seen in the Palestinian community so far," he said. "We have not seen al Qaeda in the Palestinian community so far but a Gaza that has imploded would create the medium where that could really grow," he said.

'NOBODY WANTS TO STARVE GAZA'

"The options right now are very bad," said Aaron Miller, a former State Department official and Arab-Israeli specialist. "What's at stake is whether a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is possible.

"Walling Gaza up to bring Hamas to heel is not going to work. That only will increase the desperation and sense of helplessness and open door to groups with more extremist ideologies," he said.

U.S. officials made clear they are looking for ways to prop up Abbas.

"How can you support the Abbas government? I think we want to be very positive and forward-looking in that," U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters.

Other officials said the United States, Israel and European states were ready to ease the ban on aid to the government that Abbas is forming in the West Bank after dissolving the national unity government led by Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas on Thursday.

Palestinian officials said the Bush administration told them it would lift aid restrictions, which were imposed when Hamas came to power in 2006, once Abbas's emergency government was in place in the occupied West Bank.

A senior U.S. official acknowledged the danger of cutting off the roughly 1.5 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, saying humanitarian aid had to get through but suggesting that Hamas had to pay some price for its refusal to recognize Israel, renounce violence and accept past peace agreements.