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becomes an event that can force a regional crisis in the midst of
ongoing regional crises. It thus is a vote that could have significant
consequences.
The Palestinian Divide
Let's begin with the issue not of the right of a nation to have a state
but of the nature of a Palestinian state under current circumstances.
The Palestinians are split into two major factions. The first, Fatah,
dominates the West Bank. Fatah derives its ideology from the older,
secular Pan-Arab movement. Historically, Fatah saw the Palestinians
as a state within the Arab nation. The second, Hamas, dominates
Gaza. Unlike Fatah, it sees the Palestinians as forming part of a
broader Islamist uprising, one in which Hamas is the dominant
Islamist force of the Palestinian people.
The Pan-Arab rising is moribund. Where it once threatened the
existence of Muslim states, like the Arab monarchies, it is now itself
threatened. Mubarak, Syrian President Bashar al Assad and Libyan
leader Moammar Gadhafi all represented the old Pan-Arab vision. A
much better way to understand the "Arab Spring" is that it
represented the decay of such regimes that were vibrant when they
came to power in the late 1960s and early 1970s but have fallen into
ideological meaninglessness. Fatah is part of this grouping, and while
it still speaks for Palestinian nationalism as a secular movement,
beyond that it is isolated from broader trends in the region. It is both
at odds with rising religiosity and simultaneously mistrusted by the
monarchies it tried to overthrow. Yet it controls the Palestinian proto-
state, the Palestinian National Authority, and thus will be claiming a
U.N. vote on Palestinian statehood. Hamas, on the other hand, is very
much representative of current trends in the Islamic world and holds
significant popular support, yet it is not clear that it holds a majority
position in the Palestinian nation.

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