HAMAS IS THE POPULAR GOVERNMENT OF THE NATION...:

Last March 6, Palestine's Official Gazette posted a decree from President Mahmoud Abbas that replaced an old law from Jordanian days on procedures for lawsuits involving state bodies.

The dry, technical language appearing in a dry, technical publication somehow provoked a storm of political and legal criticism. Abbas' authority to issue decrees that are treated as laws by official Palestinian bodies is contested by those who view the suspension of parliamentary life as illegitimate, resented by others who regard the ad hoc way laws are issued as autocratic, and irrelevant for those who see the Palestinian leadership as feckless and bereft of strategy. Without much of a state operating in practice, why rewrite laws for litigation? But those are familiar questions. What was so controversial about this jumble of legalistic phrases?

The move suggested the institutional interment of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The state covered by the decree-law is the "State of Palestine" with Abbas as its president. Among its many branches, agencies, and ministries are the PLO and all its associated bodies, as if they are part of the Ramallah-based Palestinian bureaucracy. Therefore, the law seemed to fold the only authoritative structures uniting Palestinians and speaking authoritatively for them as a people into an appendage of an office rooted in the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), a circumscribed and autocratic structure that limps along, stricken by inertia.

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