Nature abhors a vacuum. In the void that the Middle East peace process had become desperation and frustration fed the divisions in the Palestinian community and the bloody result was manifest in Gaza over the last days.
"If you have two brothers put into a cage, and deprive them of the basic essential needs of life, they will fight," says the Palestinian foreign minister Ziad Abu Amr. Put another way, as Minister for Foreign Affairs Dermot Ahern argued yesterday, "the root cause [of the recent violence] is the absence of a credible political process".
The seizure by Hamas of effective control of Gaza, after six days in which over 100 have died in fighting, has almost certainly dealt a terminal blow to the February Mecca agreement in which it agreed to share power with Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah organisation. Despite the rejection by Mr Ismail Haniyeh of Mr Abbas's sacking of his unity government, the truth is his government is no more. Its writ only runs to Gaza, and it has no means to provide succour to the desperate, battered and impoverished enclave of 1.3 million. With the nomination of finance minister Salam Fayyad by Mr Abbas to lead a new administration, the Palestinians now have two equally impotent "governments".
Mr Haniyeh has offered further talks and released seized Fatah security officials, but the prospects for a reconciliation do not look good. The physical separation of Gaza from the West Bank now seems certain also to become a political separation with the emergence of two entities, what has become known as "Hamastan" and a Fatah-controlled West Bank. In such an eventuality Gaza is likely to face continued international ostracisation and isolation. Meanwhile the EU, US, and Israel are already moving to confine the Hamas tide to Gaza by bolstering Mr Abbas. Israel's Haaretz is reporting that the Bush administration is putting pressure on Israel to make security and political concessions in the West Bank and the possibility of restoring frozen funding has been raised.
There has also been talk of an international peacekeeping presence, possibly with EU involvement, but with Hamas steadfastly opposed there is currently no political possibility of such a mission being put together.
In the longer term it seems tragically inevitable now that if any kind of a peace process is to re-emerge it will be on twin tracks at completely different speeds. And with two Palestinian entities singing off different hymn sheets the Palestinian case for a two-state solution is fatally undermined. For the majority of Palestinians that reality represents a desperate self-inflicted wound that sets their cause back many years.