On the occasion of the new Israeli residence order for the West Bank, Bernd Asbach interviewed Issam Nassar, co-founder of the "Institute for Jerusalem Studies" from Jerusalem.

The clash between secularism and Islam in Palestine dates back to the beginning of the Palestinian Israeli conflict more than sixty years ago. The current split between the PA and Hamas will not be resolved in the foreseeable future, and a national unity government reunifying the West Bank and Gaza is not within sight.

Diversity, Unity, and Fragmentation are three terms that have been dominating the Palestinian political discourse since the emergence of the Palestinian National Movement in the twentieth century. The internal Palestinian division since June 2007 has given more intensity to the discussion about Diversity, Unity, and Fragmentation.

The perception is widely held that Fateh represents secularism, enlightened and modern secularism, open to the West, reformist, capable for democratic transformation and Hamas represents fundamentalism, backward, traditional (if looked at positively), anti-Western, pro-Iran, authoritarian, incapable for democratic transformation, simply using democratic slogans in order to reach power.

While the international community has over the last decade converged around a two-state vision, it has neither worked convincingly to implement this vision nor to prevent or stop processes that have the potential of making a two-state settlement impossible.

There is and there cannot be any democracy or the development of a democratic system under occupation. It follows, therefore, that in our discussion today we can only pose the question about the amount of freedom needed to end occupation and build a free society and, perhaps eventually, achieve the “dream” of a democratic state in Palestine.

State-building as an indigenous process in entities emerging from violent conflicts is a growing issue not only in conflict studies, but in Development policy and in Development Economics. There are a growing number of studies related to post-conflict scenarios. The situation in Palestinian West Bank and Gaza Strip (WBGS) is hardly a “post-conflict” situation with a conflict sensitive economy and economic development.

What is and where is Palestine? One of the questions of the complex and compacted issues that are sometimes pushed to the margins in any discussion of Palestinian democracy.

The first Arab-Israeli war of 1948 has been the seminal event in the modern history of the Palestinians. The impacts of the 1948 defeat – the Nakba (Arabic: Disaster) – for Palestinians have been profound, for they have shaped the contours of Palestine and Palestinian history in myriad ways.

Nicolas Pelham concludes, that an end to western, Palestinian and Israeli isolation of Gaza and an improvement in Gaza’s lot generally, is likely to empower groups with external connections, and impede rather than accelerate Gaza’s Islamisation. By contrast, the alternative - of maintaining the closure - is likely to hasten the application of Sharia norms.