A candlelight vigil honors Yasser Arafat in Gaza. (Wissam Nassar, Maan Images)

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' call Thursday for the Hamas "gang" to be ousted from Gaza is understandable, but misguided. Hamas are no angels, and their police's shooting of seven Palestinian demonstrators from Abbas' Fatah faction earlier this week during a pro-Fatah rally in Gaza is the sort of act that blackens their name. Yet for Abbas to refer to Hamas as a "gang" and ask for their ouster is only going to worsen the tensions between Palestinians, at a time when precisely the opposite is required.

The Fatah-Hamas discord is a distinctly Palestinian problem, but also a reflection of a trend throughout the contemporary Arab world, where single states or societies are increasingly being governed by multiple authorities. These multiple authorities are often proxies for the regional and global powers that face off in the Middle East, especially the United States, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Israel.

Such dual authorities within a single sovereignty comprise one of the more bizarre Arab contributions to modern world governance history, as seen in Lebanon, Iraq, Sudan and Somalia, with others likely to follow. The dilemma in Palestine is the most severe, because both Hamas and Fatah were legitimately elected by the Palestinian people. It is unlikely that one can defeat the other militarily in all the Palestinian territories, and we certainly do not wish to see that sort of clash happen. The brief fighting in Gaza earlier this year that resulted in Hamas taking control of all of Gaza was a sad spectacle, but probably an inevitable one. Hamas' claim that it had to defeat the Fatah security forces because they were planning to attack Hamas, with Israeli and American backing, will be verified or discredited by history in due course.

This is not an isolated matter, though. Throughout the region, groups reflecting the two main ideological camps in the Middle East stare each other down politically - as in central Beirut - or clash in the streets with guns, as in Palestine. Pushing this confrontation further with calls to remove one side or the other is at once naive and further fuel for the confrontational fires.

President Abbas' problem is that widespread concern about Hamas' takeover in Gaza is offset heavily by disdain for Fatah's performance. If Hamas is a "gang," as Abbas calls them, Fatah is not seen as much better, and indeed it has a much longer track record of mismanagement, incompetence and corruption.

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