By Bernd Debusmann, Special Correspondent

NEW YORK, April 1 (Reuters) - Factional fighting, political bickering and a failure to establish law and order have turned Gaza into a symbol of Palestinian shame and are pushing the Palestinian national movement toward collapse, according to prominent Palestinian intellectuals.

"What has come to pass in Gaza is embarrassing and shameful," said Rashid Khalidi, director of Columbia University's Middle East Institute and a widely respected author of books on Palestinian history.

"You may be seeing the collapse of the Palestinian national movement. It might take us back an entire generation," he said in an interview.

"There has been a failure of leadership and it is time that Palestinian leaders looked at their own weaknesses instead of blaming everything on Zionism, imperialism and other outside forces."

Khalidi's bleak assessment is gaining currency in Gaza and the West Bank as well as the far-flung Palestinian diaspora.

In his airy office in Gaza, Raji Sourani, director of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, said in a recent interview that "officials with the mind-set of a banana republic are causing tremendous damage to the Palestinian cause."

In an angry essay in the Palestine Chronicle, an online publication, author Ramzy Baroud complained the Palestinian leadership was permeated by ideological exclusivism, cronyism and corruption and therefore "as ineffective as ever before."

Hani Habib, a political analyst in Gaza, said Palestinians had begun to doubt their ability to achieve statehood and "completely lost faith and trust in their leaders."

Almost 100 people were killed and more than 300 wounded in Gaza earlier this year in fighting between the secular Fatah movement and Hamas, an Islamist party considered a terrorist organization by the United States, Israel and the European Union.

KILLINGS, KIDNAPPINGS CONTINUE

Hamas trounced Fatah in elections for the Palestinian parliament in 2006. Tension between the two groups flared into violence late last year and although full-scale fighting ceased under a Saudi-brokered agreement in February, killings and kidnappings have continued.

The latest kidnap victim was Alan Johnston, a British Broadcasting Corp. correspondent and one of the few non-Arab journalists still operating in Gaza City, a place now considered so dangerous that most international organizations instruct their staffers not to stay overnight.

Anger with the leadership is not restricted to academia.

"All our leaders ... have wronged and harmed the image of the Palestinian people and enabled Israel to tell the world that Palestinians do not deserve a state of their own," said Yehya Rezik, a 26-year-old athletics coach in Gaza.

In Israel and among hawkish Israel-backers in the United States -- home to more Jews than the Jewish state -- the Gaza troubles prompted many to repeat the observation, ascribed to the late Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban, that "the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity."

Israel withdrew its troops and forced the evacuation of Jewish settlers from Gaza in 2005 but retained control over the territory's borders and its coast and air space.

In reaction to the victory of Hamas, which refuses to recognize Israel, renounce violence and accept existing peace deals, Israel, the United States and Europe imposed economic sanctions that resulted in the "controlled strangulation" of Gaza, according to a U.N. report in March.

ODDS STACKED AGAINST PALESTINIANS

Even the harshest Palestinian critics of the present leadership balance gloomy assessments by pointing out that the odds were stacked heavily against Palestinian statehood long before the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948.

In a book on the Palestinian quest for statehood, "The Iron Cage," Khalidi quotes a 1919 memo from Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour of Britain, then the colonial power in what later became Israel, on the relative merits of new Jewish immigrants and the Palestinians who lived in the area.

"Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far greater import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land," Balfour wrote.

Such discriminatory attitudes changed little since 1919, Palestinians say, and became more pronounced after World War Two when survivors of the Nazi campaign to eradicate European Jewry arrived in Israel to settle in what a 1920s Zionist slogan termed "a land without a people for a people without land."

Then as now, according to Khalidi, the Palestinians were at a disadvantage because their leaders were weak, not united and prone to missteps.

The most prominent Palestinian leader at the time, Haj Amin al-Husaini, sided with Nazi Germany against the British and fled to Berlin during World War Two, becoming an international pariah and tainting the Palestinian movement.

In a similar miscalculation five decades later, Yasser Arafat -- already seen as obstacle to progress by many in the West -- sided with Saddam Hussein when he invaded Kuwait in 1990. Until his death in 2004, Arafat had been the dominant figure in the Palestinian movement for a quarter century.

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