After five days of intense fighting in mid-June, armed militias of Hamas (Islamic Resistance Movement) decisively defeated the security forces of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Fatah (Palestine National Liberation Movement) and took control of Gaza.
Gaza, a small strip of land along the Mediterranean coast, is inhabited by 1.5 million Palestinians—the majority are
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Reports have appeared that Israel’s new defense minister, Ehud Barak, of the misnamed “Labor Party,” is now preparing a massive military assault on Gaza in the coming weeks. According to the London Times, a Barak adviser said, “The question is not if, but how and when.”
The U.S. and Israeli governments played a major role in fomenting the armed conflict—the most serious to take place between Palestinian organizations. Since the time of the Oslo “peace” agreement in 1993, U.S. and Israeli leaders have sought to instigate civil war as a hoped-for means of destroying the Palestinian resistance movement from within.
Those efforts were stepped up after Hamas unexpectedly won a plurality in the January 2006 elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council and formed a new government. The U.S. government had heavily pressured the Palestinian Authority and its pro-U.S. president, Mahmoud Abbas to hold the 2006 elections ahead of schedule, expecting a victory by Fatah.
Starvation as a tool of ‘democracy’
Stunned by the Hamas electoral victory, the U.S., Israeli and the European Union governments—all of whom pose as great champions of “democracy”—imposed harsh economic sanctions, seizing Palestinian tax revenues and cutting off aid to an already impoverished population. Their thuggish message: Vote the “wrong way” and we’ll cut off your food, medical supplies and other necessities. Gaza was sealed off from the rest of the world.
The blockade came on top of years of deliberate Israeli attempts to destroy the economy of both the West Bank and Gaza, which had already sharply reduced living standards and made Palestinians, especially in Gaza, dependent on outside assistance.
The aim of the blockade was to make the Palestinian population turn against the Hamas-led government. When that did not work, the U.S. leaders implemented a classic divide-and-conquer colonial tactic, hoping to instigate armed conflict among Palestinian forces, particularly Hamas and Fatah.
Hamas and Fatah are the two largest Palestinian parties. Fatah, which is led by representatives of the national bourgeoisie—the capitalist class—has been the dominant Palestinian party since the late 1960s. Its historic leader was Yasir Arafat, who negotiated the Oslo Accord with the United States and Israel in 1993.
The failure of the Oslo agreement to bring anything resembling liberation for the Palestinians led to the rise of Hamas as force that could challenge Fatah’s dominance.
Hamas is a religious organization that opposed the Oslo Accord from the beginning. Throughout the 1990s—as Israeli settlements in the West Bank doubled and conditions for Palestinians deteriorated—Hamas’s popularity rose. Adding to the growing disillusionment with Fatah was the popular perception that some Fatah leaders were using the Palestinian Authority to enrich themselves.
Despite the differences between Fateh and Hamas, the latter is also a capitalist party, its religious ideology notwithstanding. The two parties represent different sections of the Palestinian capitalist class. Like all national capitalists, they desire, above all, to rule over national territory.
U.S. promotes a coup
As reported by the June 22 Guardian newspaper, a document dated March 2, 2007, reported that a $1.27 billion dollar U.S. program was in the works to build up Abbas’s Presidential Guard to 20,000 strong: “The desired outcome will be the transformation of Palestinian security forces and provide for the president of the Palestinian Authority to be able to safeguard decisions such as dismissing the cabinet and forming an emergency cabinet.”
The U.S. reportedly sent tens of millions of dollars in military aid to the Abbas government earlier this year.
Guardian reporter Jonathan Steele labeled this the “hard coup” strategy, and named Elliot Abrams as its author. Abrams is Bush’s deputy national security advisor for the Middle East. He is infamous for his role in the U.S. wars against Nicaragua and El Salvador in the 1980s that took more than 130,000 lives.
A factor in triggering the June confrontation between Fatah and Hamas may have been a request by PA officials to Israel to allow them “to receive large shipments of arms and ammunition from Arab countries.” The request, according to the article, included, “armored cars, hundreds of armor-piercing RPG rockets, thousands of hand grenades, and millions of rounds of ammunition.” (Haaretz, June 7)
‘We should take advantage of this split’
Hamas accused the PA security forces of planning a coup, and justified its actions as “an emergency measure,” in the words of Hamas leader Khaled Meshal. Abbas and pro-U.S. regimes in the region, such as the government of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, attacked Hamas for having carried out a coup and executing captured PA officials and fighters. These reports circulated widely in the Arab media.
The bloodshed between Hamas and Fatah has created widespread dismay among Palestinians and their supporters in other Arab countries and worldwide.
It has been greeted, however, with great satisfaction by U.S. and Israeli leaders. Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni’s comments typified the U.S.-Israeli reaction: “We should take advantage of this split to the end.” (Guardian, June 19)
Immediately following the Hamas takeover in Gaza, Abbas announced the dismissal of the “unity government” that had just been established between Hamas, Fatah and some smaller political parties and independent figures at a March 2007 meeting in Mecca, Saudi Arabia.
In its place, Abbas appointed an “emergency cabinet” that excluded Hamas altogether. For the post of prime minister,
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Hamas officials, including Ismail Haniyeh, the prime minister of the elected government, rejected the creation of the “emergency cabinet.”
Palestinian organizations call for unity
Leftist organizations such as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and prominent political prisoners from the PFLP, Islamic Jihad, Hamas and other organizations rejected the idea of fighting among Palestinians. They called for negotiations between Hamas, Fatah and all Palestinian organizations, and for unity against the Israeli occupiers.
There are more than 9,000 Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli jails. Among them are many prominent activists and leaders of all Palestinian political and military resistance organizations. Because of their steadfastness in the face of systematic torture and abuse, the prisoners have high prestige and authority in Palestinian society.
Ahmed Sa’adat, the imprisoned general secretary of the PFLP, was quoted by representatives of the Mandela Institute representatives who visited him. Sa’adat said that “all factions must hold comprehensive talks for unity based on the choices of the Palestinian people far away from foreign interference, especially Israel and American.”
Sa’adat also stressed that Fatah and Hamas must resort to logic and negotiations in resolving their differences instead of the bloody clashes and violent takeover of institutions in Gaza and the West Bank.
