What’s ahead for Palestine —Disaster or renewal?

by Gerry Foley / July 2007 issue of Socialist Action newspaper

The military defeat Hamas inflicted on Fatah in the Gaza Strip is a turning point for the Palestinian movement. It can lead either to a historic disaster or to a fundamental reorganization and revival. In any case, it represents an inevitable crisis coming out of a constantly degenerating social situation, in Gaza in particular but also on the West Bank.

In both the West Bank and Gaza there is now essentially military rule by armed organizations, Fatah in the first case, Hamas in the second. The constitutional niceties are nothing but a facade that can be dispensed with as needed.

Both factions proclaim that the Palestinian people cannot be divided. In fact, the Palestinian people have been divided many times. A section lives in the state of Israel, a section in Jordan, and another section lives as permanently displaced persons in Lebanon. As individuals, Palestinians have been dispersed all over the Arab East.

A crucial question at the moment is whether or not the two territories that were supposed to be incorporated into a Palestinian state can be reunited. That will depend on the outcome of the new phase of conflict in the Palestinian territories and how Israel and its Western imperialist supporters are able to affect it. On that also will depend the possibility of any Palestinian mini-state emerging.

It seems that the most notable casualty of the Palestinian civil war is the idea of a rump state in the shadow of Israel. That is indicated by the sudden upsurge of support on the West Bank (still a minority but standing at about a third, according to polls) for the return of the territory to Jordanian rule, which means abandoning any idea of a Palestinian state.

In the period of Jordanian administration (1948 to 1967), the inhabitants of the West Bank were encouraged to think of themselves as Jordanians, whereas the Egyptians who administered Gaza in the same period encouraged the inhabitants there to think of themselves as a rearguard of the Palestinian people. Neither then nor now have Egyptian governments shown any inclination to annex Gaza. But they may not be willing to leave it as constant sore point on their border with Israel.

It is clear that despite Fatah’s claim that it is not relinquishing Gaza and even the Hamas leadership’s statements that it still recognizes Mahmud Abbas as “president of all the Palestinians,” there is no possibility of Fatah’s regaining influence in Gaza.

Moreover, while Abbas may be tempted by polls that show that 75 percent of Palestinians want new elections, in order to get a credible mandate, Abbas would have to let Hamas organize openly on the West Bank. And all of his moves since the war in Gaza indicate that he is unlikely to do so.

Fatah: demoralized and corrupted

The question is really whether or not Fatah and the Palestinian Authority security forces can effectively suppress Hamas’ organization, especially its armed wing.

The Islamic organization has been disorganized by Israeli raids on the West Bank, whereas in Gaza, the Israeli withdrawal more or less left it an open field. But it has major bases of support, in particular in the key city of Nablus. It won local elections in a number of places also on the West Bank.

And the basic dynamic that operated in Gaza also operates in the West Bank. That is, that Fatah has been demoralized by the failure of the Oslo Accords, which it sponsored, to produce any major concessions for the Palestinian people.

The most intelligent Israeli observers writing in the liberal daily Haaretz had been predicting for years that in any civil war between Fatah and Hamas, the former would lose. Because of this demoralization, Fatah’s organization has been breaking up, splitting into a variety of armed factions, some becoming simply criminal gangs. The demoralization has fostered corruption, which has eaten its way through the national liberation organization like a cancer.

Abbas’ commander in Gaza, Mohammed Dahlan, acknowledged the weakness of Fatah in an interview reported in the June 19 Haaretz: “‘Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas' men lacked the Islamists' aggressive dedication to a clear goal,’ he said. He also accused the United States of failing to make good on pledges of support, and Israel of deliberately blocking arms supplies to help divide Palestinians into a Hamas-run Gaza Strip and Fatah-controlled West Bank.

“Of the West Bank, he said: ‘It would be very easy for a few people who have a goal to succeed over a large army that does not have a goal and does not have proper weaponry.’”

The Israelis have been reluctant to let the PA security forces gain effective armament because they quite reasonably think that it is likely to fall into the hands of forces that will attack them. They know that the great majority of Palestinians hate them and will take any opportunity to fight them. Some observers have pointed out that in the last period militias linked to Fatah have staged more attacks on Israel than Hamas.

The fact is, the Fatah groups were forced to do that by the pressures of competition. In order to survive, they had to demonstrate their will to fight the Zionist enemy to the Palestinian people. But they failed because they were seen to be favored politically by Israel and its allies. That was the kiss of death.

The British Guardian’s analysis of the conflict in its June 17 issue confirmed Dahlan’s general judgment, except that it went further: “How did Hamas win? In the eyes of Gaza residents, the fight and subsequent defeat were inevitable because Fatah's forces in Gaza were widely considered nothing more than an undisciplined series of criminal gangs.

“‘[They won] from motivation, not fighting for money,' said another Gaza resident. 'They are not getting salaries. It's not a question of Hamas having more fighters, I don't think there were more, but the quality of the men carrying the weapons is totally different.

“‘Some fought for four days without going home. They believe in what they're doing. The others, Fatah security forces, fought for their thousand shekels (£120 [about $340]) or a packet of cigarettes. Dahlan had used poverty to recruit the people. The majority didn't even turn up to defend their stations, many stayed at home. Most were in plain clothes.

“‘Dozens called the Qassam [the Hamas armed force] and said, “We want to leave, give us security and a safe passage.” Most of the decent security people don't want to fight for Dahlan, or Israel or America. They don't feel they should be killed for the American or Israeli agenda.'”

Meager rewards for “moderation”

The response of Israel and the United States to the Hamas takeover of Gaza and Abbas’ expulsion of the Islamic organization from the Palestinian Authority government has been to remove the sanctions imposed on the Hamas-majority government and thereby offer rewards for “moderation” while they squeeze besieged Gaza ever harder. But this recipe has already failed. In fact, if anything it was key to Hamas’ victory.

The Zionists and their imperialist big brothers are not going to offer the Palestinians any solution for, or even mitigation of, their dispossession. That is what the record of Israel since the 1992 Oslo accords demonstrates. Life became worse for the Palestinians, and Israeli land grabs continued unabated—even at an accelerated pace.

The aid given to the Palestinian Authority benefited only a minority of Palestinians, the swollen government bureaucracy. It thus fostered demoralization and corruption. An increase of aid to the discredited Abbas regime can only aggravate the process of corruption. The majority of the Palestinian people will never sell their national heritage for a mess of potage, especially since they will never get more than the smell of it.

Although the Hamas takeover of Gaza was well organized, it is not clear if it was part of an overall plan, or if so what that might be. Over months, a series of ceasefires between the two organizations broke down almost immediately. That seemed to indicate that the antagonisms among the fighters were too great for them to accept counsels of moderation and reconciliation from their leaderships.

After the fact, Hamas justified its wipeout of Fatah by claiming that it was necessary to end the perpetual warfare in the Strip and offer its inhabitants some security. Some observers writing for Haaretz have even speculated that Hamas could win support in the West Bank by showing that it can offer security in Gaza. But in order for Hamas to do that, it would have to disarm a myriad of unofficial armed groups, including clans. It has demanded that such groups turn in their guns, in fact, but so far with minimal results.

The impoverishment and hopelessness in the Strip is likely to continue to fuel endemic gangsterism and infectious revenge killings. Hamas has said that it is not going to do repressive work for Israel. But if it is going to provide security it will likely have to repress armed groups that it does not control. Moreover, if such groups continue to fire rockets into Israel, the Israelis will continue to torture the Gaza population by bombings and raids.

If Hamas allows itself to be isolated between hostile powers, in the long or short run, it will incur disaster for itself and the people over which it rules. That is what Fatah leaders like Dahlan and the Israeli rulers are expecting. That is what was implied by Dahlan in the interview quoted above, in which he said that Hamas had fallen into Israel’s trap.

The Israeli rulers and their imperialist big brothers constantly tried to force Abbas to suppress the groups that were attacking Israel, without success, because Abbas knew that in such a confrontation he would lose. The Hamas victory shows that. But it is far from clear that Hamas could be any more successful at that task, even if it were impelled to try to relieve the Israeli pressure.

Hamas: Ready to accept a deal?

The imperialist response to the Hamas victory in Gaza seems to be taking two lines. One is to step up the pressure relentlessly on Gaza or even reoccupy the Strip and crush Hamas. The other is to try to make a deal with the Hamas political leadership along the same lines as the previous deal with Fatah. There have been indications that there is a wing of Hamas that would accept them, for the same reasons that Fatah did—that is, politicians who find the prospect of fat salaries and air-conditioned offices more attractive than the promises of heaven for martyrs of the cause.

There is in fact no basic difference between Fatah and Hamas in political outlook, as a number of specialists have pointed out in the capitalist press in Israel and the West. They are both middle-class leaderships sitting on top of an impoverished and desperate people. The only difference is verbal—the more militant rhetoric of Hamas.

That difference, however, is what has brought the Islamic organization its popularity among the Palestinians. It will be extremely difficult for them to water it down. But the Zionists and the imperialists seem determined to force them to accept a humiliating and possibly politically fatal disavowal of their rhetoric.

So, despite the promises of Israel and the West to make the West Bank a land of opportunity, the prospects of the present situation for the Palestinian people look grim. For the first time in decades there is a possibility of a lasting defeat.

If the civil war spreads to the West Bank, it can produce a demoralization that will foster an abandonment of the very idea of Palestinian independence and a desperate turn to incorporation in the neighboring Arab states as the only hope for security and some political rights. However, even this worst-case scenario will not remove the threat of Arab nationalism from the Zionist settler state and its imperialist sponsors.

For the Arab and Muslim peoples, the tragedy of the Palestinians can continue to symbolize imperialist oppression and the betrayal of their neocolonial governments. It can continue to be the banner of a rising revolt throughout the Middle East that is the real threat to imperialism in the region.

Some intelligent observers in the world capitalist press have noted that the support of the “moderate” Arab governments for Abbas serves both to discredit them and to encourage a radicalization of the masses. However, the immediate outlook for the anti-imperialist struggle in the region continues to depend largely on the political leadership of the Palestinian people. Continuing bloody internecine war and repressive rule by any faction can give the Palestinian struggle a repellant aspect even in the Arab countries.

Some writers for the Arab bourgeois press have already exploited the shock at the conflict between Hamas and Fatah to brand the Palestinian people as “primitive” and to say that Arabs should stop regarding them as an inspiring example.

Furthermore, in order to avoid the trap of the division of the Palestinian territories and the isolation of the militants, Palestinian leaders will need a new political strategy that can give their people a renewed hope in order to counter the social breakdown and achieve a new national unity.

Such a strategy would have to draw the lessons of the failure of the Oslo accords—that is, abandon the objective of a Palestinian mini-state and reject the bribes offered by the Zionists and imperialists. It would have to be based on demanding justice, the right of the Palestinian people to return to their homes and live in equality with the Jewish settlers—that is, a democratic secular Palestine.

That would mean rejecting any deals with imperialists and their agents and freeing the Middle East from imperialist domination by mobilizing the masses in a consistent struggle for their own interests. For that, a new revolutionary leadership will be needed. It can emerge from the crucible of the crisis that is shaking the traditional structures in the Palestinian territories.

In this situation, international solidarity with the Palestinian people must be strengthened. The stronger the support of world public opinion for the rights of the Palestinian people, the easier it will be for them to find solutions to their problems. And their victory will be a victory for justice and civilization for all peoples.