A historic anomaly

The rift between Fatah and Hamas is far more damaging to Palestinians than to their enemies

Ghada Karmi
Tuesday July 17, 2007
The Guardian

".....What a nadir in Palestinian fortunes for one side in Ramallah to trumpet western support while the other starves in Gaza. This shocking spectacle is a sad echo of an earlier scenario, then as now, infinitely more damaging to the Palestinians than to their enemies. "The Arabs have been so misguided in the conduct of their case that I sometimes wonder whether Jewish agents are not at work inside the Arab camp," wrote a British Foreign Office official following the bungled Arab rebellion against Britain in 1936. For two years the Arabs fought valiantly, suffered enormously and were brutally punished by the British in ways reminiscent of the Israeli army's methods today. They ended up starving, their leaders killed or exiled, and the fruits of their struggle vitiated by internal splits.

These splits went back to rivalry between two Jerusalem families, the Husseinis and Nashashibis, during the 1930s. The latter wanted compromise and accommodation with the British mandate authorities, while the Husseinis refused to deal with a government so blatantly pro-Zionist. In today's terminology, we might call the former "moderates" and the latter "hardliners". Or, roughly speaking, the Nashashibis might stand for Fatah and the Husseinis for Hamas......

....The anomaly of Fatah, shunning its natural partner, Hamas, in the struggle against Israel, and turning instead to the western camp, the authors of Palestine's misfortunes, recalls another historical parallel. When, in 1915, Sherif Hussein of Mecca pledged Arab support for the war against the Ottomans in return for British help over gaining Arab independence, he too believed their promises. Britain's cruel betrayal should have been a lesson for Arabs never to repeat the error. Yet the Fatah leadership today has discarded resistance against Israel in favour of "peace" with an enemy that has never reciprocated; hoping that the western powers and their regional proxies, who have failed so far to give the Palestinians their state, will now do so......

Tony Blair's recent appointment as Middle East peace envoy is indicative. Rather than face the basic contradictions fuelling the conflict, the Quartet preferred another pointless gesture that substitutes process for substance, hoping to convince the Arabs that something is being done, but in reality postponing the moment of reckoning. Palestinians, who will pay the price for this prevarication, must expose the basic contradiction in the western position that perpetuates the conflict....."