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The Hamas-Fatah Two-Step

(Jewish Ideas Daily) Elliot Jager - Fatah was founded in the 1950s with the straightforward, nonsectarian goal of destroying Israel via "armed struggle" - this, at a time when Arabs themselves fully controlled the West Bank, Gaza, and east Jerusalem. Under the mercurial Yasir Arafat, Fatah came to dominate Palestinian politics. In 1993, abandoning the immediate armed liberation of Palestine for a nebulous alternative strategy, Arafat signed the Oslo Accords, which collapsed in bloodshed seven years later. Hamas, an offshoot of the virulently rejectionist and anti-Semitic Muslim Brotherhood, came into its own in 1987. Considering Palestine a Muslim trust, it sees Islam as engaged in a zero-sum religious war with the Jews. Hamas is crystal-clear on its intention to eliminate the State of Israel. In January 2006, a year after Arafat's death, Hamas overwhelmingly defeated Fatah in the Palestinian Authority elections. Fatah relies on the ostensible moderate Arab states, while Hamas gets its main backing from Shi'ite Iran. As in Gaza under Hamas, Fatah-dominated media in the West Bank and the curriculum of PA schools ceaselessly teach the illegitimacy of Israel and celebrate "resistance" through "martyrdom."
2011-01-20 11:08:15
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