Khaled Abu Toameh on Fatah and Hamas:
Were it not for Israel’s presence between the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Fatah and Hamas would most likely be dispatching suicide bombers and rockets at each other.Read the whole thing.
And they would perhaps still be throwing each other’s supporters from the fifteenth and sixteenth floors of tall buildings had not Israel, in the summer of 2007, helped Fatah members and their families run away from the Gaza Strip to the West Bank.
This is not a conflict over which side will bring democracy and good government to the Palestinians so much as it is a power struggle over money and power.
The fight between Hamas and Fatah is not a power struggle between good guys and bad guys: it is a rivalry between bad guys and bad guys.
Creating a second Palestinian state is not going to resolve the Palestinian civil war--it will only exacerbate it.
But then again, the issue is to create a Palestinian Arab state--not necessarily a stable state. The West has become so focused on creating this state, that they are incapable of evaluating the issues involved, let along caring.
Technorati Tag: Fatah and Hamas.
We don't need a Palestinian state, not under the current leadership, not with the current generation.
ReplyDeleteI am an Israeli. Yoram Etinger summed up the Palestinian leadership's résumé pretty well:
Black September: 10,000 dead
Lebanon Civil War (which the PLO initiated): 100,000 dead
Hama Massacre, which a Syrian human rights organisation stated 40,000 dead in order to put down a PLO initiated uprising.
The Arab world was quite happy to see Israel exile the PLO leadership to Tunisia.
The mujahadin in Afghanitan received $1 billion dollars to fight the Soviets. Arafat received $100 million to fight Israel. Hardly enough to take on the IDF.
It is the Arab world that refuses to absorb the Palestinian refugees. It is these same Arab states that attacked Israel in 1967.
The Arab states use the Palestinians as a humanitarian weapon against Israel, and in turn to vilify Israel in the wider world.
As long as the Arab world exists in its current form, there will never be peace, with or without Israel.
Exactly. The West is so focused on creating a Palestinian state that it brushes off the ability of the Palestinians to create one that will benefit their own people. The costs of such a state are not going to be borne by Europeans and Americans. They will be paid by the Jews and the Arabs who would have to live with it and the West as Daled Amos has observed, seems to have as its principal reason for insisting on it to feel better about itself.
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