During this summer Palestine had faced a lot of changes and crises. This time it changed from problems between Palestinians and Israelis to become between internal Palestinian groups. I believe that many reasons caused the problems to occur between Hamas and Fatah. After seventeen months in charge of the government the Palestinian president gave an order for the Hamas lead government to be dismissed by a presidential order and hire Faisal Fayaad, a well known independent Palestinian economist. Was that the best thing to happen to the Palestinians in the mean time?
Let me start by giving you a quick background about when things in Palestine started to change in the last two years. On January 25, 2006, approximately 1.3 million Palestinians cast their votes in order to elect a new parliament. Fatah were in charge of all of the previous governments, but for the first time Hamas, the Islamic resistance group, decided to run for the parliament elections that year. Fatah had lost to Hamas, who established seventy-four out of the 132 seats, while Fatah claimed only forty-five. I believe this was the decision of the Palestinian people; the rejection of Fatah was again due to their corruption and incompetency, and they saw a change coming with Hamas – and with Hamas they saw a potential change for the better. But since that day, things in Palestine have been going from bad to worse and all those reasons made things even more complicated.
Palestinians are disappointed with the West’s anti-Hamas position. Since the elections, the West has denied aid to the Hamas government; Canada unfortunately was the first country to do so, stating that they made that decision because Hamas refuses to recognize Israel. I don’t understand why the new Canadian government announced that they support Israel in everything they do, even the United States of America claim to find excuses and reasons to support Israel. But on the other hand, Israel does not recognize Palestine either and Canada or other countries had never spoken about that. What made me laugh was how suddenly the United States of America decided to deal with the Palestinian issues now; they basically decided to support Fatah in any way against Hamas by funding Fatah militias claiming that they need to protect Fatah’s officials. Israel on the same issue had been working with Fatah only, they even only release Fatah prisoners but none of Hamas’s prioners. The West accused Hamas of not respecting previous agreements. But on the other hand, Israel’s suspension of tax revenue transfers to the Palestinian Authority, and refusal to implement a Gaza-West Bank road link agreement are considered violations of previous agreements by Israel. I don’t understand why the West is accusing Hamas of mixing religion and potitics, but they never mentioned anything about Israel which did the mixture by creating a Jewish state, or is this a new way to attack Islam now? I personally don’t agree with mixing religion and politics in everything but I can’t understand why there is a difference between the Muslim version and the Jewish version?
Hamas had become the opposition to the West not because of its Islamic Ideology but only because of its opposition and resistance to the Israeli occupation. Fatah on the other hand are trying to become too political and ignore the resistance part of the Palestinians struggle and Israeli occupation, and this was another reason why Palestinians voted for Hamas rather than Fatah.
I personally believe that the only way to push a real peace process forward and if it was based on a two-state solution would be by an end of the Israeli occupation and the creation of a truly independent Palestinian state. Israel should be stopped from doing all their violations against the Palestinians.
During the first week of June, Israel was celebrating its 40th anniversary of beating the Arabic countries in the six days war of 1967, which made them occupy the West Bank, Gaza, Golan heights, and the Sinai Peninsula. On the other side, where the Palestinians were supposed to be speaking out more to the Palestinian Authority about their West Bank and Gaza rights, an internal power struggle was created in Gaza. The armed militias for Hamas and Fatah kept fighting for the last few months, but in June things got out of control. I believe that those militias are armed people who shouldn’t be considered Palestinians, because after the fighting against each other they ended up killing many of the fighters from both groups and killing more civilians that were around the shootings. Hamas was able to take over Gaza and they took over some of the government’s offices that were in charge of Fatah, and what was embarrassing was to see Hamas fighters taking down the Palestinian flag and putting Hamas’s flag instead: shame on them. I couldn’t believe my eyes, now Hamas and Fatah forgot that they have a struggle against Israeli occupying forces, and decided to fight against each other so that they gain more power. I’m really disappointed that I’m writing down that Palestinians for a while ended up killing each other, but this is the truth that people should know about. So independent people should now work on helping the Palestinians fix those problems that were fueled by many outsiders.
Maybe I showed more support to Hamas rather than Fatah in my article so far but it’s not because I support Hamas, I still disagree with both parties. I hated Fatah’s corruption and their plans to do anything they are asked by the USA or Israel. But on the other hand, I respected Hamas earlier for their resistance against the occupation, but people might not agree with me on that but I will only say that “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,” so I most of the time still consider what Hamas did was resistance, but of course I didn’t agree with everything they did as their timing for attacks was sometimes more destructive than constructive. I personally believe that when they got elected, Hamas didn’t know what their exact plans were. During those 16 months in charge of the government they didn’t decide how they want to move the Palestinian conflict /issue forward. Their problem was that they didn’t have any political experience in how to run the country as they usually never got involved in politics before, since Fatah was always in charge. So it was a very hard transition for them to change from a resistance group to a political group. Another mistake I believe they made was that they were more interested in developing Gaza rather than the West Bank, and from here I should say that any Palestinian group in charge should consider Gaza and the West Bank as equal sides and work on both of them.
The most important thing at the end after all these internal problems that happened in Palestine is that what the Palestinians should do is move on with their fight to get their independence and their state. All Palestinian organizations should agree on a basic program and they should all keep working on that, they should never give up on those demands at all. Some of those demands should be protecting the right of return for all those Palestinian refugees in the world; including eastern Jerusalem with the independent state; going back to the borders in place before the 1967 war. The Palestinians outside of Palestine should concentrate on the international arena, and try to delegitimize the apartheid; have organized committees working in every major Western city; to urge the media to be more just with the Palestinian struggle and show the truth; and to have more organized meetings and demonstrations. Hamas and Fatah should both wake up and start working again together as Palestinians for their freedom, not as people from each party working independently and even sometimes against each other. I believe that Palestinians after 59 years of occupation deserve to get part, at least, of their land that got stolen from them in 1948. Until my next article I hope that things in Palestine will be getting much better so I can be writing about something that will make others happy to hear about.
** This article was the feature article of The New Crescent Magazine, issue #3. Check the link please: http://www.newcrescent.org/i3/jarrad.html **
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