Tuesday, September 4, 2007

JPost: Fatah "Intifada" vs. Hamas

The Jerusalem Post can finally appease its readers by writing of an "intifada" that has broken out between Palestinian factions in Gaza. Monday morning a second Hamas vehicle was blown up by unidentified Fatah members. As someone in Jerusalem once told me, the Israelis have never had it better, the Palestinians are attacking and killing each other and for the most part are leaving Israel alone. As I have been trying to point out for the past many months the story goes much deeper than Palestinian "Extremist Muslims" hate and kill "Secular Nationalists" and vice versa.

Division has very often been the strategy to control a people, especially when the occupied population is
bigger than the occupying power. One has to look past what the media is telling in its most common platforms in order to see that this is also the case in the Gaza Strip. In no way does this excuse either members of Fatah or Hamas of the actions they are perpetrating, but one always must look beneath the surface for the root of disease. Violence is no natural state of being.

This is the Jerusalem Post's superficial perspective of what takes place in Gaza, by using the Palestinians' own language of "intifada' they are demonizing their Palestinian neighbors and solidifying their place in the annals if history as a self-destructive people that are not to be trusted, who are naturally inclined to such inter-fighting.

"There are increasing indications that Fatah is trying to organize an intifada against Hamas, as Fatah members in the Gaza Strip try to snap out of what one commander termed a state of "depression" following their defeat at the hands of Hamas in June...


Fatah officials expressed deep satisfaction with the anti-Hamas demonstrations...

Hamas leaders said they did not rule out the possibility that Fatah members would resort to an "armed struggle" against the Islamist movement.

They added that there was growing evidence that Fatah was preparing for armed attacks on Hamas figures and institutions. They also noted that over the weekend Hamas militiamen discovered a weapons factory inside the house of a former Fatah security commander in the Strip."


Aljazeera provided this report of a Hamas cartoon that is communicating to Gaza's children this deepest of divides between the two factions. A division driven by external forces and kindled by conditions that bring us back to a mentality of survival of the fittest.


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