No, it's not that Fatah thinks Israel conducted a cruel war against
Hamas. Not at all. But that it ended the battle with Hamas still
holding the shards of power in Gaza. This news is not surprising,
given the Hamas massacre -and that's exactly what it was- of Fatah
sympathizers and officials when the Gaza Taliban took over the Strip.
The report is from Jerusalem Post reporter Khaled Abu Toameh, a
very tough reporter who is suspicious of the bullshit that both
Palestinian and Israeli news handlers put out as "information."
Fatah has good reason to regret and resent Israel's not wiping out the
entire Hamas infrastructure. As soon as the I.D.F. withdrew from Gaza
(and some say even while it was still patrolling the streets) Hamas
began to take revenge on Fatah sympathizers. That is, revenge as in
murdering them. And if only suspicions were had about them they'd get
off with a knee-cappings. This is a very civilized world, Palestinian
politics. Just how civilized you can find out in a dispatch by
Dana Weller-Polak in the oh, so dovish Ha'aretz.
But Fatah men are hardly angels. In a world where accusations are
treated as certified truth Hamas sympathizers in the West Bank also are
not safe. This is an understatement, as the Abu Toameh story makes
clear.
I know that President Obama wants to pursue peace aggressively. And so
does George Mitchell. But one has to know who the parties to a
potential peace are...and what they are capable of doing. The Israeli
body-politic is, even under enormous rocket-and-missile stress,
committed to a withdrawal from most settlements in the West Bank. It
is not committed to a renunciation of these settlements if the
Palestinians still carry around in their heads false fourth and fifth
generation fantasies of their huge California-style orange grounds.