The Palestinian Split

The news of more strife in the Middle East nearly passed me by last week. I've almost become immune to the Israel/Palestine problem and the blood that has been spilt over the decades trying to resolve it. But the division in Palestine between Hamas and Fatah - and the bloodshed it has caused over the last month – left me deeply confused. I realised that I didn’t understand the ideological division that separated Hamas and Fatah. So this week I set about trying to understand what drives and divides the two major forces in Palestinian politics.

I'll start with Fatah, the older of the two movements.

Fatah was formed in 1958 (there is some debate about the exact year of formation) by members of the Palestinian diaspora, most of who were professionals working in the Gulf States in the lucrative oil industry. Yasser Arafat, who led Fatah for over 30 years until his death in 2004, is the best known of Fatah’s founding fathers. The party’s current leader, Mahmoud Abbas, was also there from the beginning.

Fatah is a secular socialist party that became the dominant player in Palestinian politics following Israel's victory in the Six Day War of 1967. Arafat used the power vacuum created when the Arab states were defeated to position Fatah as the pre-eminent Palestinian organisation. Although Fatah has been involved in terrorist acts against Israel, it’s important to acknowledge that senior members of the party have publicly acknowledged Israel’s right to exist. In this respect, Fatah can be seen as the more pragmatic of the two competing forces in Palestinian politics.

Hamas, formed in the Gaza Strip during the First Intifada (which began in1987), is an Islamist party that seeks to create an Islamic state across the lands of historic Palestine. Hamas believes that God bequeathed the land to Palestinians and, thus, it cannot be traded away. As a corollary, Hamas does not recognise the right of Israel to exist and seeks its unconditional destruction. As the Hamas charter states, "There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad." Put simply, for Hamas, there can be no compromise.

The rise of Hamas as a force in Palestinian politics really began with the signing of the Oslo Peace Accords in 1993. The end of the Cold War saw a renewed optimism for hopes of a solution to the Israel/Palestine problem. In August 1993 Arafat and Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin secretly negotiated a ‘Declaration of Principles’ in Oslo, Norway that became known as the Oslo Peace Accords. The declaration was sealed by that iconic handshake in the White House Rose Garden a month later. Bill Clinton’s smile as Arafat and Rabin shook hands reflected the mood of much of the world on that sunny day in September as peace seemed one step closer.

But not everyone was happy – the declaration infuriated hardliners on both sides of the divide.

Two years later, a Jewish extremist opposed to the Oslo process assassinated Rabin. But by this stage the accords were already in tatters. Hamas, incensed by what it regarded as Arafat’s betrayal of the Palestinian people, began a campaign of suicide bombings against Israeli citizens in early 1996. The aim of their campaign was to derail the peace process, and it was a devastating success.

The Hamas-led violence saw Israelis emphatically reject the peace process and elect Likud hardliner Benjamin Netanyahu as Prime Minister. Netanyahu was a vocal critic of the concessions made by Rabin in the Oslo Accords and, as Prime Minister, cracked down on the Palestinians and forced Arafat to act against terrorists. However, his reign as Israel’s PM was short-lived and he lost office to Labor’s Ehud Barak in 1999.

In the closing months of his adminsitration, US President Bill Clinton attempted to bring the parties back to the negotiating table in a last ditch attempt at moving the stalled peace process forward. The summit he convened at Camp David in 2000 concluded without a suitable resolution to the impasse. Soon after Barak and Arafat left the tranquil surrounds of Camp David the second Intifada erupted in the occupied territories.

Israel's response to what became known as the Al-Aqsa Intifada was devastating, but only served to increase the popularity of Hamas among the frustrated Palestinians. They regarded Arafat’s reign as tired and corrupt and saw Hamas as a party of action and renewal.

The rise of Hamas as the new force in Palestinian politics was assured following Arafat’s death in 2004.

With the unifying figure of Arafat now lost, Hamas swept to victory in the 2006 parliamentary elections. The US, which regards Hamas as a terrorist organisation, withdrew its humanitarian aid program following the election in a bid to destabilise the Hamas led government. The civil war we have witnessed in the last few weeks suggests this destabilisation has worked, but the consequences for the Palestinian people and the Israelis remain uncertain.

This is an issue I’ll be watching with a great deal of interest in the coming months.

24/7/07 - Greg Sheridan sees a glimmer of hope in the schism between Hamas and Fatah.

24/7/07 - Martin Indyk, an Australian who was US ambassador to Israel during the Clinton administration, expands on this optimism for The Washington Post.

Thomas Hobbes

Tuesday 26.6.07. Sydney, Australia

In a speech to the Sydney Institute last night, Prime Minister Howard described the conditions in some remote indigenous communities as being akin to "a Hobbesian nightmare of violence, abuse and neglect." (see an excerpt of the speech here http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/duty-of-care-justifies-governments-action/2007/06/25/1182623817831.html.)

Howard's speech was designed to explain why the federal government has felt compelled to intervene in what is historically an issue for the NT government. But his speech got me thinking, who is this Hobbes fellow and what's this nightmare he's banging on about.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was a British philosopher who spent much of his life in self-imposed exile in Paris. He is widely credited for establishing the agenda for much of the Western political philosophy that followed the publication of his magnum opus, Leviathan.

Hobbes came late to philosophy - it wasn't until 1637 that he considered himself a true philosopher and scholar. In 1640, as tension between Royalists and Parliamentarians escalated in the lead up to the English Civil War, Hobbes moved to France so he could work without the risk of falling foul of either side.

In 1642 Hobbes was joined by other Royalist exiles who had also fled to Paris to escape persecution at the hands of the dominant Parliamentarians. They inspired Hobbes to start work on his theory of civil government, and thus Leviathan was born. (Leviathan is a biblical reference and means 'monster')

During the writing process, Hobbes nearly succumbed to a serious illness but recovered and in 1651 Leviathan was published. The reaction to it was immediate. The secular nature of the work infuriated his former Royalist colleagues, not to mention those dangerous French Catholics. Hobbes, fearing for his life in Paris, requested asylum from the Parliamentarians in London. Luckily he was granted it. (obviously the Brits were lacking their own version of the Pacific Solution.)

So, what was Leviathan all about, and how does it relate to the state of remote indigenous communities in 21st century Australia? Put simply, Leviathan is Hobbes' attempt to devise a theory of a social contract. Hobbes posits that the state of nature means each of us has a right to everything in the world but that, due to scarcity of 'things', there is a constant war of all against all to secure that right. He goes on to describe a life lived in the state of nature as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." How can one prevent this bleak outcome? According to Hobbes there is but one way. We must surrender our individual powers to the authority of an absolute sovereign and enter into a social contract. As Australian citizens, we are all signatories to a social contract - we live under a complex of laws that restrict human behaviour and make life, well, more livable.

Obviously, Howard believes the social contract has been voided in these remote communities and the only way to avoid continued brutality is to act immediately and decisively. Agree with him or not, Howard's actions are a drastic attempt to restore the social contract that Hobbes believed was so important in achieving a desirable standard of existence. That's an outcome we should all be hoping for.

[21/8/07- In his continuing series on religion for Slate.com, iconoclast Christopher Hitchens and author of God Is Not Great: How Religions Poisons Everything (see 2007 reading list), mentions Hobbes in this article]