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.