Hamas and Fatah Want a New Intifada

by Khaled Abu Toameh, STONEGATE INSTITUTE

To avoid Palestinians erupting against both Fatah and Hamas, the two parties are working to direct the heat toward Israel.

Hamas and Fatah have lately ratcheted up their rhetoric against Israel in a clear bid to distract attention from their failure to end their power struggle.

By backing a “popular resistance” against Israel, Hamas and Fatah are hoping to distract attention from their failure to end their dispute and form a unity government.

The two rival Palestinian parties are hoping that Palestinians would turn their anger and frustration toward Israel and not toward either of them.

This is why over the past few weeks leaders and officials representing Hamas and Fatah have been talking about a third intifada that is about to erupt in the West Bank and Gaza Strip against Israel.

Both Hamas and Fatah have been urging Palestinians to step up “popular resistance” against Israel.

The two parties are telling Palestinians that Israel does not want peace or a two-state solution and is only interested in maintaining control over Palestinian lands and “Judaizing” Jerusalem.

The stepped-up anti-Israel rhetoric has resulted in a sharp increase in Palestinian violence against IDF soldiers and settlers in the West Bank and Israeli policemen in east Jerusalem.

Last week, a young Palestinian man from a village near Jerusalem was killed during a confrontation with IDF soldiers. The man, Talat Ramia, was among a group of Palestinian demonstrators who hurled stones at soldiers.

Ramia and his friends took to the streets because Fatah and Hamas had warned the Palestinians that Jewish extremists were planning to “storm” the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.

Because of the warning, hundreds of Muslim worshippers clashed with Israeli policemen following last Friday’s prayer at the mosque.

At the same time, Palestinian groups in the Gaza Strip have also gone on high alert by firing more rockets at Israeli targets.

Although the two parties have signed a number of “reconciliation” accords over the past few years, the latest being earlier this month in Qatar, they have failed to implement any of the agreements.

The most recent attempt to implement the Qatar-brokered agreement between Hamas and Fatah took place in Cairo last week. However, following three days of discussions, Hamas and Fatah agreed to delay talks over the formation of a unity government because of the wide gap between the two sides.

Many Palestinians are deeply disappointed with Fatah and Hamas, which have been fighting each other since the Islamist movement came to power in 2006. Hamas and Fatah are aware that many Palestinians are increasingly frustrated with the ongoing dispute between the two sides.

They are afraid that one day the Palestinians may erupt against Fatah and Hamas. Some Palestinians have even begun talking about organizing an uprising against the two parties.

To avoid such a scenario, Hamas and Fatah are now working hard to direct the heat toward Israel. Mahmoud Abbas and Khaled Mashaal know that only a new intifada against Israel will help them stay in power: Palestinians will be too busy fighting Israel.

February 27, 2012 | 7 Comments »

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7 Comments / 7 Comments

  1. If there is a third intifada it is to be hoped that the IDF and police will be allowed to immediately shut down all transit of: goods, people, money, fuel and power -even water – into the PA areas; and that the Israeli governemnt will have the guts to say and stick to its words to say clearly that the transit will only be resumed when the PA shuts down the riots and violence. So far Israel has been too pussy footing polite to the PA which needs a dose of its own medicine of pure obstructionism. As with the regular wars of 1948, 56, 67, and 73 Israel has to obtain a quick result on the grounnd before the UN and other useful idiots can intefere. If Israel immediately shuts down supply to the PA areas ands it takes a week or even better a month before “as a favour to the powers” she reopens any transit, provided all outstanding bills for water and power are settled, it should catch the population unprepared with stocks and a month of being hungry and cold – or hot – should stick in their memories not to be so stupid again.

  2. “Ramia and his friends took to the streets because Fatah and Hamas had warned the Palestinians that Jewish extremists were planning to ‘storm’ the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.”

    Ah, yes, when all else fails, there’s always “the Jewish threat to al-Aqsa Mosque.”

    A day after Sharon set foot on the Temple Mount — after asking (and receiving) permission from the Waqf to make the visit — the Oslo-al Aqsa Intifada broke out, since obviously the Jews were set on destroying the Mosque. And that wasn’t the first time al-Aqsa was used as an issue.

    During the Second World War, Hajj Amin al-Husseini broadcast a fatwa calling for jihad against the Brits & the Jews — who, he claimed, had “defiled” the Al-Aqsa, and were bent on destroying Islam.

    And before that, in the summer of 1929, after a week of concentrated, systematic Muslim demagoguery — during which agitators criss-crossed the country, urging the local rustics in Arab villages and towns to “protect al-Aqsa against Jewish attacks” (which dreadful assaults might perhaps pray the mosque away, from below, at the foot of the Western Wall?) — horror struck the unarmed Jewish communities of the Yishuv, several of them (like the traditional & non-political enclave in Hebron), purely religious & scholarly.

    Having chosen to entrust themselves to the friendship of their Arab neighbors, they had declined the protection of the newly-effective, though still clandestine, Haganah (the Jewish self-defense organization created by Jabotinsky & Rutenberg).

    The decision would prove fatal.

    Yup, whenever you need an issue to stir up the zombies, go for protecting al-Aqsa — the old standby.

    Never fails.

  3. they are asking for it. now is time to show the power of the almighty and give it to them real bad. this time i think Israel should seal the coffin completely so that nothing remains afterwards. and keep america out of loop until obama gets himself out of white house

  4. This is a centuries old tactic by a ruling power to direct the anger of their subjects away from their own atrocities.
    The Jews always were and still are the handy scapegoats.

  5. Any force used by Israel to resist a 3rd Intifada would be called “disproportionate” by the United Nations, “unevenhanded” by the Europeans and Isreal would be “scolded and humiliated” by U.S. State Department. Same old….same old. If Israel ever showed any sign of a significant win and retreat by Hamas or Fatah, there would then be a worldwide clamor and call for “ceasefire.”