Playing Hamas against Fatah

Excerpt:

... intra-Palestinian tensions are being exploited by the US and Israel to try and destroy Hamas, by supporting Abbas and Fatah and pushing a bizarre new peace process that is supposed to kick off with a meeting at Annapolis, Maryland in the coming weeks. This US-driven peace process is unlikely to achieve either credibility or success if one of its main purposes is to exploit and deepen the Fatah-Hamas split, and structurally link the intra-Palestinian clashes with the resumption of peace talks. Trying to defeat Hamas in this way runs the additional risk of turning Abbas and Fatah into discredited collaborators whose addiction to power caused them to give more importance to US-Israeli wishes than to the expressed electoral preferences of the Palestinian people.

... Hamas is not going anywhere, because it is the organic response of many Palestinians to three cumulative burdens: the failure of their own Fatah-led elite, the continuing aggressive policies of Israel and the US, and the discord, dysfunction and degradation of Palestinian society. Trying to destroy Hamas by force after it was democratically elected would only strengthen the very forces of defiance, resistance and self-assertion that brought it to power in the first place.

It is astounding that leaders of Fatah, Israel, Europe and the US refuse to see this very simple reality, and the corresponding conclusion that Fatah and Hamas must re-negotiate the formation of a national unity government, rather than fight it out on the streets of their shattered society. Link