For many years, some of the closest people to Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas kept whispering into the ears of
western politicians and journalists that the real danger facing Palestinian society emanates not from Israeli occupation but from Islamic fundamentalism.
The whispering has turned into shouting since Hamas crushed the security services in Gaza that were loyal to Mohammed Dahlan last month. Today, it is with the loudest voices they can manage that these same individuals are crying for help, appealing to Israel and its western supporters to protect
secularism from Islam in Palestine.
The advisers to Mahmoud Abbas hope to benefit from the fact that in the
West secularism is often associated with democracy whereas religion in general is associated with authoritarianism. The idea is to divert world attention from the real causes of the current crisis between Fatah and Hamas. They speak of Fatah as a secular nationalist current that represents the aspirations of the Palestinian people to establish a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza while portraying Hamas as an integral part of an alleged global Islamicist movement that is a threat to world peace and modernity.
The crisis between Hamas and Fatah has been the product of what Abbas and his men allege was a coup. From Hamas''s point of view what happened was an inevitable surgical measure to rid Gaza of the obstacle that stood in the way of the national unity government as well as its predecessor Hamas-only government and undermined their ability to establish law and order.
The toppling of Dahlan''s empire in Gaza exposed Fatah as a corrupt and decaying organisation and revealed heaps of information about the atrocities committed in its name against the people of Gaza by its own security men who have been turned, thanks to US, European, Israeli and Arab support - including funding, training and equipping, into a den of crime and espionage.
The endeavour of Abbas''s men to "ideologise" the problem is likely to meet some success: the image they portray of Hamas as an extremist, fundamentalist and reactionary faction provides a convenient justification for those who, on purely political grounds, proscribe Hamas and refuse to deal with it despite having been
democratically elected. The western politicians'' main, and perhaps only, objection to Hamas has been its position vis-á-vis Israel. It is no wonder that nowhere in the three Quartet''s conditions is secularism or democracy or even good governance referred to. All the west wants from Hamas is for it to recognise that Israel has the right to exist, disarm and renounce violence and recognise all previous agreements reached between Israel and the PLO.
More abstracts about the A political conflict