By Stan Goodenough
Jun 26, 2007
"Our rifles, all our rifles are aimed at The Occupation," declared Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas in January, in what Israeli analyst David Bedein described as “a major speech that was warm to Hamas and harsh to Israel and the United States.”
Abbas's comments, wrote Bedein, “were interpreted by Palestinians themselves as a clear reference to attacking Israel [and] were repeated almost exactly in later television shows by other Palestinian officials, such as Ibrahim Abu-Naja and Dr. Kamal Sharafy who called Israel ‘the enemy’ and ‘the Zionist enemy,’ respectively.
“As if to remove any doubt about the militancy of Abbas’ words, minutes after his own speech Palestinian television's senior announcer described Israel’s establishment as the beginning of ‘occupation.’”
Abbas made this speech before Hamas turned on him and drove his Fatah PLO faction from the Gaza Strip.
Apart from that event, however, nothing else has changed, least of all Fatah’s resolve to wipe Israel off the map of the Middle East.
And while the Gaza putsch has been interpreted as signaling the end to Hamas-Fatah relations, Arab groups have a long and colorful history of splitting up and then making up again.
It is the enduring common hatred of Israel that most frequently works to heal those fractured friendships.
And Hamas has been extending a hand to Fatah from the moment it completed its takeover of the Gaza Strip.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said Tuesday he believed Hamas and Fatah would overcome their "differences" and offered to play a mediating role to bring them back together.