Vol. 71/No. 27      July 9, 2007

“Our hope is that President Abbas and the prime minister, Fayyad—who’s a good fella—will be strengthened to the point where they can lead the Palestinians in a different direction,” U.S. president George Bush announced in a June 19 press conference alongside Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert.

Olmert announced his government would release $400 million in Palestinian tax revenues to the new administration. The funds had been frozen in Israel since Hamas, a bourgeois party branded by Washington and Tel Aviv as “terrorists,” won a majority in the PNA elections 18 months ago.

Abbas announced the dismissal of that Hamas-led PNA administration and appointed the new one in an effort to reassert Fatah’s control over the West Bank following its military defeat in Gaza at the hands of Hamas. The five-day offensive by the numerically inferior Hamas forces routed Fatah—its latest loss in an ongoing power struggle with Hamas.

Salam Fayyad, the newly appointed prime minister, was a former finance minister in the Fatah-controlled PNA. With a PhD in economics from the University of Texas, Fayyad worked at the World Bank in Washington from 1987-95 before taking a post as the International Monetary Fund representative to Palestine.

Following the June 14 seizure of the PNA’s Preventative Security headquarters in Gaza, Hamas leaders revealed widespread evidence of the close collaboration established between the CIA and Fatah following the 1998 Wye River Accords.

“They are going to identify Fatah with the CIA,” Robert Baer, a former CIA operations officer in the Middle East, told the New York Sun. “They are going to show a record of training, spying on Hamas.”

Fatah, which dominated political life in the Palestinian territories for about 40 years, has seen its popular support steadily erode.

In January 2006, Fatah was dealt a resounding defeat by Hamas in elections to the Palestinian National Council—the PNA parliament. While much of the press painted Hamas’s action as a new surge of “Islamism,” for many, the support for Hamas was as much a rejection of the political and class course of Fatah.

For decades, the Fatah leadership pursued a course of accommodation and collaboration with Washington and Tel Aviv, but in the end has little to show for it. The gap has deepened between the majority of Palestinians living in the refugee camps and elsewhere in the territories and a wealthy minority associated with the PNA bureaucracy, whose actions have been marked by corruption and thuggery.

This course increasingly alienated many searching for an effective way to resist the brutality of the Israeli occupation and advance the Palestinian national struggle. Hamas—which refused to negotiate with Tel Aviv, while promoting the tactic of suicide bombings and the perspective of establishing an “Islamic republic”—began to grow in strength.

“The majority can’t explain why they voted for Hamas,” Khaled Abu Khatah Barghouti, 36, a director of social services for the PNA in Gaza told the New York Times following the election in January 2006. “But if you sit with them they will say: ‘We hate Fatah. They did nothing for us. A few poor people suddenly became rich people.”

Meanwhile, Tel Aviv has exploited the paralyzing factionalism in the leadership of the Palestinian national movement to pursue a policy it calls “unilateral disengagement.” Tel Aviv has removed hard-to-defend Israeli settlements in Gaza and has begun to do the same in areas of the West Bank. At the same time, the Israeli military has maintained steady pressure on any Palestinian group that carries out armed resistance against the occupiers. The aim is ultimately to establish firm borders for the state of Israel that are walled off from the Palestinian territories.

Use of economic aid and economic strangulation has been a key weapon in this strategy. Washington and Tel Aviv both announced they would begin funneling money and other aid to the Abbas/Fayyad administration on the West Bank, while intensifying the economic squeeze on Gaza.  
 
 
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