The Palestinian #Resistance and Its Enemies | Jacobin
▻https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/07/the-palestinian-resistance-and-its-enemies
Responding to Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and other resistance forces in the #Gaza Strip’s rejection of the so-called “ceasefire proposal,” Palestinian president Mahmoud #Abbas lamented, “The Palestinian factions’ refusal to deal with the Egyptian proposal for ceasefire with Israel has disappointed all of us.”
That ceasefire called for the end of rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip, but said nothing of the Israeli occupation, siege, and blockade from which those rockets were born. It was, in other words, not a ceasefire proposal at all. With his comments, Abbas, the leader of Fatah and the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, distanced himself from the rest of the Palestinian factions.
Since the 2007 Hamas-Fatah conflict, the Palestinian political spectrum has polarized. Divisions between the two main factions are not merely geographical, institutional, ideological, or political. Most centrally, they run along the fault line of their conflicting agendas: resistance and anti-resistance.
Division is not new in Palestinian national politics. Political and ideological disagreements have been features of factional politics within the Palestinian national movement since its inception. However, during moments of resistance to intensified Israeli aggression, these fissures used to close up, to be replaced with a sense of unity and shared destiny.
Unfortunately, recent years have undermined this tendency. Resistance is no longer seen as a unifying umbrella under which Palestinian factions leave behind their disputes.
Western and Israeli media like to depict Abbas as a representative of the most moderate Palestinian political camp. But in the eyes of Palestinians, his hostility to the resistance makes him appear to be an unofficial spokesman of the Israeli government. That hostility is even more problematic given that he presides over a political trend that still presents itself as a “national liberation movement.”