Israel, US, and Egypt back Fatah's fight against Hamas
The Bush administration has spent most of its $84 million in aid to Palestinians to train an elite corps of Fatah-loyal fighters.
from the May 25, 2007 edition
Page 4 of 4
"All of the support by the US administration of the Presidential Guard has made a real crisis between the Hamas and the Presidential Guard," says Fawzi Barhoum, a Hamas spokesperson in Gaza. He accused the US of promoting sectarian strife across the Middle East to protect Israel. "The new Middle East is dependant upon splitting the people into two sides," he says.
Mr. Baskin said that while the Israeli military establishment was at first leery of allowing shipments of arms to forces loyal to Abbas, the prevailing view among Israel's generals is that a direct military confrontation inside Gaza with Hamas is inevitable, so some generals believe it's worth arming Abbas first.
Whether a Palestinian civil war is good or bad for Israel, he said the military is split.
For Egypt, which is backing the US effort along with other secular authoritarian Arab states, anything that may weaken Hamas may be viewed as a positive. Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's most popular opposition movement, and currently hundreds of Brotherhood members are in Egyptian jails as political prisoners.
"We can not accept the point of view that the US and Egypt are trying to push this situation in Gaza to civil war, or to cause violence among Palestinian factions. Only pro-Hamas, pro-Muslim brotherhood people believe that," says Emad Gad, a political scientist at the Al Ahram Center for Strategic and International studies, which is partially funded by the Egyptian government.
"The Egyptian regime here is trying to minimize the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood and any success for the Hamas government means more support for the Brotherhood in Egypt, so the Egyptian regime has to seek to minimize their role."
Mr. Gad says Egypt would also like to see the Mecca Agreement of earlier this year, which was brokered by Saudi Arabia and saw Hamas and Fatah enter into a unity government, fall by the wayside, since it legitimizes Hamas, a movement he says that stands in the way of "regional cooperation and an eventual settlement."
The internal Palestinian fighting has helped bolster the position of Fatah members like Mohammed Dahlan, who heads the Palestinian National Security Council. Mr. Dahlan, who has spent five years in prison for alleged terrorism against Israel, has considerable armed support in Gaza and his supporters have sought to destabilize Palestinian governments when he's been sidelined in the past.
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