Hamas’ gain, Fatah’s loss
Israel's new cease-fire agreement with Hamas may be good news in Sderot and Gaza City, but it's bad news for the Palestinian Authority leadership in Ramallah.
As if Fatah's routing by Hamas in elections in January 2006 and in a violent coup in June 2007 weren't enough, now Israel is signing agreements with Hamas while the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority is, once again, sidelined. And it doesn't help that P.A. President Mahmoud Abbas is virtually ignored while Bashar Assad's Syria gets all the attention in Israeli-Arab peace talks (this week, the possibility of Lebanon-Israel talks even made headlines).
On Thursday night, Fatah's Kadura Fares talked to Israel's Channel 2 TV about it, and on Friday Ha'aretz carried a column by Akiva Eldar on the subject. If Israel wants to strengthen the hands of the moderate Palestinian leaders, awarding a victory to Hamas extremists and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh (the deposed P.A. prime minister) is not the way to go, the argument goes. Eldar writes:
Palestinian pollster Dr. Khalil Shikaki said this week at a conference in Jerusalem that if elections had been held on the day the cease-fire agreement was finalized, Hamas would have won majority support in both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Shikaki saw the cease-fire agreement as the reason for this...For many months, Fatah mocked Hamas by arguing that the Qassam rockets, which Abu Mazen called "toys," had no effect on Israel and were causing the people of Gaza unnecessary suffering. And here we discover that the "toys" are a strategic weapon. Instead of conducting the negotiations through Abu Mazen and letting him reap the accomplishment, or at least control the border crossings, Israel has turned Haniyeh into the hero of the hour. And that is not the end. Now that Hamas has shown that you can get recognition from Israel without recognizing it yourself, Haniyeh will free the prisoners that Fatah was unable to free; perhaps even their leader, Marwan Barghouti.
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Al-Dura conspiracy theories
After ridiculing claims by Jewish right-wingers that the iconic shooting of 12-year-old Mohammed al-Dura was a hoax, the Jerusalem Post's Larry Derfner responds to a rebuttal by Richard Landes and Philippe Karsenty with a detailed analysis of what is, and isn't, known about the shooting.
Karsenty is the French Jewish media watchdog who was sued in a French court for claiming the al-Dura incident, which helped fuel the flames of the second intifada, was staged. Karsenty initially was found guilty of defaming the journalist who filed the report, France 2 TV's Charles Enderlin, but last month a French appeals court overturned the verdict, supporting Karsenty's right to charge that the incident was a hoax.
The upshot? Derfner agrees with Karsenty, the IDF and Jewish observers who say that al-Dura likely was killed by Palestinian fire, not by Israeli troops, but Derfner says there's no evidence to show the boy's shooting was staged:
In short, the French appeals court upheld Karsenty's legal right to cry hoax. It by no means upheld the substance of his claim. There are light years of difference between the two.Yet while it's pure Jewish paranoia to claim that Enderlin and his co-conspirators knew all along that the Palestinians killed al-Dura, and it's way beyond paranoia to think the Palestinians killed the boy deliberately or that he never died at all.
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