THE split between Palestinians has taken another destructive, institutional turn. Earlier this month, the Hamas prime minister in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, said that his security forces had uncovered a number of Israeli spy networks. Just days later, it was reported that the Israelis planned to permit the Palestinian government to set up a special anti-terrorist force in the West Bank. Neither of these operations are directed against Israel. They are directed against each other. The PA’s “counterterrorist” force will be aimed specifically at Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the West Bank while the Hamas statement made it clear that the Israeli “spies” are in fact Fatah supporters and that it considers any Palestinian who supports Fatah a spy.
One calls the other “terrorist” while the other responds by labeling its opponent “spy.” The use of such charged terms is deliberate; by designating their political opponents as traitors and potential killers, it gives them the apparent right to arrest them — which is what is happening. Both sides are engaged in a massive clampdown on the other.
These are the tactics of dictatorship. It is what Stalin and the communists and Hitler and the fascists did.
That Israeli spies exist in Gaza — and in the West Bank as well — is certain. How else do the Israelis have such accurate information on the whereabouts of Hamas figures and others they want to kill? Their knowledge was devastatingly evident during the Gaza War six months ago.
But to suggest that simply being a Fatah supporter is to be an Israeli spy or, worse, that anyone in Gaza who receives a salary from the PA authority is a spy, as Haniyeh has claimed, is a politically motivated lie — as is the claim that anyone in the West Bank who supports Hamas is a terrorist. Some support Hamas because they think it morally superior to Fatah, or that there can be no accommodation with Israel. They may or may not be right, but that does not make them terrorists.
The charge made against Hamas and Fatah over the past two years — that in fighting each other they connive at Israel’s hold over them — bears constant repetition. It is Israel they need to target instead of each other.
It is easy to say, and to a certain extent true, that Palestinian divisions are the Israelis’ doing. But that does not excuse them, and it will not win them freedom. In Europe during World War II, ideological divisions between different resistance groups in Nazi-occupied countries resulted all too often in their betraying each other. Their divisions robbed them of the power to defeat the real enemy. Their liberation came not through their own efforts but from outside forces — the Americans the British and the Soviets. The Palestinians are playing the same destructive game — but there is no outside army about to free them.
US President Barack Obama said in Ghana this week that Africa’s future lies in African hands. The same is true for the Palestinians. It can be done. After years of being puppets manipulated by outside political forces, the Lebanese have risen up and asserted their freedom.
The Palestinians need to demonstrate the same willpower. But first they need to realize that there can be political differences but a common goal. Without unity of purpose, their just struggle is fundamentally flawed.
Unrest in China
EXCERPTS from the editorial that appeared in The Washington Post on Sunday:
If the reports of deadly riots and repression in a far-off region of China sounded familiar last week, it’s because you have heard them — or something much like them — before. The uprising by ethnic Uighurs in the city of Urumqi in Xinjiang province was the third such popular protest by Uighurs in the past 20 years, and it looked a lot like the trouble that broke out last year in Tibet. What began as a peaceful protest by an aggrieved minority turned to rioting after police responded harshly. Then followed a brutal crackdown by security forces, accompanied by revenge attacks by members of China’s Han majority.
As always, Chinese authorities are blocking communications from the region and fomenting Han nationalism with xenophobic diatribes in the state-controlled media. Once again an exiled leader is blamed, without evidence, for fomenting “terrorism” — in this case Rebiya Kadeer, the World Uighur Congress leader, who lives in Fairfax County, Va.
One reason China’s Communist leadership rejected the political reforms undertaken by the Soviet Union in the 1980s is a fear that Xinjiang would follow the path of neighboring Soviet Central Asian republics — some of them also populated by Turkic ethnic groups — that became independent nations. But Beijing is simply repeating all of the mistakes of the Soviet Union. It has systematically suppressed Uighur culture and language; practice of the Muslim religion is also tightly controlled. Millions of Han Chinese have moved to the province over the last half century, turning the eight million Uighurs into a minority in their own land.
The United States and other Western countries have tried for years, in vain, to persuade Chinese leaders to change policy in Tibet. Unlike the Dalai Lama, Uighurs get little love in Paris or Hollywood; mostly they are known for the alleged militants held at the Guantanamo Bay prison, who have been found to pose no threat but who (with four recent exceptions) have not been released, for lack of a place to send them. But this minority, too, deserves support. The suppression of the Uighurs’ legitimate demands for justice will not make them go away; it will only weaken China’s ability to hold on to the territory in the long term.
