The observer of the Palestinian situation can only shake his head in confusion and astonishment at what the Palestinian leaderships of various factions are doing. They are far from aligning and harmonizing with the heartbeat of the Palestinian street and do not work, even partially, to respond to its aspirations and vital and national needs. The Palestinian leadership is in one valley, and the Palestinian people are in another.
The official Palestinian entity has been in intensive care for years, struggling with death despite the absence of life essentials for a long time. But since death and life in the Palestinian case have long ceased to be purely Palestinian matters, they have become controlled by external forces, both distant and close. These forces regulate the movement and life system of the Palestinian leadership, which is shackled by fragile agreements, conditional funding, and has become a hostage to regional bargains and a playground for political adventurers and amateurs.
Instead of the gentlemen in the Palestinian leadership reaching the nearest and easiest conclusion to escape this vortex by returning to the people's embrace and protecting them, they hasten at an astonishing pace to throw themselves into the arms of their masters and financiers.
No one can read what is on their minds, but we are certain that they lack a national movement strategy and a momentary confrontation tactic. They have become remotely controlled like robots. Their steps, statements, and their policy of non-policy are all daggers in the Palestinian national body. Their unpatriotic strategy is the primary reason for the Palestinian situation's deterioration. Yes, you brothers in Hamas and Fatah leadership are the cause of national division, the economic and social decline, and the citizens' disbelief in politics and politicians to bring them to safety. You alone stand as an obstacle to the unity of the Palestinian body and its return to a confrontation strategy with the occupier.
And to avoid repeating much about the painful past of failed strategies and tactics for the overall Palestinian case, I want to shed light on the strategies and tactics of the two dominant factions in the Palestinian case, Hamas and Fatah, especially since many have written and published that both factions lack a clear political ideological strategy and are floundering in the sea of politics north and south without a defined compass!
After the military coup carried out by Hamas under the orders and pressure of the Supreme Shura Council of the Muslim Brotherhood worldwide, as documented by research, statements of some movement figures, and reports submitted to the global Shura Council weeks after the coup, Hamas’s diplomatic journey began dancing on a rope that led it to the embrace of countries—Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey—that coordinate and cooperate most with the Zionist occupation state.
This alignment of Hamas was not surprising and is not a tactic to confront a certain reality as some colleagues describe, but rather the core of Hamas’s strategy since its founding. In its sole political program, the Hamas Charter, which has not been amended or changed to date, Hamas defines itself as an Arab Islamic Palestinian movement and a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood worldwide. The priorities of this definition were not chosen by chance but are the strategic identity controlling all its momentary tactics. The depth of this strategy and its impact on the movement and its political performance appeared during the events of the so-called Arab Spring and its alignment now in the Brotherhood camp is itself a strategy.
Hamas’s rapprochement with Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah in recent years was a materially, politically, and militarily useful tactic during a time when the movement needed this support to establish its foothold in the Palestinian arena and the region to achieve its second central strategy. Hamas’s second central strategy sees the movement as the sole leader of the Palestinian people. Since its founding after the outbreak of the first Intifada, Hamas has tried to establish this strategy through a cat-and-mouse game with the unified leadership of the Intifada, which included most PLO factions, and repeated this step with the opposition alliance to Oslo. In the last two decades, Hamas has attempted at least twice to establish a parallel framework to the PLO under its umbrella. It still works to establish itself as an alternative to the PLO by creating parallel trade union, professional, social, and diplomatic frameworks to PLO institutions wherever they exist. The second strategy of Hamas sees establishing an alternative framework to the PLO, and if this is impossible for some reason, the tactic to achieve this strategy is to infiltrate the organization to overthrow it from within. Division and its reinforcement are tactics to achieve this strategy.
Hamas’s third central strategy revolves around its ideological structure and its understanding of itself and the Palestinian-Zionist conflict. Hamas considers Palestine an Islamic endowment land and the Palestinian-Zionist conflict a religious conflict between Muslims and Jews. This vision is far from the Palestinian national program and the national system strategy, which consider the conflict with the occupation purely political. Hamas’s psychological view of society does not differ from the theological vision; both seek to build a theocratic entity whose backbone is religion and religious laws. The shared ideological commonalities between Hamas and Jewish religious movements are much greater than those with the overwhelming majority of Palestinian national movements and parties. Hamas divided its theocratic strategy into a phased Islamic program.
It establishes Islamic emirates in its areas of control and is ready to bargain with the occupier to consolidate this tactic. Its occasional waving of the long-term truce slogan embodies this idea, and it sees Gaza now as the first emirate in its phased Islamic program to build the Islamic state on the endowment land in Palestine. To establish itself as a “moderate” Islamic movement within its theocratic strategy acceptable globally and by Israel, Hamas does not hesitate to provide direct and covert support to extremist Islamist movements in the Gaza Strip and to tacitly overlook their terrorist activities and expansion from time to time, provided they do not shake Hamas’s entity and strength. The tactic behind this step lies in creating a radical Islamic political body to Hamas’s right, making Hamas the center of the Palestinian political entity, facilitating the other side—Arab and Zionist—to trade with it as an alternative to the PLO.
The Palestinian National Liberation Movement Fatah is no longer a movement in the structural political sense but has turned into “shops” in a “shopping center called Fatah” led by a “business manager” named Mahmoud Abbas with a small management called the President’s kitchen. I call this political structure widespread in the East a Shop in Shop. Every shop owner in this center realizes he cannot compete or survive outside this system. This party structure is built on absolute hierarchical dependence from bottom to top, leaving no room for democratic life, especially since financial affairs are monopolized at the top, which alone decides the distribution mechanism and its pace. This dependence and structure deprive the party base of any possibility to participate in drawing a comprehensive strategy for the party and its political performance. This structure increased and solidified after President Mahmoud Abbas assumed leadership following the late President Yasser Arafat’s death, clearly. Reaching such a party structure for the largest PLO movements was one of Oslo’s strategies and its engineers, including Mahmoud Abbas. The distribution of jobs and appointments among Fatah cadres by the president and his kitchen is the effective tactic to consolidate this strategy. Internal sources indicate that more than two-thirds of the movement’s cadres have become employees of the authority’s apparatus and institutions. In the absence of labor laws and modern protection laws for workers and employees to protect them from blackmail, every employee’s fate becomes tied to the official’s satisfaction. Here emerges a deadly economic dependence leaving no room for free opinion. Silence, full loyalty, and rivalry to get closer to the president and his kitchen are features of this structure and its only tactic ensuring its survival within this strategy. Voices from within the movement occasionally singing outside the flock, like Central Committee member Abbas Zaki, are components of this authoritarian strategy that reduces party decision-making to the equation: In Fatah, there are always two opinions, the president’s opinion and the other is wrong...
Does all this mean that Fatah does not adopt a clear strategy for the conflict? The answer is yes… The movement has reduced its political output and diplomatic movement to what the president and his kitchen decide independently, away from the movement’s already weak institutions. But this does not mean that President Mahmoud Abbas lacks a strategy as many colleagues and analysts claim. Since taking charge of Palestinian affairs, President Mahmoud Abbas has adhered to a clear strategy based on convictions that have not shifted or changed over the past years; his strategy is directed to the outside world from Western countries, Arab regimes, and also Israel, conveying that he, Mahmoud Abbas, is a guarantee for their safety and interests in all aspects in Palestine and is the rock upon which they can build a new Middle East, while others are either radicals or incompetent. If they bypass him, the fate will be either chaos or a radical entity alongside Israel!
