Posted on 09/08/2009 5:48:31 AM PDT by SJackson
When the Fatah Central Committee convened its sixth party conference last month in Bethlehem -- the first such meeting in twenty years and the first ever held on Palestinian Authority territory -- one might have expected a bit of soul-searching. After all, more than two decades after the Palestine Liberation Organization and its main political faction met America's prerequisites for a dialogue by rhetorically recognizing Israel's right to exist, renouncing terrorism, and accepting United Nations Resolution 242, a casual observer might assume that a re-examination of revolutionary principles was in order.
Yet nothing of the sort occurred. That is because in recent years, Fatah has fragmented -- not just into two or three rival camps, but into multiple corrupt and competing power centers, most of which continue to drift towards extremism rather than moderation. In fact, the divisions within Fatah, to say nothing of the rift between the Palestinian Authority and its main Islamist opposition, Hamas, challenge the basic assumptions about Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking now in vogue in Washington and elsewhere. Simply put, both process and outcome are defined very differently in Jerusalem, Ramallah, and Gaza City.
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
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As long as the islamists can use them for fodder against the Israelis, what does it matter if they accept peace or not?
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