Israel can destroy Israel. Certainly not the Palestinians.
Their impotence lies in their inability to unite against the Zionist enemy and in their willingness to compromise with the Jewish state; a clear confirmation of the absence of a shared Palestinian identity, and therefore of the impossibility of a Palestinian state. Even if Israel were to disappear, we would not have the State of Palestine, but at best Palestinian archipelagos glaring at each other with hostility, amid the indifference or contempt of their Arab neighbors.
Israel’s Eighth Front: The Wars Within and Around
Within the war between Israel and the Palestinians there are at least two others. The first one is rapidly heating up among Israel’s tribes and state apparatuses. Consequently Israel’s wars are now unfolding on seven fronts, Gaza included (far from extinguished).
The eighth front, the domestic one, will determine Israel’s future, or its suicide, more than the other seven combined.
The other war involves Palestinian clans, militias, and political formations divided by fierce rivalries, above all Hamas versus Fatah (Muslim Brotherhood style Islamist Nationalism) against the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) and other jihadist armed groups, some of them on Israel’s payroll.
The dead and wounded of these days are the result of score-settling between the hired hands of October 7 (Hamas) and militiamen now in the service of Israel, the PNA, and themselves as clients. Tomorrow, some of them may perhaps be disguised as apolitical technocrats (as Trump calls them in his plan) ready to replace Hamas as policemen and administrators of the Strip on behalf of the international protectorate evoked by the American plan which gives a nod to a neo-colonial diktat formally disguised as an external trusteeship.
Gaza’s Internal War
In the meantime, a war has broken out in Gaza between Palestinians “hired” by Israel, such as the militia of Abu Shabab and Hamas. The former is organized into gangs that seek to weaken Hamas’s grip on the Strip, still considerable after two years of clashes with the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).
Jerusalem watches as Hamas settles scores with its collaborators. In the words of the IDF spokesperson:
“The militias that collaborated with the Israeli army in Gaza will not enter Israel; they will have to face their own fate. The army has forced no one to fight against Hamas, and those who did must take responsibility for their choices.”
The Jewish state applies the divide et impera of Roman memory. As long as their enemy, already considerably weaker, remains fragmented, the Israelis understand they are not exposed to a critical strategic risk. But why are the Palestinians so divided? The short answer: because they are not a nation. The more detailed one requires a brief dive into history.
From the PLO to Hamas: The Fragmented History of Palestinian Resistance
The first Palestinian front of resistance was born only sixteen years after the founding of Israel, in 1964. It was the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), whose long shadow still remains today. The PLO was a creation of Nasser’s Egypt. Its first leader, Ahmed Shukeiri, Lebanese by birth, formerly ambassador first to Syria and then to Saudi Arabia at the United Nations, was appointed by the Arab League.
This was the peak of Pan-Arab euphoria, cause with which the Palestinians closely aligned themselves. In 1967, Israel’s victory and the pan-Arabists’ defeat in the Six-Day War led to the rise of Yasser Arafat, head of the al-Fatah party, to the presidency of the PLO, a position he held until his death in 2004.
After the Oslo Accords, Israel subcontracted part of the occupied territories to the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), which it kept under tight control. The dominant force was Fatah, which within the PNA established a highly corrupt and extraordinarily inefficient patronage system. The resources, largely provided by Israel, were divided by the PNA among a dozen intelligence services, police forces, gangs, and various factions, all played against each other by Arafat and his successor, Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen).
Abbas, now almost ninety, remains president of the PNA. He is the symbol of the liquidation of the Palestinian problem, now mothballed, ideal for Israel and the United States, but perfectly acceptable also to the 157 states that recognize the PNA as the State of Palestine. Abu Mazen is the ghost at the helm of the state that does not exist.
The great rival of the PNA was, and remains, Hamas, a movement born under the impulse of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, established in the territories, especially in Gaza, since the late 1980s. At once nationalist and Islamist, endowed with a strong welfare network, it openly challenges the leadership of the Fatah-PNA system.
Hamas, which Israel treats as a terrorist organization and Abu Mazen calls a “pack of sons of bitches,” is both a political and military movement, composed of semi-autonomous brigades not always under the direct command of the political leadership. It is an organism capable of surviving even when losing some of its limbs, as the ongoing war confirms. “Geopolitical experts” trying to identify the core causes of this resilience, love to use bombastic strategic terms like decentralized operational structure or hybrid warfare, failing to address Hamas’ s greatest strength which lies in its nature; before anything else, Hamas is an idea.
Since its inception, Israel has supported Hamas against Fatah and the PNA. The movement gained the relative majority of Palestinian votes in the 2006 legislative elections, elections that have never been held again by the PNA, partly out of fear that the Islamists would win once more.
When in 2007 Hamas seized control of Gaza, expelling the PNA at gunpoint, the government in Jerusalem kept it afloat with generous funding guaranteed by Qatar, channeled through Israel and Egypt. For years, Netanyahu openly boasted of playing the Palestinians against one another. Quoting Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich: “Hamas is an asset for us.” Israel has ended up a victim of its own cunning.
Conclusions
The PNA remains a bit player. Hamas, in addition to fighting the Israelis, fights the collaborators. Under Trump’s plan it should disarm and leave Gaza. For now, it refuses either option.
Result?
An independent Palestine remains a mirage, war the reality. Palestinians survive amid diaspora, submission and desperate resistance to Israel, under the indifferent or hostile gaze of their Arab “brothers.”
For the Arab Petro-monarchs of the Gulf and beyond, being able to trade arms, technologies and resources with the Jewish state is a far more attractive prospect than supporting a lost cause. Ask them what Palestinians should do, and one will answer: “Die for their cause.”
