Fatah shoots itself in the foot (again)
August 3rd, 2008Very intrigued by the reports of the latest fighting in Gaza between Hamas and Fatah. Intrigued because it looks as if parts of Fatah are using it to undermine other parts of Fatah — which ultimately of course means undermining the whole of Fatah.
The fighting is between the Hillis clan, whose head is also Fatah’s secretary-general in Gaza. I interviewed Ahmed Hillis a few times before the Hamas takeover in July last year.
He didn’t really seem to hate Hamas. He did really seem to hate Mohammed Dahlan, who had been Arafat’s chief enforcer in Gaza, and whom Hillis accused of every kind of corruption and malpractice. Hillis was also one of the leaders of the talks between Hamas and Fatah when they were negotiating the Mecca agreement last year.
When Hamas took over Gaza, several of Hillis’s allies pointed the finger at Dahlan for stirring up the trouble. Hillis himself, though, squarely blamed Hamas. And his clan had already got into a feud, which has since continued, with members of Hamas’s Executive Force (its alternative to the PA security services), over the killing of a Hillis clan member. Nor is only the Hillis clan a target — Hamas has been trying to curtail the power of the clans in general.
So when a bomb went off at a cafe last week and killed half a dozen Hamas people, Hamas blamed the Hillis clan. The Hillis people denied it. There was a tit-for-tat round of arrests of Fatah and Hamas people in Gaza and the West Bank.
Then yesterday morning more fighting broke out. Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad both begged Israel to give refuge to Ahmed Hillis and some of his people who had fled the fighting and crowded up near the Gaza-Israel border fence.
Extraordinarily, Ehud Barak, who has been consistently blocking Abbas and Fayyad’s requests to remove checkpoints and do other things to make life easier for ordinary Palestinians in the West Bank, agreed to let 180 people including a good number of fighters (albeit unarmed) enter from Gaza, which they did late last night.
But then, strangest of all, Abbas and Fayyad withdrew their request. Israel started sending refugees back to Gaza, where Hamas immediately rounded them up. The Ha’aretz article says that it is “likely that Fayyad and Abbas’ backtracking is connected to power struggles within Fatah”. That looks like a coded way of saying that maybe Dahlan has found a way to use the fighting to screw over his old rival. A seasoned Gazan conspiracy theorist — which of course I am not — would go further and accuse him of ordering last week’s cafe bombing that set this all off in the first place.
At any rate, bad tactical mistake by Abbas to backtrack. His most reliable ally in Gaza, the Hillis clan, must now feel like it has no backing from him. This makes Fatah’s foothold in the strip even weaker than before, and it makes Abbas more dependent on Dahlan.
Dahlan is still powerful in Gaza despite not having been back there (reportedly at least) in over a year - he did well in the local elections that Fatah held earlier this year for delegates for its congress. But he doesn’t have the armed presence that the big clans do, plus he has a poor reputation in general and is believed to have had a hand in provoking the Hamas “coup” which proved such a disaster for Fatah. Depending on him as an agent for anti-Hamas change is not a good gamble.