Palestine Threatens to Move from Gang Wars to De-Legitimization

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http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&article_id=83041&categ_id=17#

Editorial

The current fighting among Hamas and Fateh gunmen in Gaza has gone beyond the realm of the merely irresponsible and cruel at the Palestinian level, and has entered the realm of an existential loss for all Arabs. There is something particular about inter-Palestinian fighting in Palestine that transcends the parallel waste and cruelties experienced in Lebanon, Iraq, Sudan and other troubled Arab lands. Palestine is a cause that has resonated among all Arabs and decent people around the world for over six decades, and has seen many fellow Arabs pay a heavy price for sharing the burden of defending that cause. Lebanon in particular has paid dearly over the years, and today it continues to shed blood and other assets in absorbing onto its territory the direct and indirect ramifications of the Palestine issue. Egypt, Syria and Jordan also suffered the cost of being Palestine’s immediate neighbors, while Arabs in the Gulf, Iraq and further afield offered material, diplomatic and other support. Individual Palestinians throughout the world have sent money and materials to aid their compatriots. And today all these people and countries – and others who share a similar warm feeling and sense of principle about the justice of the Palestinian cause – all ask if what they have supported turns out to be young men in hoods running around shooting assault rifles at each other and killing two dozen or so other Palestinians every day?

How can it be that the Fatah and Hamas leaderships have been so incompetent and brutal as to allow their followers to stoop to this level of political imbecility and human irresponsibility? Some gunmen may find it fulfilling to capture the headquarters of a rival group in Gaza. Most of the Palestinian people and all their many Arab supporters find this an act of juvenile political immaturity at best, and depraved criminality at worst. Whether these gunmen think they are acting in the name of God or a nationalist revolution is beyond any reasonable credibility, because their actions in recent months have deeply scarred the powerful authenticity and legitimacy of the Palestinian cause. A poignant, trenchant national struggle anchored in a heroic quest for a redress of grievance has been transformed into an unsightly mob scene punctuated by grieving mothers and fathers wailing over the deaths of their own children by their own political movements. How utterly sad and misguided are these reckless Palestinian leaders who have taken one of the most powerful and enduring national causes in modern history and systematically transformed it into embarrassing internecine street-gang warfare that has elicited neither the pity nor even the lasting attention of the world.

The Palestinian people and cause, and all the Arabs who have supported them and suffered with them, deserve more than the current fare of harrowing, and apparently worsening, national self-destruction that will soon border on home-grown de-legitimization.

Palestine Threatens to Move from Gang Wars to De-Legitimization

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AUTHOR

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Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME) is not-for-profit [501 (C) (3)], grass-roots community of scholars who have united to promote honest, fact-based, and civil discourse, especially in regard to Middle East issues. We believe that ethnic, national, and religious hatreds, including anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism, have no place in our institutions, disciplines, and communities. We employ academic means to address these issues.

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