Yael has rather a breathless post tonight about what she takes to be the implications of the apparently momentous step by the Palestinian Fatah movement to ban its former partner in the "National Unity Government" of the Palestinian Authority, Hamas.
And according to one of her Palestinian fellow bloggers, Palestinian Authority TV has now started turning out broadcasts that stigmatize and demonize Hamas just as for so many years they have stigmatized and demonized Israel.
It all reminds me of those scenes in George Orwell's "1984" where the propaganda machine shifts the population seemlessly and without a pause for breath from fighting enemy-to-the-death Country 1 to fighting allies-for-ever Country 2. Only in this case, it's the other way round.
As Yael pointed out in an earlier post, this is the same Fatah whose Dahlan claimed only the other day that the whole Hamas coup was an Israeli plot anyway. And, by the way, didn't he also recently claim that the reason Hamas was able to trounce Fatah so quickly and decisively in the battle for Gaza was that the poor Fatah fighters were so exhausted by their years of struggle with Israel?
It all absolutely fits with Fatah still being an unreconstructed Marxist-totalitarian party, true to its
traditions from the Stalinist yearbook, which overlaid itself in recent years with a veneer of Islamism.
Maybe I'm being too cynical.
Maybe those hundreds of Palestinian organizations and trade unions, all controlled by Fatah, will now pass hundreds of identical resolutions overturning their call for a total boycott of Israel and calling instead for a total boycott of Iran, Syria and the Muslim Brotherhood worldwide.
Oooh, look--did you see those pigs just turning aerial somersaults as they zoomed past the window?
Hey Judy, just wanted to point out that it wasn't Dahlan who said that it was an Israeli conspiracy but rather Samir Nayfa who is the Fatah representative in the city of Tulkarim.
Posted by: Yaeli | June 18, 2007 at 03:28 PM
Isn't the pig thing from Animal Farm?
Posted by: Robert | June 18, 2007 at 04:48 PM
It's 1984 you want to worry about, not Animal Farm!
Posted by: Jeremy Jacobs | June 22, 2007 at 03:08 PM
I doubt if Fatah was ever Marxist. It's the PFLP that's Marxist. Still, that doesn't stop Fatah from taking its cues from the Orwellian playbook.
Posted by: Joanne | June 24, 2007 at 07:30 AM
don't you like Little Green Footballs?
Posted by: ploome | June 24, 2007 at 09:02 PM
I share Joanne's doubts about Fatah ever having been Marxist. Arafat and Abu Jihad were connected with the Muslim Brotherhood before founding Fatah, which they modeled on the Algerian FLN, in the late 50s. Whatever Marxist-Leninist gestures they may have made subsequently I would take to have been purely opportunistic attempts to get Soviet support. As Joanne says, it's the PFLP that was ideologically committed to M-L; not surprisingly, a number of its members came from Christian Palestinian families.
Posted by: Derick S | June 27, 2007 at 03:53 AM
'two legs good four legs bad'
regards Mr Bagel
Posted by: Mr Bagel | July 27, 2007 at 01:31 AM
Fatah is not marxist. Never has been. The writer doesn't know anything about Palestinian politics.
Posted by: freespeechlover | August 10, 2007 at 07:15 PM
i don't think it's so much an ideological issue as it is a function of conspiracy theory which in turn comes from a culture of blame, scape-goating, and resolute refusal to take any responsibility. one need not be totalitarian to indulge in such fantasies. as pipes' book Hidden Hand shows, this is part and parcel of Arab political culture. totalitarians, as Norman Cohn showed in The Pursuit of the Millennium, are highly prone to this kind of conspiratorial paranoia.
Posted by: Richard Landes | October 26, 2007 at 02:49 PM