From Hamas vs. Fatah: The Struggle for Palestine by Jonathan Schanzer

 Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 256pp. $26.95

Divisions among Palestinians generally do not receive their due attention, Jonathan Schanzer correctly points out, in the immense academic and journalistic coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Instead, an official, propagandistic, and inaccurate party line holds sway. To quote Rashid Khalidi, a former Palestine Liberation Organization employee now teaching at Columbia University , a “uniform Palestinian identity” exists. The Palestinians are one—full stop, end of story.

This simplistic and ahistorical understanding largely dominates how outsiders see the Palestinians, to the near exclusion of other, more nuanced analyses, and the party line afflicts the whole history of the conflict—the period before 1948, the heyday of pan-Arabism, the emergence of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and especially the 20-year period, 1987 to 2007, that Schanzer studies in the following pages. As he puts it, “While the mainstream American media overreported the violence between the Palestinians and Israelis, the ‘other struggle for Palestine,’ which began to play out between Fatah and Hamas, received little to no coverage in .”

Many differences divide Palestinians—Muslim and Christian, urban and rural, sedentary and nomadic, rich and poor, regional—but Schanzer, a highly talented historian of the modern Middle East, establishes here the nature, extent, and significance of two specific intra-Palestinian tensions: primarily that fight between Fatah and Hamas, for this has the most acute and immediate political importance, and secondarily the dichotomy between the West Bank and Gaza.

Hamas versus Fatah traces the history of the two groups’ relations from the emergence of Hamas in late 1987 to the Hamas conquest of Gaza in June 2007, then surveys the implications of this hostile but subtle relationship. In summary, Schanzer traces the simultaneous weakening of Fatah and strengthening of Hamas over this period. By 2008, Fatah’s leader, Mahmoud Abbas, is enfeebled, “no more than the president of the Muqata compound in Ramallah,” while Hamas rules the roost in Gaza, threatens to seize power on the West Bank, sends hundreds of rockets into Israel, and even challenges the government of Egypt.…Palestinian self-destruction, neglected or not, ranks as a major foreign policy concern, especially since 1993, when Washington cast its lot with Yasir Arafat, Fatah, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Palestinian Authority, hoping against hope that Western backing would transform a revolutionary movement long allied with the Soviet Union into an agency of good government and status quo aspirations. Among its many conceptual mistakes, this hope implied devoting too little attention to the competition raging between Fatah and Hamas…. What American (and Israeli) policy makers tended to dismiss as incidental turned out to have deep and abiding consequences; suffice it to say that the Palestinian constituency for accepting as a Jewish state has steadily lowered since the heady days of late 1993, to the point that it now represents only about a fifth of the body politic.

Schanzer also documents the cost for foreign policy of inattention to the Fatah-Hamas fitna (Arabic for “internal strife”).… In brief, those responsible for American interests neither anticipated nor prepared for the two climatic events in Hamas’s rise to power, a situation as embarrassing as it is revealing. So limited an understanding of the issues almost guarantees severe policy mistakes.…

Most books on the Arab-Israeli conflict tread well-worn ground. Hamas versus Fatah offers an original analysis of a key topic.