Hamas and Fatah continuing to fight...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6751079.stm

Seems like these guys will never get along. It's not surpising. After Yasser Arafat's charasmatic leadership, there is no Palestinian leader who comes close to bringing all Palestinians together. Also despite the larger Palestinian cause, it seems that politics and struggle for leadership takes precedence first. Right or wrong, that's how politics works.

This whole farce on forming a unity government must stop. Neither Fatah nor Hamas will agree to any power sharing because they are both ambitious, power hungry, and ideologically different. Fatah is more or less secular, nationalist, and follows a more political ideology which means that it will be more inclined to negotiate with Israel to solve the intractable Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Hamas, on the other hand, is a religious organization bordering on radicalism and unwilling to negotiate with Israel on any condition. We have two different philosophies colliding and its impossible to reconcile between them unless one group fundamentally changes its vision. Only one political party can reign and that group in my opinion will be Hamas.

Why? Because Hamas has the support of the Palestinian people. Hamas made a name for itself in the first Intifada(1987-91) by helping the Palestinians on the ground and providing social services which the leadership could not do. Hamas also got its support by supporting a violent struggle against the Israelis and refusing to compromise or negotiating with them. The PLO leadership, then dominated by Fatah, has failed to deliver on its promises of a Palestinian state and is marred by corruption, bureacratic bungling, and failure to provide Palestinians physical, economic, and infrastural security. Naturally the Palestinians are upset and angry and thus more apt to support Hamas who take that anger and frustration and throw it violently against the Israelis.

Unfortunately the international community will never accept Hamas(as they are labeled a terrorist organization) and will continue to press economic sanctions which only hurts and embitters the Palestinian people. Hamas then uses this as propaganda and aquires more support and sympathy from the Palestinians who see the sanctions as collective punishment against all Palestinian people and an attempt to break their will. There have been suggestions that the sanctions should be targetted only on Hamas and not on Fatah(since they are considered to be more reasonable and inclined to negotiate) but if that happens, Fatah will be charged with being stooges of the West and lose even more support from the population. But sanctions themselves hurt the Palestinians more who are facing water, electricity, food shortages and have little to no access to utilities or clean sanitation. For the sanctions to end, Hamas must be willing to recognize and negotiate with Israel which it swears it will never do. Thus there seems no way out of this deadlock.

In the end, it the common man who suffers the most in this political tug of war.