Yoshie wrote:
But have you found any actually-existing Palestinian, pro-Western or anti-Western, secular or religious, who speaks of Fatah as the left and Hamas as the right (or whatever)? The idea of Fatah = the left seems to me to be your own creation...Terms such as left and right matter probably only to people who still belong to such currents as the PFLP and the Palestinian People's Party, but they don't speak of Fatah as the left...The problem that most Palestinians think of as most urgent is the Israeli occupation, and the distinctions among political forces they make are probably based, first and foremost, on different relations they have to the Israeli occupation...If they vote against Hamas and for Fatah, they will do so for the same reason that the Nicaraguans voted against the Sandinistas and for Violeta Chamorro and UNO in 1990. That doesn't make Fatah the left in Palestine any more than it did Chamorro and UNO the left in Nicaragua.
Yoshie was replying to my comments as follows:
But I don't know if the Palestinians are still as ideological as they once were...It wouldn't surprise me to learn that many are politically worn out and distinguish between Hamas and Fatah less in relation to their political programs than in their potential to relieve the desperate living conditions in the occupied territories...If despair and exhaustion have overtaken struggle and steadfastness as the predominant political mood, then Fatah will have an advantage, even if the West supports it - and perhaps even because the West supports it. I don't know how reliable it is, but Ulhas on the LBO list today posted a Reuters report of a survey of Palestinian opinion showing that Fatah would decisively defeat Hamas if new elections were held, as Abbas is threatening to do. The punishing sanctions will have then accomplished what they were designed to do.
============================ I don't know what's being disputed here. I'm not championing Fatah as a party of the left any more than I would the contemporary ANC or the Sandinistas, although, unlike yourself, I expect the supporters of these parties would continue to define them that way, rightly or wrongly, in relation to their political opponents. In itself, that has little significance for me, and I don't know why it has for you. On the essential point - that the Palestinians judge the parties in relation to the occupation and its effects and not ideologically - we're in agreement, as is evident from my remarks above. I happen to think this may now favour Fatah rather than Hamas, but nowhere have I indicated this has something to do with whether Fatah is on the left or not. It has everything to do with the sanctions. But you can have the last word.
