THE victory of the Hamas movement in the fighting in the Gaza Strip is a huge setback for the imperialist diplomacy of the US and the UK.
It was the US and UK governments that turned on the Palestinian people in their anger at the landslide election of a Hamas government in the 2006 general election, since Hamas does not recognise the state of Israel.
The Fatah government was removed because of the lack of progress of any movement towards the establishment of a Palestinian state, and because of the notorious and open corruption of sections of the Fatah leadership.
The imperialist powers literally sought to starve the Palestinian people into removing the just elected Hamas government by imposing an economic and financial boycott, to punish the Palestinian people for exercising their democratic right to elect the government of its choice.
At the same time the US and Israel began to financially and militarily support a section of the Fatah movement with the sole idea of organising regime change in Palestine, while the Israeli army began its attacks on the Gaza Strip, which have cost the lives of hundreds of Palestinians.
The outcome of these attacks on Hamas was its agreement to form a national unity government, which some Fatah leaders saw as a halfway house to the removal of Hamas from power.
The fighting in Gaza was not a product of Hamas belligerency – it has no need of it since it has the overwhelming majority support of the people of Gaza.
The fighting was a product of the attempts of sections of the Fatah leadership to create the conditions where Hamas would be forced to call a new general election.
Now this plan has been squashed with Hamas’ declaring that it has no intention of forming a government of the Gaza Strip, and that the National Unity government remains in power.
The Fatah leadership has however quite lost its head after the Gaza defeat. The Palestinian bourgeoisie at the head of Fatah have opted to organise their own coup, by bringing in rule by decree and by forming a National Salvation Government.
The Fatah leadership around Abbas is willing to settle for anything that Israel and the US is willing to let them have, and declare that this entity is the state of Palestine.
Hamas represents the millions of Palestinians who want to see a Palestinian state from the Mediterranean to the Jordan, with Jerusalem as its capital and with the refugees having the right to return.
It is willing to concede that initially there may have to be a Palestinian state on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, but the most they are prepared to offer Israel to achieve this is a truce, in the struggle for the Palestinian state over all of historic Palestine.
There is no two state solution, as the Israeli conduct ever since the PLO returned to Palestine, of delays, more delays and more and more settlements has made crystal clear.
President Abbas and those around him are willing to settle for the maximum that Israel is prepared to offer, and the formation of a National Salvation Government suggests that this could be sections of the West Bank minus the Israeli settlements and East Jerusalem.
The Fatah movement must make a historical reckoning. The result of this reckoning must be to purge Fatah of the Abbas leadership, and all those leaders who are willing to collaborate with Israel and the US.
Fatah must bring forward a new leadership from the trend around the imprisoned leader Marwan al Barghouthi. This trend does not think that it has a god given right to be the government of the PNA and is willing to work with Hamas in a principled way, as it does in the Israeli prisons.
A new Fatah leadership will renew the national unity government and create the conditions for an international boycott of Israel, supporting a Third Intifada to establish the Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.
