I have a dream ... My dream is of semitic brotherhood rewelding the power of ancient semitic people into a modern cultural force. We .. the Arabs, the Jews, .. we are the heirs of the ancient peoples who really founded modern civiliation.
While the intransigence of the Israelis and the PLO seems to be endless, perhaps there is a god waiting in the sidelines? Hamas and Fatah, at least seem to be talking.
“We’ve turned a new page. There was a great deal of understanding and enthusiasm for working together and we were serious about implementing, not only reconciliation but everything needed to put the Palestinian house in order,” Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal said.
The Hamas::PLO conflict is a mess into and off itself. Hamas, for all its strident antisemitism is a fairly democratic organization …. more like a traditional American ethnic political machine than … a masked, murderous terrorist organization. In contrast, the PLO, or the Fatah party that dominates the PLO, has never attempted to be democratic. Fatah was built by Nasser and Arafat on a Mafia-like model … a model intended to enrich the leaders of Fatah while destroying the ability of anyone, Israelis or Jordanians, to govern the refugee camps.
Fatah is still a lot like the Mafia, irredentist in its hatred of the Israelis much like the Sicilian mafia has always hated the Italian occupation of their island. But, like the American Mafia, Fatah has become respectable by making business work on the West Bank. Meanwhile Hamas is doing a lot better than the liberal media or the conservative media will let you know. The Gaza economy is, despite the Israeli blockade and the idiocy of missile exchanges, growing.
The dream would be for the political machine of Hamas to run all of Palestine while somehow finding a way to accommodate itself to the idea of a semitic brotherhood with the Israelis. A Jerusalem based Tammany Hall under Hamas might not look a lot like the Israeli idea of a democracy, but it might ..might .. just be practical enough to move the two sides forward in pursuit of common economic goals.