Palestinian Terrorist Division of Labor - It's Not About Who's Moderate, It's About Who's In Power
For a long time, the task was to guess which Palestinian terrorist organization was going to murder Israeli civilians based on that organization's ideology. Hamas - very extreme - lots of murders. PFLP - mostly extreme - some murders. Fatah - outwardly moderate compared to the other unrepentant terrorists - only occasional murders.
But it turns out that everyone's been going about the categorizations all wrong. It's not about what each organization believes or their explicit ideologies. It's about who can commit murder without implicating the Palestinian government:
Defense officials admitted that... what concerned them the most... was the group that claimed responsibility - the Aksa Martyrs Brigades armed branch of the Fatah movement. While Fatah, the long dominant Palestinian party, has never completely abstained from terror activity... Thursday's suicide attack... was the first perpetrated by a Fatah affiliate since a February 2005 Palestinian cease-fire. Fatah and Hamas, officials warned over the weekend, seem to have switched roles... Hamas, a security official said, was trying to at least outwardly show itself as reforming and that it has cut back its terror activity in an attempt to establish itself as a non-violent government.
This is a new trick - a Palestinian terrorist group takes over the government and presents a somewhat non-terrorist face to the world, while all the other terrorist groups continue their murder campaigns. And if it so happens that one group commits enough murders to gain the popularity needed to win an election, then the terrorists switch and we start all over again. And they say Palestinians aren't good at bureaucratic division of labor.
[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]
But it turns out that everyone's been going about the categorizations all wrong. It's not about what each organization believes or their explicit ideologies. It's about who can commit murder without implicating the Palestinian government:
Defense officials admitted that... what concerned them the most... was the group that claimed responsibility - the Aksa Martyrs Brigades armed branch of the Fatah movement. While Fatah, the long dominant Palestinian party, has never completely abstained from terror activity... Thursday's suicide attack... was the first perpetrated by a Fatah affiliate since a February 2005 Palestinian cease-fire. Fatah and Hamas, officials warned over the weekend, seem to have switched roles... Hamas, a security official said, was trying to at least outwardly show itself as reforming and that it has cut back its terror activity in an attempt to establish itself as a non-violent government.
This is a new trick - a Palestinian terrorist group takes over the government and presents a somewhat non-terrorist face to the world, while all the other terrorist groups continue their murder campaigns. And if it so happens that one group commits enough murders to gain the popularity needed to win an election, then the terrorists switch and we start all over again. And they say Palestinians aren't good at bureaucratic division of labor.
[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]
