FATAH SURRENDERED GAZA WITHOUT A FIGHT

Fatah never fought (Elder of Zyion)
I just found Charles Levinson's blog, Conflict Blotter. It looks like a truly excellent resource. Levinson was in Gaza and interviewed Fatah fighters, where he discovered that they were never instructed to fight back:

We left Gaza yesterday with a Red Cross aid convoy, but I want to post some thoughts on Fatah’s collapse. We spoke with nearly a dozen Fatah fighters and soldiers from the various branches of the security services, all of whom were around in the president’s compound, the intelligence headquarters, the Preventative Security headquarters and even in Khan Younis until the final hours of the battle. We came with a pretty damning indictment of the political and military leadership.

Fatah never fought. Gaza was essentially handed over to Hamas. Soldier after soldier said they felt betrayed and abandoned by their leadership. There was a seemingly willful lack of decision making by the senior most political leadership. Up and down the Gaza Strip from the first moments of fighting, the military leadership disintegrated while the political leadership remained eerily silent.

Ousted Fatah loyalists in Gaza widely suspect a political decision was made early on in Ramallah to surrender the Gaza Strip to Hamas in order to extricate Abbas, Israel and the US from the seeming intractable pickle they were facing as infighting spiraled, living conditions worsened, and the peace process seemed hopelessly stuck. With the Palestinian territories now split, the US, Israel and Abbas suddenly have way forward, without compromising to Hamas.

I don’t mean to sound conspiratorial, and I think the likeliest scenario is that all the parties involved simply accepted what was essentially a fait accompli some time in the course of the fighting and set about finding whatever silver lining could be salvaged.

There are of course a dozen reasons why Fatah was so ineffective. Fatah was unpopular and the vast majority of the security forces were not really Fatah loyalists. They were merely after a steady salary, not some messianic belief in Fatah or the rightness of the Palestinian Authority. They were doing it because it was their job and they hadn’t been paid more than a fraction of their salaries in 18 months. Fatah was also divided into disparate bickering factions.

All that being said, the total surrender of the security forces is striking.

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