BETTING ON FATAH WON'T BRING PEACE (OR STABILITY)

Our World: No heroes in Act Three By CAROLINE GLICK (JPost)
Will the US and Israeli belief that a hero will suddenly appear to save the day for the Palestinians never die? Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and US President George W. Bush are in for a big disappointment. Palestinian and Arab sources say that with the scheduled return of Egypt's intelligence detail to Gaza next week, Fatah will commence discussions toward politically capitulating to Hamas. And so the US and Israeli plan to respond to the Hamas takeover of Gaza by strengthening Fatah has failed.

Neither its failure, nor the US and Israeli insistence on courting failure is the least bit surprising. For the past 14 years, Washington and Jerusalem have clung to their belief that that the way to bring stability and peace to the Middle East is to establish a Fatah-dominated Palestinian state in Gaza, Judea and Samaria and parts of Jerusalem - in spite of its consistent failure.

Since 1993, from blueprint to road map to vision statement to horizon vision, successive Israeli governments and US administrations have advanced the idea that Fatah is the deus ex machina that will solve all the woes of the region with a singlemindedness bordering on religious zealotry. Both countries' apparent obsession with finding the proper way to establish a Fatah state has caused them to stubbornly ignore mountains of evidence which clearly showed that their basic assumption - that a Fatah state would engender stability and peace - was wrong.

THROUGHOUT the 1990s, both countries shut their eyes as Yasser Arafat built irregular Fatah militias; enabled Hamas and Islamic Jihad to carry out suicide bombings against Israel; and transformed the Palestinian schools, mosques and media into indoctrination centers which hooked the Palestinians on jihad.

In 2000 Arafat's rejection of statehood and peace at the Camp David summit exposed the fact that the Fatah-based, two-state solution was a failure. Yet both Jerusalem, under the Barak and Sharon governments, and Washington, under the Clinton and Bush administrations, have refused in the intervening years to accept its failure. To the contrary: Since 2000, Israel and the US have redoubled their efforts to "strengthen Fatah" in the hopes of establishing that Palestinian state.

Even as their favorite "moderates" - who at various times have included Arafat, Abbas, security chief Muhammad Dahlan, convicted mass murderer Marwan Barghouti, former PA prime minister Ahmed Qurei and current Fatah Prime Minister Salam Fayad - have all been implicated in terror attacks and funding, both Israel and the US have remained unstinting in their view. Fatah must be strengthened in order to achieve a two-state solution.

STILL TODAY, in spite of Hamas's takeover of Gaza, its popularity in Judea and Samaria, and Abbas's inability to even control his own terror forces in Fatah, the Bush administration and the Olmert government are adamant: Fatah must be strengthened in order to achieve a "political horizon" that will bring about the Palestinian state.

And now, by engaging in negotiations with Hamas, Fatah intends to prove them wrong yet again. And again, far from engendering peace and security, the Fatah-based policy breeds yet more instability and greater Palestinian support for terror.