The Muslim Brotherhood Triumph in the Palestinian Territories
By Douglas Farah
The big winner in the Hamas-Fatah peace pact appears to be the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is an armed branch.
While giving up very little Hamas, through the intercession of leaders of the Brotherhood, has sidestepped the issue of recognizing Israel while ceding little to Fatah and opening the way, they hope, for international recognition. This is a common tactical decision by the Brotherhood, which is often willing to trade off short-term contradictions for long-term gains, with the clear understanding that anything written now can be rewritten later.
But the fundamental issue between Fatah and Hamas ( and the Brotherhood) is deep and perhaps irreconcilable, and goes to the heart of the Islamist project. For Hamas, it is a religious matter of faith that Israel cannot be recognized and the Caliphate must be reestablished. Fatah, for all its bumbling incompetence, sees the territorial issues as a matter of policy and politics.
The noted scholar Mamaoun Fandy, recently warned in an article excerpted in the Middle East Media Research Institute, the Muslim Brotherhood has now conquered Palestine as a symbol in the Arab world.
This conquest "will transform [the Palestinian problem] from a resolvable territorial struggle into a religious struggle that cannot be resolved," he wrote. A reversal of this trend is highly unlikely because al Jazeera is, at least in large part, controlled by the Mulim Brotherhood, giving it the dominant medium in the region. My full blog is here.
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