That was a nightmare. It was also absurd. Palestinian fighters were shooting at each other in the streets of Gaza, gladdening the hearts of the occupation authorities. As in the arena of ancient Rome, gladiators killed each other for the amusement of the spectators. People who had spent years together in Israeli prisons suddenly acted like mortal enemies.
That was not yet a civil war. But the bloody incidents could have led there. Many Palestinians were worried that if the clashes were not stopped immediately, a fully fledged fratricidal war would indeed break out. That was, of course, also the great hope of the Israeli government-that Hamas and Fatah would annihilate each other without Israel having to lift a finger. The Israeli intelligence services did indeed predict this.
I was not worried on that account. In my view, a Palestinian civil war was never in the cards.
First of all, because the basic conditions for a civil war are absent. The Palestinian people are unified in their ethnic, cultural, and historical composition. Palestine does not resemble Iraq, with its three peoples who are distinct ethnically (Arabs and Kurds), religiously (Shi'ites and Sunnis) and geographically (north, center and south). It does not resemble Ireland, where the Protestants, the descendants of settlers, were fighting the Catholic descendants of the indigenous population. It does not resemble African countries, whose borders were fixed by colonial masters without any consideration of tribal boundaries. It certainly had no revolutionary upheaval like those that brought on the civil wars in England, France, and Russia, nor an issue that split the population like slavery in the United States.
The bloody incidents that broke out in the Gaza Strip were
struggles between party militias, aggravated by feuds between hamulahs (extended families). History has seen such struggles in almost all liberation movements. For example, after World War I, when the British were compelled to grant Home Rule to the Irish, a bloody struggle among the freedom fighters broke out at once. Irish Catholics killed Irish Catholics.
In the days of the struggle of the Jewish community in Palestine against the British colonial regime ("the Mandate"), a civil war was averted only thanks to one person: Menachem Begin, the commander of the Irgun. He was determined to prevent a fratricidal war at all costs. David Ben-Gurion wanted to eliminate the Irgun, which rejected his leadership and undermined his policies. In the so-called "season," he ordered his loyal Haganah organization to kidnap Irgun members and turn them over to the British police, which tortured them and put them