Word: fatah
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...Israelis, with the support of the Bush administration, expect a major crackdown on Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah's al-Aqsa Martyr's Brigade. But those organizations are popular on the Palestinian street, and their elimination would require nothing short of a Palestinian civil war - an eventuality Mahmoud Abbas and his government are desperate to avoid. It's far from clear that Abbas could win such a war, with or without the support of Yasser Arafat. And if at the end the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza remained surrounded by Israeli settlements and soldiers, Abbas...
...chief last month grudgingly turned over power, at least in theory, to a newly installed Prime Minister, Mahmoud Abbas. But top Palestinian officials tell TIME that Arafat is still fomenting opposition to the new PM. Arafat met last week with several local leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization's Fatah faction (to which Abbas also belongs), offering money and jobs to ensure their loyalty. "We must make sure," Arafat warned his visitors, "that Fatah is capable of countering plots against the people." That was a dig at Abbas and his security chief Mohammed Dahlan, who won U.S. support for condemning...
...finding it hard to crack down on militants, as he must to win Israeli cooperation in any peace plan. That's partly because last week Arafat ordered the head of Preventive Security--a plain-clothes police agency in the West Bank--not to cooperate with the security chief. And Fatah's militant arm, the Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, released a communique in which it stated that it refused to comply with Abbas' and Dahlan's calls for an end to terrorism. "We will not halt our resistance," it read, "as long as the occupation of our land continues...
...that an Israeli withdrawal is a prerequisite for a crackdown on terrorism. But Sharon is in no mood to accept half-measures, and insists that Israel will deal only with a Palestinian Authority willing to disarm the Palestinian organizations that carry out terror attacks - Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Fatah-based Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. Palestinian Prime Minister Abbas insists that he plans to eliminate "armed chaos" in PA territory by establishing and strictly enforcing a monopoly of force in the hands of the Authority itself (as required by the Oslo agreements). But he's also made clear that...
...vowed to fight to keep their weapons. Hamas is far more popular now than it was in 1996 when Yasser Arafat's administration successfully cracked down on the organization to stop a wave of suicide bombing, and Abbas's has to contend with the fact that today, his own Fatah movement has a militant armed wing of its own, which has vowed to stand alongside the Islamists in defying disarmament. Add to that the fact of ongoing Israeli security operations stoking popular outrage among Palestinians, and the fact that Abbas has no substantive political support base...