Word: israelism
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When Senator John Kerry visited Gaza last week, he made certain to emphasize that he had no contact with Hamas, and demanded that the militants stop firing rockets into Israel. Still, Kerry's visit - one of the first to the coastal strip by an American legislator since Hamas took power there in 2007 - wasn't exactly the kind of publicity that Israeli officials wanted. While being escorted into Gaza by an armed United Nations convoy, Kerry was disturbed by the sight of Israeli security forces blocking trucks filled with pasta from entering the beleaguered territory. Pasta, the Senator was told...
...Fatah movement in Beirut's Shatila Palestinian refugee camp. Posters of Abbas - President of the Palestinian Authority, leader of Fatah and chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) - would normally hang in offices and on street corners throughout Lebanon's 12 Palestinian refugee camps. But ever since Israel's incursion into Gaza earlier this year, Abbas has become politically radioactive to the approximately 400,000 refugees languishing in Lebanon, who were livid at his failure to act in defense of the beleaguered Gazans. "Abbas embarrassed us," says one Fatah official charged with delivering Abbas portraits in the camp. "Sometimes...
...refugees of Lebanon have always been more militant than their brethren inside the Palestinian territories. Most are descendants of those who fled Israeli forces in Galilee during the war of 1948; since then they have been prevented by Israel from returning to their homes. Having lived for six decades without citizenship or basic civil rights in the squalor and despair of refugee camps in a country that bars refugees from owning property and from entering some 70 professions, they have long provided a fertile recruiting environment for militant groups...
...armed struggle to "liberate Palestine" and still run guerrilla-training academies. These days, however, even that hard-line Fatah stance is no longer enough for most Palestinians here. High-ranking officials of Abbas' own party fear that he will trade away their right of return to what is now Israel. "Yassir Arafat went into negotiations with the olive branch in one hand and a weapon in the other hand," says one Beirut Fatah commander. "But all Mahmoud Abbas does is negotiate. He gets nothing, but he keeps negotiating. Palestinians believe in military operations because they want to go back...
...Victory in Lebanon would give Hamas a significant new strategic advantage. By agreement of the Arab League, Palestinian camps lie outside the jurisdiction of the Lebanese state, so control of the camps would allow Hamas to train and operate largely without interference from Israel or any Arab states. Moreover, unlike in the Gaza Strip, which is surrounded by an Israeli blockade, in Lebanon Hamas could easily receive weapons by sea, by land from Syria or with help from Hizballah. And a Hamas victory in Lebanon could be the beginning of the end of Fatah. "We already lost Jordan and Syria...