Atta Abu Rmeileh has been languishing in an Israeli prison for two weeks. The head of Fatah in Jenin province was arrested on 1er november. A few hours earlier, this senior official of the ruling party in the occupied West Bank had called the Palestinians for a general strike. In a video posted online, he stood alongside two local leaders from Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The army did not tolerate their demonstration of unity, after the attack carried out by the Islamist movement on October 7.
Mr. Abu Rmeileh is a veteran: he laid down his arms after the second intifada in 2005. Faithful to his old friend, the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, he sincerely believes in the peaceful resistance that the old man preaches. rais, and a negotiated political solution to the conflict. For more than two years, he has been working to maintain a bridge between the armed Fatah insurgents in Jenin and Mr. Abbas, whose security services collaborate with Israel.
But after October 7, Atta Abu Rmeileh gave up. “ Peaceful resistance failed. The war has started and it will not stop”, he confided, bitterly, before his arrest. He feared that Mr. Abbas would soon have no other choice “than to dissolve the Palestinian Authority”.
“We don’t eradicate an idea”
These words have been resonating for a month in all Fatah cells. A groundswell is sweeping away this disoriented party, undermined by corruption and power struggles, torn between the smidgen of sovereignty that Israel still grants it and the temptation of armed struggle. Mr. Abbas fears these rumors. Since October 7, he has imposed silence on the movement. He alone speaks. He demands a ceasefire in Gaza, and a negotiated political settlement to the conflict: the creation of a Palestinian state in the enclave and in the West Bank, with East Jerusalem as its capital.
The oldest leader in the Arab world (87 years old), elected in 2005 for a four-year term, has the ear of American President Joe Biden for the first time. Washington supports the Israeli war effort, while calling on its ally to entrust Gaza, freed from the yoke of Hamas, to a Palestinian Authority “reinforced”, then to relaunch negotiations with a view to the creation of a Palestinian state. But these plans appear to be a figment of the imagination to many Fatah leaders, who fear total destruction of the enclave over the course of endless months of operations promised by Israel.
These executives are aware of the immense popularity of Hamas. They do not imagine that Israel can ” destroy “ the Islamist movement, as he promises, nor prevent it from reviving. “We cannot eradicate an idea”, notes a concerned minister, who wishes to remain anonymous. They believe that Fatah has no choice but to reconnect with its enemy brothers, after the civil war which tore the two parties apart in 2007.
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