Hamas chief attacks 'stupid anarchy' of Palestinians
By Tim Butcher in Jerusalem
(Filed: 30/08/2006)
A senior member of Hamas has broken a taboo by calling on Palestinians to stop blaming Israel for all their ills and look instead at their own failures.
Ghazi Hamad, the Hamas government's official spokesman, said Palestinians had been "attacked by the bacteria of stupidity".
"The anarchy, chaos, pointless murders, the plundering of lands, family feuds … what do all of these have to do with the occupation?" he asked in the opinion piece published in the Palestinian newspaper, al-Ayyam. "We have always been accustomed to pinning our failures on others, and conspiratorial thinking is still widespread among us."
He was particularly scathing about the failure of the Palestinians to make a success of the Gaza Strip, the territory that Israel effectively surrendered a year ago.
"When you walk around in Gaza, you cannot help but avert your eyes from what you see: indescribable anarchy, policemen that nobody cares about, youth proudly carrying weapons. From time to time you hear that so-and-so was murdered in the middle of the night, and the response comes quickly the next morning. Large families carry weapons in tribal wars against other families.
"The reality in which we are living in Gaza can only be described as miserable and wretched, and as a failure in every sense of the word." His description resonates with what many outsiders find when they leave the orderly roads and fields of Israel and cross into Gaza, a dirty, crowded coastal strip teeming with 1.4 million people.
Israel can be blamed for many of Gaza's problems but there is plenty of evidence to support Mr Hamad's thesis, that the kidnapping, lawlessness and social chaos are, at least partly, homegrown.
He said his article was his private opinion.
But it is a sign of growing division between Hamas members living in the Palestinian territories and exiles living elsewhere, including the leadership in Damascus.
The exiles take a hard-line attitude, insisting on militants continuing to fire Qassam rockets from Gaza into Israel. But people, such as Mr Hamad, who live in Gaza seem to have lost patience with these tactics.
The rockets have killed only four Israelis, yet hundreds of Palestinians have died in Israeli retribution.
War
Terror
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