Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and his sacked Prime Minister Ismail Haniya both cut their teeth in the politics of the armed struggle against Israel but a generation divides their approach to the Middle East conflict.
The 71-year-old Abbas had already been involved in underground Palestinian politics for the best part of a decade when the 44-year-old Haniya was born.
He co-founded the mainstream rebel faction Fatah with Yasser Arafat in the diaspora in Kuwait in the 1950s and was intimately involved in its armed resistance against Israel in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
But as early as 1974 when Haniya was just 11, Abbas had already concluded that armed struggle was not an end in itself and that year he became the first senior Palestinian figure to hold talks with Israelis.
Those early talks involved fringe left-wingers and peace activists but eventually paved the way for the secret talks masterminded by Abbas that led to the 1993 Oslo accords with Israel and the creation of the Palestinian Authority he now heads.
It was only as a result of those agreements that Abbas was able to enter the Palestinian territories in 1994 after spending most of his life in exile.
Born in Safed in British mandate Palestine in 1935, he had fled with his family when the historic center of Jewish learning was incorporated into the new state of Israel in 1948.
Haniya by contrast was born and raised in the Palestinian territories in an impoverished Gaza refugee camp just kilometers (miles) from his family's ancestral home in the port of Ashkelon in what is now Israel.
Educated at Gaza's Islamic University, he rapidly became involved in Islamist politics when the eruption of the first Palestinian uprising sparked the formation of Hamas in 1987.
He was jailed several times by Israel before being deported to southern Lebanon with more than 400 fellow Islamists in December 1992.
On his return he rose to prominence as the private secretary of Hamas's iconic wheelchair-bound spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and survived a 2003 assassination attempt against the Hamas founder before the Israeli military finally got their man the following year.
After the assassination of both Yassin and his successor Abdelaziz Rantissi in retaliation for a wave of deadly suicide bombings by Hamas militants inside Israel, Haniya sided with those inside the movement calling for a rethink of its strategy.
The father of 13 championed both the idea of a conditional truce with Israel and the strategy of using the movement's huge grass-roots base to enter mainstream electoral politics.
The first bore fruit in early 2005. Since then Hamas has not carried out a single suicide bombing inside Israel, although it has fired dozens of rockets into the Jewish state from Gaza and also took part in deadly cross-border raid last year in which militants seized an Israeli soldier.
The entry into electoral politics saw Hamas rout Abbas's long-dominant Fatah faction in January 2006 parliamentary elections that catapulted Haniya to the premiership.
But the victory at the ballot box failed to win the Islamists the international respectability Haniya had hoped for.
The European Union praised the conduct of the elections but joined Israel and the United States in maintaining its blacklisting of Hamas as a terrorist organization and suspended all aid to the Palestinian Authority when Haniya took power, crippling his administration.
The election victory also forced Haniya into an uneasy sharing of power with Abbas, in which both men realized the key importance of control of the security forces.
Abbas himself had had a near-career-breaking row with Arafat in 2003 when as prime minister he could not agree with his longtime mentor on the chain of command.
Faced with the domination of the security forces by Abbas loyalists, Haniya's government set up its own interior ministry paramilitary force in defiance of the president, supplementing its substantial militia presence in its Gaza bastion.
It was those forces that were ultimately able to overwhelm the official security forces in Gaza overnight, enabling Haniya to defy Abbas's decree ousting him and effectively creating two rival Palestinian administrations.
(AFP) |
