Ha'aretz: At Nablus university, gunfights erupt between student activists
May 11, 2004

Especially for those on a campus somewhere, this is an interesting bit of news: yesterday, on the campus of al-Quds Open University in Nablus, conflict between student Fatah activists and student Hamas activists ended in gunfights. Though to a profoundly lesser extent than in Israel, there are internal schisms within Palestinian society between the leading movements. This is partly the result of clan or family loyalties, and partly the result of differences over strategy. The younger generation of Fatah in particular has criticized the manifest uselessness of violence against Israel in achieving Palestinian national aims. They have also decried the total disaster of Arafat’s Second Intifada for both the Palestinian and Israeli peoples. Hamas campus recruitment, meanwhile, probably attracts the weak and disturbed minds of the haters and fanatics and agonists.

We have long insisted on this listserv that terrorism is nothing other than a violent mode of politics – to get what you want, instead of arguing or comprising or persuading, you murder and intimidate. In societies like ours it is exceptionally rare for politics to turn bloody; yes, even at the University of California. In those societies without various social and institutional restraints, violence can supplant politics. Perhaps nearly four years of Intifada has made violence into a probable method of conflict resolution. A society does easily wash itself of a self-created culture of struggle worship, reasserted daily through television, music, radio and print.

"8 Palestinians hurt in Hamas-Fatah gunfight," by Arnon Regular, Ha'aretz, May 10th, 2004. The image on the right is of a lecture schedule at al-Najah university with a biography of Karim Nimr Mafaraja, a dead Hamas militant involved in suicide bombings.