Schisms

Isaiah Berlin, the great British Jewish philosopher, was reputed to have been
the first to suggest that every ideological movement has within it the seeds
of its own destruction. The beginning of this process seems to involve a
schism that divides a movement into two competing and opposing parts. So
it was with each of the political movements that bedeviled the 20th century.
The Communists started out as the Social Revolutionary movement in Russia,
and split into Bolsheviks (the majority) and Mensheviks (the minority).
It was Lenin's manipulative ability that enabled him to obtain a majority,
and later the Mensheviks and all their purported successors were abolished
and murdered by the Communists. One could argue that the downfall of
Communism came about eventually because it had killed off too many of
those who could have supported it "with a human face."
The Fascist movement began ostensibly in Italy and was led by Mussolini. It
started out as a syndicalist, ideological movement, but Hitler and the Nazis
transformed it into a super-nationalist, racist ideology that could not
survive without war and genocide. The downfall of Mussolini lead to the
takeover of Italy by the German Nazis, although both were eventually
defeated by the Allies.
Religious schisms are similar, Christianity split first into Catholic
(Western) and Orthodox (Eastern) sects, and then again the Western sect
split to form the Protestant Churches. Being religions they declared each
other heretical and fought each other in bitter wars, but both sides survived.
Similarly, the Muslims split into Sunni and Shia, in a classic case of a
succession conflict, that still persists to this day. Even Judaism has
divided into Orthodox and the Conservative/Reform movement,
that has its equivalent in most countries. At least this schism has not been
attended by internecine bloodshed.
In Gaza, there is a lot of internal strife, with the political division mainly
between the nationalist Fatah and the Islamist Hamas. The irony is clear,
when Fatah was in control they asked that men not carry guns in public and
Hamas rejected this request. Now that Hamas is in charge PM Ismail Haniyeh
asked the same thing, but now Fatah rejects this request. Four were killed
and sixty wounded in the worst intra-Palestinian violence so far. This was
triggered when a leader of the Popular Resistance Committees, Yusuf al Kuka,
was blown up in his car on Sunday. At first this was reported to be from an
Israeli missile, but the IAF denied responsibility, and then the Palestinian
security services themselves declared that it was a nearby car bomb that had
killed him, hardly the signature of the IDF. So then the PRC and Fatah
gunmen of al Aksa Martyrs' Brigades went on a shooting rampage and took
over several Government buildings. At the moment calm has returned, but
temporarily. The big schism in Israel is between those who want to vacate
the "occupied" territories, now the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) and
those who want to settle it. The former see the evacuation of this land and
its handover to the Palestinians as an inevitable process. The latter view
the evacuation of this land as treachery to Jewish destiny and the word of
God. There is not much of a bridge between these two camps, the liberals
and the nationalists, and after the violence at Amona, who can confidently
predict that this dilemma can be resolved peacefully.