Spengler posits a reason why the unacknowledged Palestinian civil war is so one-sided:
All the training and arms in the world will not persuade the leaders of the Palestine Authority to fight, because they are extremely wealthy men who live in luxury anywhere in the world. Ahmed al-Meghami, then the PA’s attorney general, estimated in 2006 that billions of dollars may have been stolen by Palestinian officials. Men with London townhouses and villas in the south of France don’t risk their lives. Their Hamas counterparts are quite willing to die and in any case have nowhere to go except safe houses in Damascus. That explains why only one side fights.
Western donors to the PA know this perfectly well; they also know that the putative refugee population is inflated by as many as 1.3 million non-existent souls in order to inflate foreign aid requirements, as I reported on August 18 (Palestine problem hopeless, but not serious). But it is easier to keep the charade going than to admit failure. Cupidity and inertia have produced a criminal enterprise in the guise of a proto-state, vulnerable to liquidation by hard men who are willing to die for what they believe. That is why the Palestinian civil war is a one-sided affair; the other side has no reason to fight.
Hamas seems to be working more for a Palestinian state than Fatah. True, the Palestinian state desired by the terrorist group would take over all the land “the sea to the river,” be void of all Jews, and likely be an Islamic theocracy — but it would still be a state. Fatah, on the other hand, seems to be spinning its wheels.
