(IsraelNN.com) An escalated Fatah campaign to stamp out opposition in Judea and Samaria has stoked fears that it is copying the Hamas authority in Gaza and turning the Palestinian Authority (PA) into a police state.

The tactics, including documented torture, also pose an obstacle to peace, according to former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky and Arab human rights activist Bassem Eid. They recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal an article under the title "There Won't Be Peace Without Democracy."
Natan Sharansky and Arab human rights activist Bassem Eid wrote, 'There Won't Be Peace Without Democracy.'

The increasing human rights violations and torture by Fatah as well as Hamas have been ignored by American and western governments that have financed police training for Fatah, the Associated Press pointed out Wednesday. It cited as examples of Fatah violence the recent "mistaken arrest" of a professor, who was beaten so badly that he suffered a concussion, and the use of clubs by PA police to break up anti-government protests.

"The West is supporting one Palestinian faction over the other. It's all about politics, not human rights," Bir Zeit University political scientist George Giacaman told AP. A citizens’ rights activist told the news agency, "We have warned of [the PA] turning into a security regime, and there are indications that we are heading in that direction."

Sharansky and Eid, in their recent Wall Street Journal op-ed article, wrote that "the tragic peace process turned to farce" with deadly Fatah-Hamas clashes in Gaza. They pointed out the irony that it was Israel and not Fatah that worked to rescue a Fatah-aligned clan and then keep them from returning to Gaza, where they would be subject to the whims of Hamas.

The writers pointed out that the proponents of the Oslo Accords in the 1990s argued that a PA democracy, no matter how weak, would enable former PA chairman Yasser Arafat to vanquish Hamas and bring about peace. "In other words, a peace process that undermined Palestinian democracy created a 'peace partner' [Fatah] so hated by its own people that the Israeli Army must now protect them,” Sharansky and Eid wrote.

"Where is the money that was supposedly spent on reforming the judicial system? Where is the international outrage as Palestinian leaders drag their own society further into the abyss?" they asked.
 
PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has stated that a crackdown on Hamas in Judea and Samaria is necessary to prevent an overthrow similar to last year's military coup in Gaza. Hamas has accused Fatah and Israel of collaborating to work against it.
 
The United States has spent tens of millions of dollars to build a training camp in Jericho and teach military skills to Fatah militia forces. Its initial training was a dismal failure as the well-armed Hamas militia pulverized Fatah in the militia war leading up to the Hamas takeover in Gaza.

The U.S. has continued to pump money and advisors into training Fatah, which has deployed hundreds of armed policemen in Jenin and Shechem. Israel has complained that they do very little to fight terrorism and that the IDF still has to conduct most of the counterterrorist operations in the areas.

Fatah has reacted by trying to remove all elements of public opposition to its authority, violently breaking up demonstrations, beating photojournalists and shutting down opposition media.
 
The Canadian National Post concluded, "The appalling fact, only fitfully reported in North America, is that the two major Palestinian factions are committed to an often murderous conflict…. This week, the third anniversary of Israel’s wildly optimistic and ill-advised withdrawal from [Gaza], the situation is much as Steven Erlanger described in the New York Times at the second anniversary last summer: "Rather than a model for a future Palestinian state, Gaza looks like Somalia: broken and ravenous."