    Before the United States government subcontracted the Chilean military
    to overthrow the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende
    in 1973, it carried out a number of important missions in the country in
    preparation for the coup of 11 September. These included major strikes,
    especially by truck owners, which crippled the economy, massive
    demonstrations that included middle-class housewives and children
    carrying pots and pans demanding food, purging the Chilean military of
    officers who would oppose the suspension of democracy and the
    introduction of US-supported fascist rule, and a major media campaign
    against the regime with the CIA planting stories in newspapers like El
    Mercurio and others. This was in a context where also the Communist
    Party and the Leftist Revolutionary Movement (MIR) criticised and
    sometimes attacked the Allende regime from varying leftist positions.

    The Chilean example is important to keep in mind when one looks at the
    Palestinian situation today, as it functions as a sort of training video
    for US-planned anti-democratic coups elsewhere in the world. Not only
    are the US and Israel financially backing the open preparation for a
    coup to be staged by the top leadership of Fateh (and in the case of
    Israel allowing weapons' transfers to Palestinian Authority [PA]
    President Mahmoud Abbas's Praetorian Guard), but so are the intelligence
    services of a number of Israel-and US-friendly Arab countries whose
    intelligence services have set up shop openly in Ramallah more recently,
    making their longstanding and major, though understated, involvement in
    running the Palestinian territories more open and shameless. Indeed the
    intelligence "delegation" of one such Arab country has rented out a
    multi-story building in Ramallah to conduct their operations there.

    Israel has helped this effort all along by kidnapping and arresting
    Fateh members who resist the collaborationist policies of the top
    leadership. As for the leadership itself, it has periodically purged
    members of Fateh who oppose its policies, and marginalised those in the
    Diaspora who continue to resist them. The Fateh/PA coup leaders consist
    of Abbas and the ruling triumvirate of Mohamed Dahlan, Yasser Abd Rabbo,
    and Nabil Amr. The profiles of these three make them well suited for the
    tasks ahead. Dahlan is universally known as America's and Israel's main
    corrupt military man on the ground. Abd Rabbo (aka Yasser Abd Yasser,
    literally "Yasser worshipper of Yasser" on account of his subservience
    to Arafat) is the architect of the Geneva accords, which recognise
    Israel's right to be a racist Jewish state as legitimate and reject the
    right of Palestinian refugees to return as illegitimate. He recently
    upheld the Israeli position when fighting with the Qatari foreign
    minister and his staff during the latter's visit to the occupied
    territories. Amr is the former PA information minister, and a former
    visiting fellow at the Israel lobby think tank the Washington Institute
    for Near East Policy. He is also the speechwriter for Abbas and Dahlan.

    Abbas and these three have undertaken not only to launch massive strikes
    by the Fateh security thugs that they have armed to police the
    territories on behalf of Israel, and strikes by the bureaucracy that
    staffs the PA ministries, but also have coerced large numbers of
    Palestinians, including teachers and professors, under the force of
    guns, to uphold a strike against Hamas, when most of them had voted for
    Hamas in the first place and refuse to strike. Palestinians who have
    fought for decades to keep their schools and universities open against
    Israeli draconian closures and suspension of Palestinian education, are
    now forced by Fateh and its armed thugs to stop the Palestinian
    educational process with strikes against Hamas, and threaten to shoot
    people if they refuse to follow Fateh's coup directives.

    In addition, Abbas and the Fateh/PA triumvirate have organised
    demonstrations in Ramallah by middle-class Palestinians, including
    housewives, who brought out their pots and pans, in a scene borrowed
    from 1973 Santiago, in demonstrations against Hamas. The
    Fateh-controlled press, especially Al-Ayyam is fomenting major
    anti-Hamas propaganda campaign in preparation for the coup and is thus
    playing the same role as El Mercurio did in Chile. Al-Ayyam is aided in
    its efforts by the anti-Hamas secular Palestinian intelligentsia, most
    of whose members are on the payroll of the bankrollers of the Oslo
    process and its NGOs. These old leftist Palestinians, like their
    counterparts in Lebanon, are better known today as the right-wing left,
    as they take up right-wing positions while insisting that they are still
    leftists based on positions they had held in the 1980s or earlier.

    The plan is that the Fateh/PA rulers would do their utmost to provoke
    Hamas to start the war at which point Fateh, with the aid of the
    intelligence services of friendly Arab countries, as well as assistance
    from Israel and the US, would crush Hamas and take over. Indeed, the
    first unsuccessful round took place when the Israeli government
    kidnapped a third of the Hamas government, both cabinet ministers and
    parliament members, and placed them in Israeli jails. This was not
    sufficient to bring Hamas down, and not for lack of help that Fateh
    rendered the Israeli occupiers. Aside from the initial burning of the
    Legislative Council building, Fateh thugs have also burned the prime
    minister's office, shot at his car, burned offices in different
    ministries several times, harassed and threatened Hamas ministers and
    parliamentarians whom Israel failed to kidnap and arrest, refused to
    allow the government ministries to operate, and so forth. Hamas however,
    is wisely adamant that it will respond by force only when Fateh launches
    an all-out war to bring about its planned coup, but not before.

    Fateh's planned coup is not only based on the popularity of Hamas and
    its electoral victory but also on Hamas's increased ability to defend
    itself against Fateh forces. If the US and Israel armed Fateh thugs
    under Arafat's leadership to crush the first Palestinian Intifada and
    any remaining resistance to the occupation since 1994, today, Hamas is
    almost as well-armed as Fateh forces and can defend the rights of the
    Palestinians to resist the Israeli occupation and the well-armed
    Palestinian collaborators that help to enforce it. This is where the
    situation today differs measurably from that of the mid-1990s. To offset
    this new balance of forces, the United States government, according to
    the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, has been training Abbas's Praetorian
    Guard in Jericho for over a month with American, British, Egyptian, and
    Jordanian military instructors, and is providing arms to them in
    preparation for the confrontation with Hamas. The Israeli cabinet in
    turn has recently approved the transfer of thousands of rifles from
    Egypt and Jordan to Abbas's forces. The Israelis also approved a US
    request that Israel allow the Badr Brigade -- part of the Palestine
    Liberation Army currently stationed in Jordan -- to deploy in Gaza.
    These steps have been conceived by General Keith Dayton, the American
    security coordinator in the occupied territories, who wants the Badr
    Brigade to function as Abbas's "rapid reaction force in Gaza". As a
    possible step to increase its security and military roles in the
    occupied territories, the Jordanian government recently established a
    legal committee to review the provisions of Jordan's decision to
    "disengage" from the West Bank announced on 31 July 1988, effectively
    suggesting the possibility of a reversal of part or all of these
    provisions. More recently, the Israelis intensified their bombings and
    killings in Gaza, most recently in Beit Hanoun murdering over 50
    Palestinians in a few days.

    Mahmoud Abbas and his ruling triumvirate are reticent at the moment to
    start an open war for fear of a public backlash. They prefer to remove
    Hamas through imposing a "national unity" government that would undercut
    Hamas gradually and peacefully. However, Abbas and his triumvirate are
    quickly losing patience. Indeed, in a hastily-arranged meeting of the
    Diaspora-based Fateh Central Committee set to convene in Amman three
    weeks ago to ratify the coup plans, members of the committee opposed
    Abbas's US and Israel-supported coup, which forced Abbas to cancel the
    meeting altogether claiming falsely lack of quorum as the reason. This
    speaks to Abbas's desperation in engineering the coup without adequate
    preparation. Indeed, rumour has it across the occupied territories that
    the desperate attacks committed recently against Palestinian Christian
    churches were the work of undercover thugs. Those who sent them want
    Palestinian Christians and the world at large to think that these were
    Hamas acts in response to the pope's racist pronouncements against
    Islam. Hamas duly condemned the attacks. Few in the occupied territories
    believe that Hamas was behind them and most know that they were the work
    of undercover agents.

    The Fateh plan is simple: where Israel and its Lebanese allies failed to
    crush Hizbullah in the Sixth war, Fateh and its Israeli allies will
    succeed in crushing Hamas, even if the ongoing Israeli war against Hamas
    and the Palestinian people becomes an all-out Seventh war. The flurry of
    visits by Condoleezza Rice to the area in the last few weeks hoped to
    put the final touches on this plan. If Hamas, like Hizbullah, could be
    provoked into a military response, the coup planners believe, then
    Fateh's and Israel's wrath (backed by the US, Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi
    Arabia) would be unleashed to finish Hamas off. The Fateh leadership and
    its thugs are sharpening their knives for the showdown. Hamas has
    remained calm despite the pressure.

    In the meantime, Ramallah proper (excluding the surrounding villages),
    continues to be what many now refer to as the Palestinian Green Zone,
    sheltering, in addition to the intelligence staff of Israel and
    Israel-friendly Arab countries, those Palestinians who are paid and
    protected by the Oslo process, whether the Oslo bureaucracy, its
    technicians, and hired intellectuals, or the business and middle classes
    recently habituated to the new name-brand consumerism that the Green
    Zone can offer. This opulent life contrasts with the life of the rest of
    the Palestinians outside Ramallah who live in misery, hunger, and under
    the bombardment of the Israelis and the attacks of savage Jewish
    colonial settlers, not to mention the harassment by Fateh thugs. In
    Ramallah itself, the trigger-happy thugs shoot at random during their
    demonstrations, injuring and sometimes killing passers by "in error".
    Even the few secular intellectuals who deign to oppose Fateh inside
    Ramallah are harassed in different ways. Some of them experience
    mysterious robberies that are repeated every time they make anti-Fateh
    statements. The preservation of Ramallah as the Green Zone is paramount
    to Abbas and the Fateh/PA triumvirate, whose fear of any reform
    introduced by Hamas would strip the elite of the benefits of corruption
    and the dolce vita that Fateh-rule has ensured for them.

    Meanwhile, Abbas and his triumvirate will continue to treat Hamas the
    way Israel has treated the PLO and other Arab countries all along. In
    the interminable negotiations that Hamas held with Fateh to avert a
    showdown, whenever Hamas would agree to a Fateh demand, Fateh would up
    the ante and insist on another concession or claim that its initial
    demands always included the now expanded terms, even though they did
    not. Moreover, Fateh would also publicly interpret Hamas's concessions
    as having included things that Hamas had not agreed to at all. If this
    is reminiscent of the post-Oslo negotiating strategy that the Israelis
    used successfully with Arafat, this is because it is the same strategy.
    Abbas has gone so far as to walk away from negotiations, and refuse to
    speak to Hamas leaders, just as the Israelis have done often with the
    PA. Moreover, if the Israelis would often carry undercover attacks
    against Western interests to implicate Arab governments, the clearest
    example being the infamous Lavon Affair of the mid-1950s targeting
    Egypt, similar operations are being committed to implicate Hamas by
    undercover agents, like the recent example of the attacks on the
    churches illustrates. There may be many more such operations being
    planned.

    Whatever fig leaf still covered the Fateh leadership's complete
    collaboration and subservience to Israeli interests has now fallen off.
    As a result, there is very little left that can restrain Fateh's
    actions. The next few weeks will be decided by how much Fateh leaders
    are itching for a fight to save their skins and fortunes, and how much
    patience Hamas can muster in the face of so much thuggery. In the
    meantime, what has been unfolding in the Palestinian territories is
    nothing short of the Chilean script.

    Pinochet is in Palestine. His success however remains far from certain.

    The writer is associate professor of modern Arab politics and
    intellectual history at Columbia University. He is the author of The
    Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the
    Palestinians (Routledge, 2006).