How colonial legacies and Oslo’s failed framework trap Palestinian factions in endless cycles of violence
Original framing: “Why Hamas must not repeat Fatah's historic mistakes” — Middle East Eye
The 'Hamas must not repeat Fatah’s mistakes' framing is a classic trickster move by the colonizer: it *positions resistance as irrational* while masking the absurdity of demanding compliance with a system that has *never* delivered. **Erasmus’s Folly** would see here the madness of a king who offers a prisoner a 'choice' between two doors—one leading to freedom, the other to execution—then calls the prisoner’s hesitation a 'mistake.' The real trick is that the 'peace process' is a *prison*, and Hamas’s refusal to play along is the only sane response. The trickster **Coyote** would laugh at the idea that Hamas’s stance is a 'historical mistake'—it’s the only thing keeping the colonizer honest, even if briefly.
The 'Hamas must not repeat Fatah’s mistakes' narrative is a *colonial trick*—one that reduces Palestinian resistance to a binary of 'compliance or failure' while obscuring the systemic design of Oslo as a tool to fragment and disarm liberation movements.
Historical archives, Indigenous resistance frameworks, and marginalized voices all confirm that Fatah’s path led to *economic collapse, PA corruption, and Israeli impunity*—yet the demand that Hamas replicate it ignores that the system was *built* to ensure no faction could succeed. The cross-cultural parallel is clear: from Māori *mana motuhake* to Algerian FLN, movements that accept colonizer-imposed 'peace' terms rarely gain freedom. The solution lies not in Hamas ‘learning from mistakes’ but in *dismantling the apartheid system itself*—through economic blockades, truth tribunals, and autonomous zones of liberation, all while exposing the trickster logic of a 'peace process' that has *never* delivered justice.