1 Nothing is ever what it seems in Palestine: what WikiLeaks tells us about the Hamas-Fatah conflict in Gaza in 2007 Victor Kattan 11,429 words without title, abstract, footnotes, or bibliography Abstract This paper revisits the feud between Fatah and Hamas, after Fatah lost the legislative elections to Hamas on 25 January 2006. Using the unprecedented disclosure of US diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks, Palestinian negotiating documents disclosed by Al-Jazeera, and a leaked UN report to The Guardian newspaper in London, this paper argues that the rout of Fatah from the Gaza Strip in June 2007 was the result of economic and diplomatic pressures on the national unity government that was formed after the Mecca accord in February 2007. These pressures on the national unity government were heightened by misunderstandings between Fatah and Hamas amidst disagreements over a security plan that was exacerbated by rumors of an alleged coup plot that appears to have been deliberately stoked. Introduction The rout of Fatah from the Gaza Strip in June 2007 remains a controversial, disputed, and largely misunderstood moment in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Hamas claims that following its victory in the legislative elections in January 2006, and its refusal to adhere to demands that it recognise Israel, abide by past agreements, and abandon armed struggle, there emerged a conspiracy to overthrow it. Had Hamas not acted when it did, Fatah’s armed forces in Gaza would have routed Hamas. In effect, Hamas contends that what happened in June 2007 was an act of preemptive self-defence that prevented a Fatah coup, rather than a coup by Hamas that was long in the making. The Hamas version was first articulated by Alastair Crooke, a former MI6 agent, and former adviser to EU High Representative Javier Solana, on his website Conflicts Forum in January 2007 (Crooke, Conflicts Forum online, 7 January 2007). Crooke repeated the allegation in an interview with Al-Jazeera two weeks later (Crooke, Al Jazeera, 24 January 2007). Following the routing of Fatah from Gaza in June, when Crooke’s allegations appeared to have been vindicated, Crooke referred to American and British efforts to finance, train, and arm the security forces led by Gaza strongman Muhammad Dahlan to confront Hamas in a review in the London Review of Books (Crooke, 5 July 2007, 3). The White House and the State Department refused to comment on Crooke’s allegations when they first surfaced in 2006. However, after Fatah’s rout, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told a press conference in Cairo that Hamas was being armed, in part, by the Iranians, to the detriment of ‘the legitimate Palestinian Authority security forces’, which she described as not being ‘a very good situation’ (Milton-Edwards and Farrell, 2010, 284 quoting Rice). In her memoir, No Higher Honor, published three years later, Rice alluded to a training programme for the Palestinian Authority (PA) security forces when she expressed her view that Hamas ‘decided to launch a preemptive strike against the rapidly improving security forces of Mahmoud Abbas’ (Rice, 2011, 581). Likewise, Elliot Abrams, the Deputy National Security