Jonathan Spyer of the GLORIA center published a great piece recently about a new player in the Palestinian arena. Spyer notes that the Islamist Hizb ut-Tahrir (Liberation Party) “held a demonstration numbering 2,500 in Hebron, and one of its members was killed in subsequent clashes with Palestinian Authority police. Similar gatherings took place in other West Bank cities.”
“Hizb ut-Tahrir remains a small, minority stream in Palestinian politics and the significance of its emergence should not be exaggerated. But neither should it be ignored,” Spyer writes. “Those who thought the emergence of Hamas as the most significant Palestinian political movement was a product of… the corruption and failure of Fatah… missed a key contemporary dynamic of the politics of the Arab world, namely the growing “Islamization” of politics.”
Recently, I pondered whether another radical faction could challenge Hamas in Gaza. Hizb ut-Tahrir could one day be that challenger.
