On Friday, 27 August 2007, EI’s Ali Abunimah appeared on WBEZ Chicago’s Worldview, on which he discussed with host Jerome McDonnell the events that have transpired since Hamas routed Fatah in the Gaza Strip last month. Since then, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has created a new government of dubious legality with technocrat and US darling Salam Fayyad. The US and Israel have offered aid money and sent 1,000 M-16 weapons through Jordan to bolster Abbas’s forces while Fatah security head Mohammad Dahlan has resigned.

Abunimah commented on the embattled Palestinian Authority government: “ ‘Government’ implies that it has sovereignty and that it has control. In all our discussions of politics and the goings on we have to remember that Israel is the occupying power and the reason that neither the authority or the government in Gaza or in the West Bank has freedom and cannot control the territory or the airspace or the borders is that Israel retains overall control. In reality, there is only one government between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, and that’s the government of Israel. Nevertheless, the existence of these Palestinian entities has political importance as we’ll discuss.”