JERUSALEM (Reuters) — They handily outnumbered their isolated Islamist rivals, had pledges of Western cash as well as military training and the endorsement of Arab powers.Yet Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s forces still lost to Hamas in Gaza, a rout that has rattled the region and thrown into doubt the Western doctrine of cultivating local assets against the perceived spread of anti-Western influences.

Stunned officials from Abbas’s Fatah faction, as well as their foreign advisers, have given various tactical reasons — withheld equipment, absent commanders, ignored intelligence — for the defeat during six days of Gaza street fighting.

But many experts believe that the pro-Fatah campaign also suffered from inflated expectations of a once dominant national movement now in political entropy and, after years of failed peace talks with Israel, bereft of Hamas’s ideological focus.

“You cannot fight a religious force with military power,” Abbas’s national security adviser, Mohammed Dahlan, told Reuters. “Hamas had a goal. The security services did not just self-preservation.”

While Hamas capitalised on Iranian funding and an extensive weapons smuggling and manufacturing network, Fatah was dependent on US aid that was often fatally slow in coming.

Several arms shipments and cash transfers were held up by Israel and its US lobbyists, who cited concern the weapons and know-how could be used against Israelis.

Many of Fatah’s best men were groomed as VIP bodyguards, commanders complained, while Hamas was marshalling soldiers for the battlefield.

There may also have been mixed messages from Abbas, who, in a move that vexed Israel and Washington, tried to head off the war with Hamas by joining it in a coalition government in March.

“We informed them (Abbas’s circle) that Hamas was preparing a coup, but Fatah didn’t expect it. It believed in Hamas’s good intentions,” an Abbas aide with security duties said.

Bret Stephens, a Wall Street Journal columnist who writes regularly on the Middle East, faulted the Bush administration for not insisting that Abbas disarm Hamas pre-emptively.

“The US made a fatal mistake in believing Abbas when he said he could quiet Hamas through negotiations,” Stephens said. “As it turns out, had the US made the demand (for a crackdown on Hamas) then Abbas would have been done a favour.”

Though Hamas denied seeking to take over Gaza and said it was only responding to a Fatah threat, the clash may have been inevitable given their divergent world-views: Fatah talks of peace with Israel while Hamas says it will never reconcile itself to co-existence with the Jewish state.

Matti Steinberg, a retired Israeli intelligence analyst, said that Fatah’s morale had been sapped by the lack of a “political horizon” with Israel, which quit Gaza in 2005 but has vowed to keep parts of the occupied West Bank, another territory where Palestinians seek statehood, under any peace deal.

“Fatah had no strategic rationale, nothing to fight for,” Steinberg said, adding that Israel — and by extension the United States — “should learn that patronage toward the moderate Palestinian camps is not the same as partnership”.

But Mouin Rabbani of International Crisis Group cautioned against seeing Gaza as an arena for warring world ideologies.

The fighting in Gaza, Rabbani said, could as likely be seen as a matter of bloody score-settling feuds between “local actors” as an orchestrated campaign for territorial control.

“This was not about whether the Palestinians should seek a two-state settlement with Israel or junk that paradigm and go for a different one. There is very little daylight between Fatah and Hamas if you look at their positions,” he said.