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United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) Conference, Stamford, CT March 25, 2012 Selected audio from plenary sessions and panel discussions

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For Fatah, New Unity Pact with Hamas is Risky, but Few Options Remained

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Posted May 11, 2011

Interview with Chris Toensing, editor of Middle East Report, conducted by Melinda Tuhus

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On May 4th, Fatah, the Palestinian faction that rules the West Bank, and Hamas, the Islamist faction that controls Gaza, signed a pact in Cairo that would unite the two rival parties to form a transitional government and hold long-delayed elections in both territories within a year. Because Hamas has refused to renounce violence or recognize Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state, Israel condemned the move, while the Obama administration is taking a wait-and-see approach.

The Palestinian accord puts at risk hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. aid for Fatah’s Washington-supported Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, since the U.S. considers Hamas a terrorist organization and could refuse to fund any government they’re part of.

Between The Lines' Melinda Tuhus spoke with Chris Toensing, long-time editor of Middle East Report, about the Palestinian accord. He says the reconciliation was a response to grassroots Palestinian demand to end the debilitating division that presented a major obstacle for the resumption of meaningful negotiations with Israel. The pact also sets the stage for an effort to pursue international recognition of a Palestinian state at the United Nations this September. Toensing addresses how the U.S. and Israel are likely to respond to Hamas and what Hamas and Fatah both hope to gain from the new arrangement.

CHRIS TOENSING: I would say Israel and the U.S. are setting up hurdles for Hamas that Hamas can't jump over, and I think Israel and the U.S. know that. Specifically, the hurdles are the so-called Quartet conditions that were put in place, I believe, in 2006, as conditions for Hamas to join the U.S.-sponsored peace process alongside other Palestinian parties. And those conditions would be acceptance of previous agreements that Palestinians have made with Israel -- the Oslo Accords and so on -- renouncing all forms of violence, and accepting Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state. And Hamas is not going to give a firm answer, one way or the other, to either of those conditions. On the question of violence, Hamas will say that they offer a long-term ceasefire, which of course they have done in the past and have observed in the past, largely without incident -- not completely, but largely. And that's for the reason that Hamas does not to appear to Palestinians as being unilaterally disarming in the conflict. And since Hamas has won a large part of its current political support from Palestinians -- even those who are not Islamist -- on the strength of resisting what Palestinians see as Israeli aggression against them, then Hamas could not appear to be laying down its arms without some kind of promise of the same from Israel.

Then with regard to the second question -- Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state -- that relates to the right of return for Palestinian refugees; also the future status of Palestinian citizens of Israel, who Hamas or Fatah for that matter, as leaders of the Palestinian people as a whole, consider themselves in some representative relationship to. So the idea there is that they don't want to appear to be sort of saying that any agreement with Israel is now and forever to forestall any unification of the Palestinian people and the diaspora in the lands from which those people were expelled in 1948. It's very unlikely that Hamas will agree to those things. And since they're not going to agree to those things, that largely drowns out the news, which is that Khaled Meshal, the spokesman of Hamas based in Damascus, has stated very clearly this time, with no ambiguity whatsoever, that Hamas will recognize the pre-1967 borders as the provisional borders of an Israel and a Palestine, with Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine, with the settlements in the West Bank removed and no land swaps. It was a very clear statement that Meshal made. So basically, Hamas is going a considerable distance -- further, in fact, than they have gone to date. And the response so far of Israel has been to reject the agreement and the response of the U.S. has been wait and see, but keep the existing blockades and so on in place.

BETWEEN THE LINES: It's a pretty big financial gamble for (Mahmoud) Abbas (president of the Palestinian National Authority) to risk billions in U.S. support. Even if the Obama administration is taking a wait-and-see attitude, I can imagine members of Congress moving to cut funding immediately. Do you agree?

CHRIS TOENSING: I'm sure that they do regard it as something of a gamble, but I think they probably think it's a gamble they had no choice to make. The alternative -- to make no attempt on the Palestinian side to set the agenda or seize the initiative would be to leave the status quo to fester. And the status quo is untenable for the Palestinians. You know, the best the Palestinians could hope for under Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or under a successor government led by the Kadima Party -- what is now called the centrist party in Israel, which is leading in most of the polls that are taken -- the best the Palestinians could hope for is a unilateral Israeli declaration of a Palestinian state, based on provisional borders, which would have no guarantees about any of these so-called final status issues, in which Israel would retain all sorts of rights and all sorts of impingements on Palestinian sovereignty. And that would essentially be a legalization of the status quo. So, if the Palestinians are going to have any measure of real sovereignty, they have a considerable obligation here to try to set the agenda on something closer to their own terms, and that's what I think they've done.

We can't leave out the popular pressure, either, which is a very important factor, and in the broader environment of the Arab world -- in the wake of the Tunisian revolution and the Egyptian revolution and the outbreak of popular uprisings across the Arab world, including in Syria and other countries, and mass protests in Jordan and other countries very close to Palestine with large Palestinian refugee populations -- there was a great deal of pressure on the Palestinian leadership to put aside their own differences -- which were considerable -- and try to work together toward a common national goal.

Find a link to Middle East Report's latest on the Israel-Palestine conflict at www.merip.org.