On May 4, the
Palestinian National Reconciliation Agreement was signed in Cairo
calling for the creation of a unified Palestinian government. The
central parties to the agreement were Fatah, the ruling party of the
Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, and Hamas (Islamic Resistance
Movement), the ruling party in Gaza.
Twelve other
organizations, including the Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine, Islamic Jihad, Democratic Front for the Liberation of
Palestine, and Palestinian People’s Party also signed the unity
accord.
The new Egyptian
government played a key role in negotiating the agreement. Cairo has
announced that it will open the Egypt-Gaza border, ending the Mubarak
policy of collaborating with Israel and U.S. imperialism in
maintaining the brutal blockade of 1.5 million Palestinians living in
Gaza. Both the unity agreement and the expected opening of the border
were made possible by the Egyptian revolution.
Another important
factor was the recent rise of a Palestinian youth-led movement
holding demonstrations and other activities calling for unity. The
rise of this new youth-based movement was in part inspired by the
revolutionary uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and other countries in the
region.
The response of
the U.S. and Israeli governments to the agreement has been one of
hostility, threats and demands. On May 9, Israel announced that it
was suspending the turnover of taxes to the PA on goods shipped from
Israel to the West Bank, which has caused 155,000 employees of the PA
in the West Bank and Gaza to go unpaid.
At the same time,
while feigning dismay, many top Israeli leaders see the agreement as
helping to justify their real policy of pretending to be for peace
while grabbing more and more Palestinian land. The inclusion of
Hamas, which the U.S. and Israel have labeled a “terrorist
organization,” has served as a new pretext for the Netanyahu
government to continue avoiding negotiations.
Main points of
the agreement
Points of the
agreement include:
-
Presidential,
legislative and Palestine National Council elections will be
scheduled one year after the signing of the accord. Fatah and Hamas
will jointly agree upon the formation of an electoral commission and
electoral court. -
Fatah
and Hamas agree to form a Palestinian government and to appoint the
prime minister and ministers in consensus between them. -
Affirmation
of the role of the Palestine Liberation Organization as the
representative of the Palestinian people. Whether or not Hamas will
now join the PLO is not clear. -
Formation of
a Higher Security Committee made up of officers decided by
consensus. -
The
agreement includes several points on the functions of the interim
government, including preparation for elections; addressing main
issues of “internal Palestinian reconciliation”; efforts for
reconstruction and an end to the blockade of Gaza; and overcoming
problems of division and “unification of the Palestinian National
Authority institutions in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Jerusalem.” -
Reactivation
of the Palestinian Legislative Council (parliament.)
Click here to read the full text of the agreement.
Background to
the accord
Implementation of
the unity agreement faces significant obstacles, due in particular to
the bitter conflict between the two principal parties in recent
years. In January 2006, the Hamas party won a sweeping victory in
elections for the Palestinian parliament, while Mahmoud Abbas,
successor to the historic leader of Fatah, Yasser Arafat, continued
as PA president.
Conflict between
Hamas and Fatah over control of Gaza erupted into armed struggle in
June 2007, and ended with Hamas in control of the area. Since then,
PA security forces—many trained in Jordan by the CIA and
Pentagon—have collaborated with Israeli security in suppressing
Hamas and other organizations in the West Bank. Reports say that as
many as 300 Hamas prisoners are held in PA jails, and dozens of Fatah
supporters are held in Hamas’s Gaza prisons.
The “Palestine
Papers,” a collection of more than 1,600 documents dealing with
Israel-PA-U.S. Negotiations, released by the Al Jazeera media network
in January, revealed that PA negotiators had in 2008 offered to
capitulate on all major points of dispute with Israel. The PA side
indicated that it would accept Israeli demands on borders, Israeli
settlements in the West Bank, Jerusalem, Palestinian refugee rights
and other issues in order to obtain a truncated “state.” The
revelation of the PA’s “generosity”—supported by the U.S.
government, which has provided hundreds of millions of dollars
annually to the PA —was highly embarrassing and compromising for
the Abbas administration.
Israel’s
rejection of the PA’s offer exposed beyond any doubt that, contrary
to its relentless propaganda about wanting “peace,” what the
Zionist government is really seeking is maximum territorial
expansion. It illustrates the utter hypocrisy of Netanyahu’s
response to the Palestinian unity accord on May 4: “Abbas can have
peace with Israel or peace with Hamas, but not both.”
Another factor in
Abbas’s decision to seek a unity agreement was the U.S. veto of a
U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israel’s ever-expanding
settlements in the West Bank—despite the fact that the U.S.
official position opposes the settlements. The settlements are
clearly in violation of international law and have been widely
denounced by virtually all international bodies. The wording of the
resolution that the U.S. delegate voted against was taken from a
speech by Hillary Clinton condemning continued settlement building by
Israel.
The isolation of
the U.S. was illustrated by the fact that the Security Council vote
on Feb. 18, 2011, was 14-1, with even U.S. allies and client states
in that body voting in favor. The Obama administration did not want
to be put in position of being the lone negative vote, especially
given the rapidly spreading upheavals in the Arab world. To avoid
that eventuality, the administration had brought heavy pressure to
bear on Abbas to call off the vote, threatening him with a cutoff of
aid and other consequences.
But given the futility of many earlier concessions and attempted concessions
to obtain even a semblance of a state, the PA government had begun to
go in a different direction. The strategy of relying on the U.S. as
the only power that could force Israel to concede a Palestinian
state—the basic doctrine of the PA since the 1993 Oslo Accord—had
come up empty.
Since last year,
the PA had been carrying out a campaign to obtain international
recognition of an independent Palestinian state, limited to the West
Bank and Gaza, with its capital in East Jerusalem, with the aim of
bringing Palestinian statehood to the United Nations in September,
2011.
The so-called
“two-state solution” has been historically opposed by other
Palestinian organizations like the PFLP, which calls for a democratic
secular state in all of Palestine and the right of return for
Palestinian refugees.
Another important
factor in the shift by the PA was the fall of the U.S.-backed Mubarak
regime in Egypt. Mubarak supported the Abbas government and treated
Hamas, which was originally a branch of the Egyptian Muslim
Brotherhood, as an enemy, maintaining the southern end of the
blockade of Gaza for many years.
Mubarak was a key
figure in the three-way alliance of U.S. imperialism, Israel and the
reactionary Arab regimes, which suppressed the Palestinians and the
Arab masses as a whole.
The Egyptian
people who rose up against Mubarak were also overwhelmingly opposed
to the blockade of Gaza and this is reflected in the new government.
The turn toward
unity with Hamas, about which Abbas reportedly did not inform the
Obama administration ahead of time, was deemed necessary to
strengthen the PA’s position both internationally and vis-à-vis
Israel.
The leader of
Hamas, Khaled Mashal, declared that his organization would observe an
immediate ceasefire and a long-term truce with Israel in exchange for
the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and East
Jerusalem.
The response by
Secretary of State Clinton was telling. She demanded that in order
for the U.S. government to enter into any talks with the newly
unified Palestinians, Hamas would have to renounce violence,
recognize the state of Israel and agree to carry out all previous
agreements between Israel and the PLO.
Similar demands
are never placed on Israel. With the massive firepower provided by
U.S. imperialism, Palestinian casualties over the past six-plus
decades have outnumbered those on the Israeli side by a factor of
close to 10 to one. In “Operation Cast Lead,” the Israeli assault
on Gaza in 2008-9, Palestinian casualties were 100 times those of
Israelis.
As a
colonial-settler state, Israel has never recognized the most basic
rights of the indigenous Palestinian people, including their right to
live in their own homeland. And since the signing of the Oslo Accord,
Israel has continually trampled on the terms of even that dismal (for
the Palestinians) document.
The situation for
the Palestinians in Gaza has been extremely difficult since the
creation of Israel and the massive refugee camps 63 years ago. The
inhuman blockade and frequent Israeli assaults have been directed
against one of the most densely populated areas of the world. Ending
economic and political isolation is imperative for the Hamas
government.
While many
questions remain about how the unity agreement will be carried out,
it has been hailed by Palestinian organizations across the political
spectrum as an important step forward.
Very different
responses have come from the U.S. and Israel. Since the Oslo Accord
in 1993, their fundamental strategy has been to promote civil war
between Palestinian factions as a means of destroying the resistance
movement altogether. Thus, both U.S. and Israeli leaders view the new
agreement as a setback.
Israeli leaders
have condemned the agreement. For extreme right-wing IsraeliPrime
Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his fascistic foreign minister,
Avigdor Lieberman, it has provided a new pretext for rejecting
negotiations that the Obama administration is continuing to call for.
But it is not just the right; the agreement has also been denounced
by the president of Israel, Shimon Peres, a supposed “dove” from
the misnamed “Labor Alignment.”
The U.S.
government has issued new demands on the PA and also threatened to
cut off hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, while at the same
time not categorically ruling out future talks. The quandary for the
administration is that taking more belligerent steps could undermine
a project in which it and its predecessors have invested a great deal
of time and money: turning the PA into another client in the region.
The context of upheavals throughout the region can only heighten
concern about such an outcome.
