Zack Beauchamp explains the Palestinian reconciliation agreement signed in Gaza yesterday:
According to the new deal, the two Palestinian factions would form a shared interim government within five weeks, and hold elections for Palestinian Authority President, PA legislative council, and Palestinian Liberation Organization council within six months. If implemented, the Palestinians would have a unified government for the first time since 2007. The Palestinian split had made peace negotiations extremely difficult, as Israel couldn’t make two separate deals with two separate Palestinian groups.
There’s some reason to believe the deal won’t hold. Hamas and Fatah came to similar agreements in both 2011 and 2012, but both of those fell apart. This deal doesn’t resolve underlying issues between the two groups, such as whether Palestinians should agree to a permanent peace deal with Israel or whether Palestine should be governed according to Islamic law. Those are pretty significant disputes.
Israel immediately cut off talks and announced reprisals:
The top-level inner cabinet of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government “decided unanimously that it will not negotiate with a Palestinian government that incorporates Hamas, a terrorist organization that seeks the destruction of Israel,” a statement said after an emergency meeting that lasted throughout Thursday afternoon. Israel also said it plans to introduce economic sanctions against the PA — which will reportedly include withholding tax revenues collected by Israel on behalf of the PA.
Noting that past attempts at reconciliation have failed, Karl Vick thinks this announcement could be a tactical play:
The timing of the announcement, six days before the April 29 deadline for U.S.-sponsored peace talks, suggests Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who heads Fatah, may have chosen to push back against pressure from Israel and the U.S., which Palestinians see as insisting on new concessions. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was angered by the latest announcement, declaring, as he did after the previous pacts, that Abbas “must choose. Does he want reconciliation with Hamas, or peace with Israel?”
By appearing to choose Hamas, Abbas wins points with the Palestinian public (which strongly opposes the factional rift), while perhaps also driving a wedge between the Americans and Netanyahu. “Is he hoping this will raise alarm bells in Washington, and they’ll go back to the Israelis and say, ‘We’ve got to offer him something’?” asks Mouin Rabbani, a senior fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies. “Yes, the timing is suspicious.”
Jacob Eriksson exposes the cynicism of Netanyahu’s position:
Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has said the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), can have peace with Israel or peace with Hamas – but not both. But this logic is inherently problematic; an oft-heard criticism during the seven-year rift between Fatah and Hamas has been that the Palestinian Authority does not represent all Palestinians and so any agreement reached would not be able to be implemented.
But when the Palestinians do move to create a unified, democratically elected leadership that represents all their people and can negotiate meaningfully if it chooses to do so, Israel considers this a non-starter.
This is a convenient excuse for Netanyahu to disengage from negotiations that he was never seriously committed to in the first place.
Juan Cole piles on:
[T]he hostility of Israel and the US to a Palestinian internal reconciliation also derives from their desire to divide and rule. A united Palestinian front would make that strategy much less salient. If the 4.4 million Palestinians in the Occupied territories could speak with a single voice, they would nearly have the weight of the 5.5 million Israeli Jews.
The US spokesperson said that Israel cannot be expected to negotiate with a party that does not believe it has a right to exist. The hypocrisy and irony is thick. Israel doesn’t recognize the right of Palestine to exist. As for the demand that Hamas renounce violence, likewise, Israel has not renounced violent aggression toward the Palestinians, something it and its settler surrogates engage in daily. The fact is that parties to negotiations are often engaged in violence against one another (hence the negotiations) and often don’t recognize each other’s legitimacy at the start.
The Dish 