Eye on the Middle East | Between Israel, Palestine, and the US – three divergent views on conflict resolution
Fatah controls parts of the West Bank through the Palestine Authority (PA), and Hamas controls the Gaza Strip unilaterally since 2007.
On July 23, Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi stood between Mahmoud al-Aloul of Fatah and Mousa Abu Marzouk of Hamas and announced the signing of the ‘Beijing Declaration’ – a reconciliation agreement between both groups and part of a commitment by 14 Palestinian political factions for a post-war national unity government.
Across the Pacific, over the next two days, Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the US Congress (while thousands protested his visit outside) and met privately with President Joe Biden and presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee Kamala Harris. In his hour-long address to Congress, peppered with standing ovations, Netanyahu did not make a single mention of a potential ceasefire, but rather vowed to “finish the job faster” in Gaza with US military aid.
While VP Harris refrained from attending his address, she asserted later that in their private meeting, she pressed Netanyahu to agree to a ceasefire, and reaffirmed US support for the two-state solution. As the death toll in Gaza crosses 39000, what is now firmly in effect in the Middle East, is a triangle of differences – with Israel, Palestine/Arab states, and the United States situated at three points, all differing over what conflict resolution should look like.
Notwithstanding the hard-to-ignore testament to the Chinese diplomatic heft in the Middle East that the Fatah-Hamas agreement symbolises, the reconciliation attempt contained the spark for this triangle.
Palestinian unity and the binding agent
Palestine’s two most prominent political factions – Fatah, which controls parts of the West Bank through the Palestine Authority (PA), and Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip unilaterally since 2007, have made at least nine attempts to reconcile their differences between that year and 2017. All these attempts have been in vain, given the fundamental nature of the differences between Fatah (which renounced armed resistance since the 1993 Oslo Accords) and Hamas (which continues to prioritise the armed approach, including acts of terror as shown on October 7).
Notably, however, while Fatah has actively cooperated with Israel for security in the West Bank in the last decade, Hamas’ view of Israel has evolved. Even though its founding principle is the non-recognition of Israel, Hamas’ position has effectively settled at demanding those borders for Palestine which existed before 1967; reiterated in Hamas’ 2017 charter.
However, all sides have been in this position before. In 2014, as the PA and Israel attempted peace talks (with the same leaders as today), Fatah’s decision to reconcile with Hamas eventually led to the talks breaking down — with the final nail in the coffin being Hamas’ kidnapping and killing of at least three Israeli teens in the West Bank, leading to Israel’s partial invasion of Gaza in 2014. Even though Hamas’ Khalid Mishal was already making pragmatic overtures in the early 2010s to accept Israel’s existence, both Fatah-Hamas and PA-Israel remained in a deadlock.
Now, with Israel both bombarding Gaza at an unprecedented scale as well as promoting fresh settler activity in the West Bank (even as the International Court of Justice declared Israel’s occupation illegal), for both Hamas and Fatah the pain threshold to trigger another attempt at reconciliation, has been crossed. Unlike past attempts, however, the current effort is aided by a strong external binding agent in the form of Israel effectively undertaking a scorched-earth campaign in Gaza militarily, uprooting most of Gaza’s population, and continuing to express its war aims as being the “total destruction of Hamas”.
As Hamas weakens militarily, for Fatah, the reconciliation signals a possible shedding of the old fear of being undermined as the pre-eminent Palestinian party should it accept the Hamas-Palestine Islamic Jihad combine as a partner. For Hamas, unity is a win-win. It enmeshes its own future with that of Palestine and further complicates Western efforts to extricate it from the political process.
Rather than relying solely on military resistance and leverage through hostages, Hamas’ entry into a process for Palestinian unity gives it an additional layer of political self-preservation internationally. In any case, it remains politically influential domestically with successive polls showing continued public support, especially in Gaza. Hence, already by early June, both sides had participated in two rounds of talks in China and Russia, which served as a precursor to the Beijing agreement in July.
The new triangle of differences
Last week, this column showed Israel’s steady move away from committing to the two-state solution – flowing against global consensus. That states are focused on acting against Israel’s actions in the West Bank even as its campaign in Gaza continues, is evident in Japan imposing sanctions on key Israeli settlers in the West Bank for violence against Palestinians; a significant first for Tokyo.
Moreover, the United Kingdom (with a new Labour government) is now supportive of the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Minister of Defence Yoav Gallant (along with Hamas leaders). Thus far, there has been enough evidence of a divergence between the Israeli and global (including Western) positions.
The triangle is created principally by the Fatah-Hamas pact. Essentially, the polarisation among all parties now flows in three different directions. The first pole is formed by Israel which is now resolutely against Palestinian sovereignty in the long-term while hesitating to commit to a ceasefire in the short-term — Harris’ call for an end to Israel’s campaign has already drawn Israeli ire.
The second pole is the Arab/Palestinian position that now integrally links the final outcome of the current war with the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state. Washington on the other hand is pressing Israel for a ceasefire and is continuing support for a two-state solution, even as it staunchly stands by Tel Aviv militarily and politically.
What makes the US position a third pole, is its demand, like Israel’s, that Hamas cannot be part of any political process for Palestine’s future. The US then, combines two crucial positions – one of Arab/Palestine, and the other of Israel. Following the deal, State Department Matthew Miller bluntly stated that “there can’t be a role for a terrorist organization” (in a post-conflict political process). It is here that the Hamas-Fatah agreement, should it hold, threatens to upset what has thus far simply been a divergence.
Ironically, the spark of the modern Israel-Palestine question was a triangular set of differences of another kind – the UN’s partition of Palestine in 1947 (UNGA Resolution 181-II), its rejection by Arab states due to the perceived disproportionate allocation of land, population and resources, and its rejection by Israel due to a perceived violation of the Balfour Declaration.
With the modern triangle, there is a risk to the elasticity of the Abraham Accords that side-lined at least one of the three poles – the question of Palestine, to be dealt with after normalisation of Arab-Israel ties. As Netanyahu departs Washington, and leaders from Hamas and Fatah depart Beijing, they almost counter-intuitively present more clarity to the world about their positions. The Israel-Palestine question is now marked by a return to the fundamentals and entrenched positions, only increasing the need for an end to the Israeli bombardment of Gaza and a release of Israeli and American hostages by Hamas, as a first.
Bashir Ali Abbas is a research associate at the Council for Strategic and Defense Research, New Delhi, and a South Asia Visiting Fellow at the Stimson Center, Washington DC. The views expressed are personal.