Socialist Action newspaper

There is movement in the tug of war between the Palestinian Authority government and the Zionist state’s imperialist big brothers, although not between the PA and Israel itself.

The formation of a Palestinian unity government, brokered by Saudi Arabia, in negotiations in Mecca, has induced the imperialists to relax their boycott of the PA to the extent that they are now willing to negotiate with the ministers in the new government who do not belong to the Islamist party Hamas and to suggest that they may be prepared to offer financial aid to the Palestinian Authority.

Hamas is insisting that the imperialists must negotiate with the PA government as a whole, but so far contacts have been only with non-Hamas ministers. The new council of ministers includes 10 Hamas representatives, six Fatah representatives, and four allegedly independent technocrats.

The Arab news service al-Jazeera reported March 21: "The EU [European Union] and UN contacts followed a meeting on Tuesday between a senior U.S. diplomat and Fayyad [The PA finance minister], an independent with close ties to the White House and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president and Fatah leader.

"By holding the talks the U.S. broke ranks with Israel, which has called on other countries to disregard all members of the Palestinian unity cabinet established on Saturday between Fatah and Hamas, an Islamist party that does not formally recognize Israel.

"The meetings marked the re-establishment of limited engagement between the Palestinian government and the Quartet of Middle East mediators—the United States, the European Union, the United Nations, and Russia."

Al-Jazeera’s analyst Marwan Bishara commented: "For all practical reasons, the wall of sanctions is crumbling down because three of the Quartet members—Russia, the EU, and the UN—have shown all sorts of positive signs toward the new [Palestinian] government."

The Israeli government wants to maintain the diplomatic and financial boycott of the PA because, it alleges, the document on which the unity government is based does not recognize Israel, renounce violence, or reiterate acceptance of the Oslo peace-treaty agreements. The Zionists also complain that the document recognizes the right of resistance and the right of Palestinians to return to the areas from which they were driven out.

Obviously, the document is a compromise between Hamas—whose political support depends to a large extent on its declared intransigent opposition to Zionism—and al-Fatah, which in its acceptance of the Oslo agreements took a conciliatory attitude to the Zionist establishment. The Zionist press has commented that Israel faces a certain diplomatic isolation in the wake of the establishment of the unity government.

Basically, the Palestinian position is strengthened by the prospect of an end to the war between Fatah and Hamas, which was an unprecedented boon for the Zionists. It is the cessation of this conflict that is the fundamental condition for improving the bargaining position of representatives of the Palestinian people. Unfortunately, it remains unclear whether the political leaderships of the two organizations can effectively turn off the fighting.

Reuters reported March 23: "A Palestinian child was killed by gunfire in Gaza on Thursday, medical officials said, as Fatah and Hamas fighters clashed in a second straight day of factional violence since the formation of a unity government.

"Medical officials said the two-year-old boy was killed and a female relative was wounded by gunfire as Hamas and Fatah gunmen clashed in northern Gaza.

"Palestinians hoped a unity government formed on Saturday between Hamas Islamists and Abbas's secular Fatah faction would end the fighting. But clashes broke out on Wednesday and spread after a series of abductions."

After the prolonged and bloody clashes between the two groups, many of whose activists have been made desperate by the ruthless siege the Zionists have imposed on the Palestinian territories, it is obviously going to be difficult to assuage the conflict.

Israel does not want to relax the siege on the PA because that precisely is what is fueling the conflict between the Palestinian factions. The basic goad is the inability of the Palestinian Authority to pay the salaries of the PA employees. These are one of the few sources of income in the territories. So, the entire population suffers from their absence.

But also most of the PA employees are Fatah members or supporters, and the cutting off of funds to the PA by Israel and its imperialist allies has been justified by Hamas’s control of the PA legislature and council of ministers. The conflict between the two factions has been institutionalized by the division of the government. Fatah continues to control the presidency and the security services dependent on it. Hamas has formed its own security force.

In the context of renewed negotiations between the imperialist powers and the PA, the project of a regional summit sponsored by Saudi Arabia has resurfaced. The negotiations are supposed to be on the basis of the Saudi peace plan, which the Israelis rejected in the past because it called for them to turn over all the territories conquered in 1967—including East Jerusalem—to the PA and to permit the return of at least considerable numbers of Palestinian refugees to their original homes.

The Israeli government now says that it thinks a Saudi-sponsored summit could be useful because the Saudis say that they are ready to modify the terms of their proposal. The Saudis have not yet said what modifications they are prepared to make. But the Israeli rulers undoubtedly expect them to put pressure on the Palestinians to capitulate on some important principles.

Thus, while the new diplomatic climate can lead to the relaxation to some extent of the immediate material pressures on the Palestinian people, it also involves the dangers of new betrayals at the hands of their bourgeois leaders and the reactionary Arab regimes.

In any case, the extent of the material deprivation of the Palestinian people has reached such a level that it has became a growing international scandal and thus difficult for the imperialists to sustain. It is urgent in this new situation that the Palestinian fighters overcome their divisions and find new and more effective strategies for winning the rights of the Palestinian people.

There does seem to have been a political advance, in the sense that the perspective of a solution involving a rump Palestinian state existing under the shadow of Israel has been largely discredited. The way seems to be opening, therefore, for a revival of the revolutionary perspective of a single united, democratic Palestine, in which the conflict between the Jewish settler-state and the Palestinian people can be removed.