On Religious Fundamentalism... The Last Dance of Death (3/3)

The last dance of death began with the 2007 coup against the institutions of the Palestinian National Authority, a direct consequence of the emergence of dual power after Ismail Haniyeh was elected prime minister. His primary task, however, was to implement the policy of the popularly elected president of the Authority, within a hybrid electoral system under which voters elect half the members of the Legislative Council through a single-member district system, casting their ballots directly for individual candidates, while the other half are elected through party lists, with the entire territory treated as a single electoral district. The number of seats won by each list is determined according to the percentage of votes it receives.

As defined by the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian National Authority is a body exercising limited self-rule over three categories of areas in the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967, each governed by its own security and administrative arrangements. These operate amid overlapping powers between the Palestinian security services and the Israeli occupation army, alongside systematic settler activity, backed by security and military protection and by financial resources enabling the construction and expansion of settlements in the West Bank.

At the same time, the Palestinian National Authority was grappling with two major issues: the first concerned the fate of East Jerusalem; the second, the question of Palestinian refugees in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the diaspora, who in fact make up roughly half of the Palestinian population.

The foregoing reveals a profound problem in the policies adopted to devise solutions capable of meeting Palestinian aspirations without colliding with the effort to produce a historic settlement with the State of Israel, one that would lead to its withdrawal from the occupied Palestinian territories.

At the heart of this problem was the fact that the Palestinian National Authority based its policies on adherence to international political legitimacy and, as the authority created by the Oslo Accords, relied on the political and legal framework they had established. Hamas, once it gained representation within the Authority, based its decisions and positions instead on the concept of historical and religious right, rather than on the concept of political right as recognized by the international community.

This gave rise to an objective conflict between historical right and political right, a conflict for which it was difficult to find a workable formula for coexistence within a single authority. Coexistence between the presidency of the Authority and the premiership thus collapsed within a year of the elections, paving the way for the confrontation that ended with Hamas’s takeover of the institutions of the Palestinian National Authority in the Gaza Strip in 2007.

An Impossible Coexistence

Ismail Haniyeh’s government won the confidence of the Legislative Council at the end of March 2006. Yet coexistence with the Palestinian presidency quickly unraveled, reaching its climax in June 2007, when Hamas security forces launched a broad assault on the institutions of the Palestinian National Authority in the Gaza Strip. According to United Nations figures, the clashes left 161 people dead, including 41 civilians, 11 women and 7 children, and around 700 injured.

What happened suggests that the movement’s leadership failed to appreciate the scale of its popular electoral victory. It also lost the political flexibility that might have allowed coexistence to continue for at least a few more years within a fledgling Palestinian democracy. The bloody method of resolution likewise reflected the predominance of security and military thinking over all other considerations and demonstrated a choice to seize the levers and institutions of power by force, even though the prime minister and many ministers themselves belonged to the movement.

In this sense, the democratic process did not appear, in the movement leadership’s view, to be an end in itself so much as a means of reaching power and taking control of its institutions. The effects of division and the takeover persisted for nearly two decades, during which the democratic process was paralyzed not only in the Gaza Strip but, by extension, in the West Bank, the institutions of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and trade-union life as well.

This led to the continuous erosion of national institutions and to the predominance of emergency and temporary policies over state-building policies with a clear strategic dimension, until managing division became a substitute for building the institutions of a state.

As for Hamas rule in Gaza, it moved toward strengthening its security apparatus to consolidate control, while building military capacity to resist the occupation. This time, however, following Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005, confrontation no longer relied primarily on suicide attacks, but on rockets and military operations launched from tunnels and underground positions.

In parallel, the “tunnel culture” became part of economic life in the Strip, with tunnels used to bring in goods and commodities for both civilian and military purposes. At one stage, the “tunnel economy” was even presented as a solution to a deteriorating economy, while unemployment exceeded 40 percent of the labor force and poverty rates rose to record levels.

For the Hamas leadership, this reality was not sufficient reason to reconsider its model of government. Its social and economic cost was instead treated as the price of “holy jihad” and confrontation with the occupation, waged through rockets fired from a distance and operations launched from underground.

At the same time, the movement was conducting permanent negotiations on a parallel track with Fatah and the other factions in search of national reconciliation among “brothers.” In other words, the de facto authority in Gaza combined the entrenchment of division on the one hand with the management of reconciliation talks on the other, a political paradox that persisted for many years.

Reconciliation Games

Hamas was shocked by victory, just as Fatah was shocked by defeat. One effect of the shock of victory was that confusion and hesitation came to dominate positions and statements, reflecting a degree of apprehension among those who had never tested themselves in government before and who only took the reins of power for the first time after winning the elections.

After decades of exaggerated mobilization around claims of integrity, abstention from power and its corrupting influence, and devotion to struggle and martyrdom, the position of Islamic Jihad deepened this confusion. The organization announced that it would refuse to sign the “National Conciliation Document” issued by the leadership of the prisoners’ movement in Israeli jails, on the grounds of its continued rejection of the Oslo Accords, which formed the political and legal basis of the Palestinian National Authority. It declared that it would remain faithful to its jihadist line, away from power and the corruption it brings.

Most factions, by contrast, signed the document known as the “Prisoners’ Document,” which contained provisions combining support for the PLO’s effort to establish an independent Palestinian state with the adoption of resistance within the framework of national consensus.

These provisions were later transformed into the “National Conciliation Document for Comprehensive Dialogue,” adopted in Ramallah and Gaza on June 25 and 26, 2006. Yet these attempts failed to produce a formula for national partnership in power until Saudi Arabia entered the reconciliation process, leading to what became known as the “Mecca Agreement” in February 2007.

The agreement went beyond the National Conciliation Document and moved toward establishing an actual partnership and division of power between the two poles of the Palestinian political system, Fatah and Hamas, and between the presidency and the premiership. On this basis, Ismail Haniyeh’s government was formed in March 2007.

Yet the spring of reconciliation lasted less than three months. Everything collapsed in early June that same year, when forces and security agencies affiliated with Hamas seized the institutions of the Palestinian National Authority in the Gaza Strip, viewing this as the shortest route to monopolizing power and returning once again to a policy of accusations of treason and exclusion.

This situation continued for four years before Egyptian mediation intervened again, leading to the “Cairo Agreement” in May 2011. Failure was repeated, and this time Qatar advanced a new initiative that led to what became known as the “Doha Declaration” in February 2012.

Then came the “Beach Agreement” in Gaza in April 2014, which succeeded in forming a national consensus government headed by Rami Hamdallah. It too did not last long, however, and the chain of reconciliation initiatives was broken for nearly three years before Egypt renewed its role in sponsoring the reconciliation process in 2017, culminating in the second “Cairo Agreement.”

Algeria then made its own attempt to produce reconciliation in 2022 through what became known as the “Algiers Declaration.” The final episode in this succession of initiatives came from China, which sponsored an understanding between Fatah and Hamas and led to what was called the “Beijing Declaration” in July 2024, without that declaration becoming an implementable agreement either.

We thus ended up with a long series of attempted agreements, with Arab and foreign states involved in mediation and sponsorship, while the Palestinian National Authority continued to pursue a policy of flexibility and accommodation. Yet the net result remained zero.

Public cynicism toward the process became widespread in Palestinian society, to the point that the principal negotiators appeared to have nothing new left to discuss. A common saying emerged that what was taking place amounted to nothing more than “reconciliation tourism,” a repeated performance of a scene in which little remained to be hidden after the dirty laundry had been aired in public.

After Al-Aqsa Flood

Next November, when the elections scheduled for the Legislative Council are due to take place, if they are indeed held, they will fall in the first month of the fourth year of “Al-Aqsa Flood,” the attack that generated an ongoing war of extermination and displacement at varying levels, one that ceasefire agreements and blockade alike have failed to end. For the spilling of Jewish blood, as in the October 7, 2023 attack, is treated as license to spill Palestinian blood and more, becoming a new banner for an enduring conflict after the failure of the first historic settlement through the Oslo Accords.

Everyone has come to understand that dismantling Oslo from either side is far easier than building a complex peace process. It is enough for a gunman to shoot Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin while he is calling on Israelis to embrace peace for the entire edifice to collapse, and enough for Hamas to carry out a suicide attack for the Palestinian National Authority’s inability to protect its people to be exposed.

The Israeli army then resumes its functions as an army of occupation, while settlers move forward with the construction of additional settlements, leading ultimately to the imposition of Israeli sovereignty over most of the West Bank. At the same time, Israeli National Security Minister Ben-Gvir calls for dozens of Palestinians to be killed every day, permanently and systematically, until Gazans are convinced they must emigrate.

The present scene is deeply connected to a series of mistakes committed by the Palestinian National Authority in managing its internal conflict with all those who contributed to a return to violence. This lies at the root of the failure of the continuing attempts, over four decades, to produce a formula for joint action between the Palestine Liberation Organization and Hamas.

In this regard, the author of these lines wrote the following conclusion two years ago, on the occasion of the anniversary of the Palestinian Declaration of Independence on November 15:

“The question of reconciliation is not the responsibility of Fatah, since the movement’s political weight does not entitle it to lead this process, but rather allows it to help bring it about. Nor can any reconciliation be discussed, or any dialogue conducted, in a way that bypasses the social and political contract represented by the ‘Palestinian Declaration of Independence,’ as the highest reference document for all, until the promised Palestinian constitution is completed.

Likewise, Hamas’s considerable weight does not give it the right to disavow the social and political contract as long as Palestinian society remains committed to it and continues to struggle in accordance with it.

Hamas, as a movement in rebellion against the political order grounded in the Palestinian national interest, has no right to set the rules of dialogue for reconciliation, even if the factions agree with it, because undermining legitimacy and departing from it is the starting point for the failure of dialogue. This is what we witnessed in the ‘Beijing Declaration.’ Likewise, identifying Hamas’s rebellion as an internal rebellion requires the Palestinian Authority to engage it in dialogue only on Palestinian soil, not in any capital. The logic and purpose of reconciliation are based on bringing the movement back within the framework of legitimacy through a change in its behavior and policies, not by bending legitimacy and the law or bypassing the substance and text of the ‘Declaration of Independence.’

The repeated talk of ‘reforming the Palestine Liberation Organization,’ rebuilding it, ‘sanctifying national consensus,’ and all the terms derived from these expressions, which have no precise meaning or credible definition, merely serves to paper over contradictions in favor of a tribal approach that usually ends in accusations of treason. It weakens our national choices and opens us up to agendas that are not Palestinian.”

Finally, our understanding, conduct and strategies for building the State of Palestine must be reconsidered on the basis that it cannot afford to conflate the concepts of revolution and the philosophy of old liberation movements, on the one hand, with the concepts of state-building in the contemporary world, on the other.

In this brief overview, it is worth noting that the Palestinian National Authority committed two errors that have never been discussed with the methodological rigor required to preserve the political order grounded in the Palestinian national interest.

The first error occurred during the transitional phase of implementing the Oslo Accords, from 1993 to 2000, when President Yasser Arafat adopted a policy of containment, accommodation and fraternity toward Hamas, even as the movement was openly waging war to bring down the agreement and practicing violence through suicide attacks. In practice, this entrenched the duality of power in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The second error occurred during preparations for the second Legislative Council elections in early 2006, when Hamas was allowed to participate without first declaring its adherence to the national choices established by the “Declaration of Independence” and to the Authority’s commitments toward Israel and the international community.

This error was not linked solely to President Mahmoud Abbas’s decision. It was also connected to the exceptional pressure Washington exerted at the time. The relevant archival documents must therefore be made public so that we can objectively assess the event and its continuing consequences for the fledgling Palestinian political system.

The paradox is that Hamas adapted to the laws and rules of the Oslo Accords while continuing to raise the slogan of bringing them down to this day.

Disregarding the major national choices enshrined in these documents, together with the duality of power, shattered the internal sources of strength of the Palestinian political system and enabled the opponents of Palestinian statehood to pursue their policies, as we are witnessing today.

Finally, the failure of the settlement between the two peoples can be summed up in the success of extremism on both sides in reproducing violence, and in the failure to achieve justice. The political settlement crafted by the ruling elites lacks a concept of historic reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians, a reconciliation protected by social forces with an interest in rejecting violence and grounded in justice.