Palestinian supporters of the Fatah and Hamas movements demonstrate in the West Bank city of Hebron on Jan. 17, calling for an end to the siege of the Yarmuk Palestinian refugee camp in southern Damascus. HAZEM BADER/AFP/Getty Images
Summary
A high-powered Fatah delegation on a visit to Gaza Feb. 11 continued its meetings with the leaders of Hamas. The two sides have been discussing ways of implementing the understanding they reached on ending the intra-Palestinian conflict and will continue to try to reach a power-sharing settlement. Two days earlier at a news conference, Hamas Politburo member Khalil al-Hayyah and Fatah Central Committee Member Nabil Shaath said talks were in the implementation stage after having reached an agreement ending a nearly seven-year civil war.
Given that the two groups have failed to reconcile for years, it is unclear that this latest move will succeed. However, it is significant that a senior Fatah official traveled to Gaza to meet with Hamas leaders, and both sides are using unprecedented conciliatory language. The progress made thus far is due to the confluence of numerous regional dynamics and could lead to a breakthrough. If it were reached, an intra-Palestinian rapprochement would complicate matters for Israel, which is already dealing with a very difficult geopolitical environment, considering the shifts underway in Syria, Iran and Egypt. It could also complicate the U.S.-led effort to restart Palestinian-Israeli peace talks.
Analysis
The divide between the secular Fatah movement and the Islamist Hamas has been a key factor in preventing any progress in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. In fact, the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 took place at a time when the Fatah-controlled Palestine Liberation Organization no longer monopolized the Palestinian landscape. It was being challenged by Hamas, which, along with other smaller Islamist and secular factions, was engaged in militancy against the Israeli occupation. There has not been much progress since the Oslo Accords.
From Israel's perspective, the attacks within its borders constituted a major threat to its national security. However, the violence perpetrated by Hamas and other smaller groups like Palestinian Islamic Jihad, al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and others enabled Israel to resist international pressures to negotiate with the Fatah-dominated Palestinian National Authority toward a final settlement that would produce a sovereign Palestinian state. Whenever pressed by the United States and other major global powers to negotiate with the Palestinians, the Israelis would simply say there was no coherent Palestinian side to negotiate with.
In 2005, the government of former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon unilaterally withdrew from the Hamas-dominated Gaza Strip, a decision that arose from the desire to further the intra-Palestinian divide. The Israeli position was strengthened even further when Hamas, after a decadelong boycott of the Palestinian National Authority, participated in legislative elections in 2006, won a landslide victory and formed a government. From Israel's perspective, the Palestinian government was now in the hands of a terrorist group that did not recognize Israel's right to exist. However, the Israelis did not want to see the Palestinian landscape dominated by any single group.
Israel had long encouraged the growth of Hamas' predecessor organization, al-Mujamma al-Islamiyah, an apolitical religious organization that did not oppose the occupation, as a counterweight to Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organization, which for decades had pursued armed struggle against Israel. However, when the roles reversed and Israel was faced with an armed Islamist movement that had gained power via the ballot box, it was all the more important for Israel that Hamas not totally push Fatah aside.
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Fortunately for the Israelis, Hamas' rejection of the state of Israel created a dilemma for the Islamist movement, forcing it to form a coalition government with Fatah in order to avoid complete international isolation. Power sharing proved to be a problem at the outset and only aggravated the rivalry. The arrangement fell apart in June 2007 as the two factions descended into open warfare, which led to Hamas' seizing control of the Gaza Strip. Since then, the two areas that comprise the Palestinian territories have been separate geopolitical entities, with Fatah ruling the West Bank and Hamas controlling the Gaza Strip.
The Israeli strategy for managing the Palestinians has been based on this de facto partition of the Palestinian territories. Israel has viewed Gaza as a militant enclave that periodically needs to be dealt with militarily, as evidenced by the two major wars in 2008 and 2012 as well as by frequent airstrikes. Meanwhile, it maintains a direct occupation in the West Bank, where it has steadily increased Jewish settlements while allowing the Fatah-led Palestinian National Authority to run the territory's day-to-day affairs.
This is why the Obama administration's 2013 initiative to restart stalled talks between Israel and the Palestinian National Authority is about the creation of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank, leaving Gaza as a rogue entity. In other words, the United States was not about to wait for Hamas and Israel to reach a common negotiating platform. Instead, the plan was to use the Palestinian division as an opportunity to push forward a negotiation with Fatah and Israel, with the hopes that an isolated Hamas would become more moderate and try to catch up if a deal were struck to avoid being completely sidelined.
After the Arab Spring
The meltdown of secular autocratic regimes in the Arab world that began in 2011, particularly the one in Egypt, directly affected the balance of power in the Palestinian territories. The ouster of the Mubarak government and the rise of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood threatened to weaken Fatah and enhance Hamas' position. Until the July 3, 2013, coup in Egypt that ousted the Muslim Brotherhood government, it appeared as though Hamas would be able to expand beyond Gaza and revive itself in the West Bank, especially with support from Iran, Qatar and Turkey and improved relations with Jordan.
However, the coup not only reversed these changes but created unprecedented hostilities toward Hamas. Under the leadership of Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the Egyptian military regime has tried to contain the political unrest led by the Brotherhood and an insurgency led by Sinai-based jihadist group Ansar Beit al-Maqdis. The government has accused Hamas of participating in the political unrest and the militancy. As a result, Hamas has been squeezed from both sides -- Egypt and Israel -- and has struggled against a rising Salafist-jihadist movement in Sinai that has a presence in Gaza.
While Hamas faces a major reversal of fortunes, Fatah has been on the upswing -- and not just because of the Egyptian coup. The renewed push for a breakthrough in the long stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process has given Fatah considerable agency. However, the Israeli-Palestinian talks have not made much progress, in large part because of the issue of the Jewish settlements and Israel's demand that it maintain security control of the border between the West Bank and Jordan.
In addition to having a weak hand in the negotiations, Fatah does not want a Palestinian state that is limited to the West Bank or is further undercut by settlements. It needs a way to enhance its bargaining position. Fatah would also like to take advantage of Hamas' weakened position after the turn of events in Egypt.
Reconciling with Hamas could help Fatah on all these fronts. Indeed, it appears that the constraints upon both Palestinian factions have aligned such that both sides see benefits to cooperating in efforts to develop a single Palestinian entity, in which they would share power. The negotiations between the two sides have reached a stage where the discussions are centered on the creation of a roadmap to national unity, which involves fresh legislative and presidential elections.
The most significant statement to come out of Shaath and al-Hayyah's joint news conference came from the Hamas official, who said that although his group was not involved in the peace talks with Israel, it supported Fatah chief and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in resisting pressures "to give up the constants of the Palestinian people." This statement shows that not only is Hamas prepared to accept Fatah's retaining the Palestinian presidency, it also may be willing to support the secular movement in the talks with Israel.
Hamas' Delicate Position
Hamas has stagnated over the past several years in political isolation, but it has avoided fresh elections because it was afraid it would not perform as well as it did previously. However, its leaders may now be calculating that it is time to share the blame for its territory's problems to save its own political credibility, especially since it is facing competition from an array of Salafist and jihadist entities.
The extent to which Hamas is willing to change track remains unclear. What is clear is that Hamas has realized that it has peaked in terms of its power, which is confined to the Gaza Strip. It is caught between Israel and Egypt's military regime, which has proved to be more hostile than the Mubarak government. Within the confines of the Gaza Strip, it runs an entity that amounts to a little more than a municipality -- one that lacks international recognition and thus remains isolated.
Making matters worse is that its rule in Gaza has been challenged by Salafist-jihadist forces cooperating with their allies in neighboring Sinai, which used to be Hamas' gateway to the outside world. Recently, Hamas has been entangled in the struggle between Cairo and its jihadist rebels. This would explain why, during the news conference, al-Hayyah went out of his way to emphasize that Hamas would never interfere in Egypt's affairs or engage in actions that would harm the Egyptian people.
Similarly, Hamas is struggling to sustain the truce with Israel that was established in November 2012. Salafist-jihadists have been launching rockets at Israel, and Israel Defense Forces have been responding with airstrikes on Gaza and engaging in pre-emptive action. Hamas' concerns about the rising fortunes of Salafist-jihadists are not limited to Gaza and Sinai. Like many other actors in the region, Hamas is watching the growth of Salafist-jihadism across the entire region, especially in light of the escalating conflict in the Levant.
Hamas and Fatah see the shared need to secure Palestinian national interests before the strategic situation in the region gets worse. They also agree that in addition to being a threat, the current circumstances give the Palestinians an opportunity because Israel and the United States would like to move toward some sort of settlement on the Palestinian issue as a way to manage the growing uncertainty in the region. The U.S.-Iranian negotiations have also created a dynamic in which Tehran has hinted that it would not oppose a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that was acceptable to the Palestinians.
For Israel, a reunification of the Palestinians would be a setback for its strategy, which has relied on the Hamas-Fatah conflict to manage the Palestinian issue. However, with the region's overall strategic environment becoming hostile -- struggles on Israel's two key borders with the Arab world (Egypt and Syria/Lebanon) and Iran on its way to international rehabilitation -- the Israelis are also re-evaluating their situation. Ultimately, the current situation is a strange alignment of all the factors in the Palestinian issue. It is too early to say whether this complex configuration will enable Hamas and Fatah to finally put the past behind them -- the sheer number of moving parts could easily frustrate the latest efforts. But the situation has not been this conducive to cooperation since the start of their civil war.
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