JERUSALEM — Less than a week after rival Palestinian factions Fatah and Hamas signed a historic reconciliation pact, both Israel and the U.S. said such a union could complicate Israeli-Palestinian peace.
In a statement released Thursday, President Donald Trump’s special representative for international negotiations, Jason Greenblatt, said any Palestinian government must “unambiguously and explicitly commit” to nonviolence and recognize Israel.
He said Hamas needed to disarm if it wanted to play any role in a future Palestinian government.
Greenblatt’s words follow a similar tone adopted by the Israeli government on Tuesday stating that it would “not conduct diplomatic negotiations with a Palestinian government that relies on Hamas, a terrorist organization calling for the destruction of Israel.”
But Palestinian officials, including Hamas in Gaza, said Israel and the U.S. envoy were meddling in internal Palestinian affairs and the reconciliation process would continue.
“It is the right of our people to choose its government according to their supreme strategic interests,” said senior Hamas official Bassem Naim, the Associated Press reported Thursday.
Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a spokesman for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, said the reconciliation agreement was of supreme national interest and must be promoted to end Israel’s occupation and establish an independent Palestinian state, local media reported.
Skepticism abounds
For 10 years, the two parts of the Palestinian territories, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, were ruled by mutually antagonistic groups that only just recently agreed to bury their differences.
Palestinians have long believed that it is in Israel’s interest to keep the two factions divided, weakening the Palestinians nationally and keeping the status quo in place.
“The reality is that there are no peace negotiations going on and even if there were, they would not yield anything positive,” said Diana Buttu, who formerly served as a legal adviser for the Palestinian negotiating team.
“The Israeli government is looking for any excuse not to negotiate,” she said. “They always say they want to negotiate but the facts on ground are exactly opposite. They refuse to remove settlements and are even celebrating 50 years of occupation.”
Professor Hillel Frisch, a senior lecturer at Bar Ilan University, near Tel Aviv, said he was doubtful Palestinian reconciliation would achieve anything anyway.
“I don’t think Israel has to fret. It will end in a shootout at most,” he said.
Over the past 10 years, there have been several abortive attempts at reuniting Hamas and Fatah, but even after the two sides agreed to form a unity government three years ago, Hamas continued to run Gaza.
This time, though, some Palestinian officials say conditions are more conducive. Gaza is in the midst of a humanitarian crisis that has paralyzed daily life for its 2 million inhabitants.
