Palestinian Factions Sign Accord to End Rift

 

Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the Fatah movement and — at least until now — an American ally, joined forces with Khaled Meshal, the leader of Hamas, the Islamist group that rejects Israel’s existence and accepts arms and training from Iran.

At the signing ceremony inside Egypt’s intelligence headquarters, men from Mr. Abbas’s Palestinian Authority, which runs the West Bank, and from Hamas, which rules Gaza? —? who had for four years viewed one another as solemn enemies? —? embraced and even joked. But they also expressed steely mutual resolve.

“We will have one authority and one decision,” Mr. Meshal said from the podium. “We need to achieve the common goal: a Palestinian state with full sovereignty on the 1967 borders with Jerusalem as the capital, no settlers, and we will not give up the right of return.”

The forces that produced this unexpected reconciliation are many — the changes in Egypt, the troubles of the government in Syria, the failure of peace talks with Israel and Mr. Abbas’s plans to retire with a lasting legacy. But the efforts of Mr. Abbas to join hands with Hamas also underscore his determination to pursue Palestinian statehood unilaterally and his willingness to risk a major rupture with the United States and Israel.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, visiting London, denounced the pact as “a tremendous blow to peace and a great victory for terrorism.” The Obama administration has been cautious, saying it needs more details. In a sign of declining relations, Mr. Abbas gave the administration no warning of the deal, first publicized last week.

Much about the pact remains to be determined — how it will define resistance, whether the two sides’ militaries can be coordinated and what happens to American and European aid. But it was agreed that a government of unaffiliated technocrats would prepare for elections in the West Bank and Gaza within a year.

In a sign of early change on the ground, Hamas’s television broadcasts were beamed for the first time into the West Bank, and Palestinian Authority broadcasts into Gaza.

On Wednesday, Mr. Abbas saluted Palestinian youngsters who had taken to the streets on March 15. Compared with other recent uprisings, that rally in Gaza City was small potatoes — 10,000 calling for unity between Hamas and Fatah.

But it was the biggest turnout for an unauthorized demonstration in four years of Hamas rule. It was an indication of rising public discontent, the first clear indication that the regional earthquake would not spare the Palestinians. From that moment, negotiations grew serious.

Hamas had rejected a similar unity agreement signed by Fatah nearly two years ago but, in truth, that offer was halfhearted. Mr. Abbas, along with his allies, the old Egyptian government of Hosni Mubarak, the United States and Israel, wanted Hamas to be seen as the problem. A negotiated peace deal, he believed, would force Hamas’s hand later.

Mr. Abbas said last week that he had come close to an agreement with Ehud Olmert, then the prime minister of Israel, in 2008. When he tried to pick up negotiations with Mr. Netanyahu the next year, he faced a more hawkish approach.

“He wanted Israeli troops in the valley and on the heights for 40 years,” Mr. Abbas told a group of Israeli guests, speaking of areas in the West Bank. “That means a continuation of the occupation.”

Therefore, from September 2010, when Mr. Abbas concluded that negotiations were doomed, he began down another path — reconciliation with Hamas and a campaign for a United Nations declaration of Palestinian statehood in September. He has repeatedly said that he will not run for the presidency again, and a number of people who know him believe he wants to end his career on a note of unity.

Hamas was brought on board through meetings in Cairo under the auspices of the new Egyptian government.

In late March, the new Egyptian foreign minister, Nabil el-Araby, invited a delegation from Hamas to Cairo to meet at the Foreign Ministry instead of the intelligence headquarters or a hotel meeting room — effectively upgrading them from militants to diplomats, some later said.

“The foreign minister told them, ‘We do not want to talk about a ‘peace process,’?” said Ambassador Menha Bakhoum, a spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry. “We want a peace, and the only way to talk about peace is to end the divisions.”

In turn, Hamas brought up a reopening of the Gaza border with Egypt, which had been kept essentially closed by Mr. Mubarak. The Egyptians said they would open it, and things moved quickly.

Developments in Syria, where Hamas’s political leadership is based, have also played a big role. The government of President Bashar al-Assad has faced widespread popular demonstrations in recent weeks and has responded with brute force. The Syrian government demanded that Hamas profess loyalty to it, but Hamas, which considers itself a popular movement, has demurred, threatening its Syrian ties.

The deal appeals to Hamas in part because it would remake the Palestine Liberation Organization, the overarching authority of Palestinian politics that now excludes Hamas. A committee to study changes will include the leaders of all the Palestinian factions — including Mr. Meshal of Hamas — and could end up being the main power in the coming year.

“Hamas will be part of the political leadership taking major decisions,” said Mamoun Abu Shahla, a Gaza businessman and independent who has been involved in the process.

The difficulties the two sides face in reconciling their conflicting ideologies will be great. For now, while a committee negotiates the future of security cooperation and prisoners, each side will police its area independently. The Palestinian Legislative Council, the parliament where Hamas won a majority in 2006 elections, will also be revived.

Hamas’s rising influence could well mean that the United States, which labels Hamas a terrorist group, could cut off hundreds of millions or dollars in aid to the Palestinians.

Representative Steve Chabot, an Ohio Republican and the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia, met with Mr. Araby, the Egyptian foreign minister, on Monday and came away arguing that the new transitional government was “a wolf in sheep’s clothing” and that Hamas could have unchecked influence over peace talks.

But Munib al-Masri, a West Bank businessman who has been promoting reconciliation, said the deal should be given a chance.

“Hamas will change,” he said in an interview. “Bring them in. Fatah used to be just like them.”

Fares Akram contributed reporting from Gaza, David D. Kirkpatrick from Cairo, and Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem.

 

Palestinian Factions Give Differing Views of Unity Pact

 

Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, said Thursday that because he was also chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization he remained in charge of peace efforts with Israel. The future unity government, he said, will have only two functions, to rebuild Gaza and set up elections within a year.

“The new government and peace talks are two different things,” Mr. Abbas told a group of Israelis who signed what they called the Israeli Peace Initiative this month and were invited to his headquarters for lunch. He said no activists of either his party, Fatah, or of the Islamists of Hamas would serve in the new government.

He added that negotiations with Israel were his preferred path to statehood rather than recognition from the United Nations, which he is also pursuing. But he repeated that for negotiations to begin, he needed a moratorium in Israeli settlement building in the West Bank, a condition that Israel rejects.

Aides to Mr. Abbas, who were not authorized to speak publicly, said one central reason the two sides were reconciling after four years of enmity was that Hamas had suddenly found itself in a position of weakness. Hamas is based in Syria, which is in turmoil, and it may not be able to stay there over the long term. Moreover, the aides said, Egypt may be friendlier to Hamas than it was under President Hosni Mubarak, but it is not heading down an Islamist path, as Hamas had hoped.

“They are in trouble, and so they reached out,” one Abbas aide said of Hamas.

Hamas figures presented a different picture of what led to the accord. They focused on Mr. Abbas’s frustrations with Israel and the United States in failed peace efforts and said that Fatah was therefore heading more in the direction of Hamas.

“There are no negotiations now, so let’s not speak about illusions that may or may not happen,” Taher al-Nounou, a Hamas spokesman, said when told of Mr. Abbas’s comments. “The Israeli government has nothing to offer to the Palestinians. It even refused to freeze settlements.” But he said that Hamas would abide by any P.L.O. negotiations and that it expected the P.L.O. to be reconfigured after elections in a year.

Mahmoud Zahar, a Hamas leader who was in Cairo for the Egyptian-brokered Palestinian negotiations, said he saw no place for peace talks with Israel under the new arrangement.

“Our program does not include negotiations with Israel or recognizing it,” Mr. Zahar told Reuters. “It will not be possible for the interim national government to participate or bet on or work on the peace process with Israel.”

Ahmed Youssef, a former deputy foreign minister of Hamas who now serves as a consultant to it in Gaza, said by telephone that Palestinians were “really disappointed in the Obama administration” and what they had originally been led to believe was a new American vision for the region. He added that the warmth of the new leadership in Egypt allowed it to place its confidence in its good offices.

In Gaza, people received the news of the accord with a mixture of skepticism and cautious optimism.

“I’m happy for the reconciliation but unhappy about the reasons that led to this agreement,” said Khalil Ghabin, 48, a grocer. “The changes in the region forced them to reconcile, and they did this because they were afraid that the flames of change would burn them. If there was no upheaval, they would not have agreed.”

Israeli officials reacted with horror to the prospect of a Palestinian government involving Hamas, saying it could have no place in peace talks, a stand supported by the United States.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak said in a statement: “Hamas is a murderous terrorist organization that fires rockets at citizens and recently fired an antitank missile at a school bus. It is an organization with which we have nothing to discuss, and therefore we have nothing to talk about with it.”

He said earlier in a radio interview that Israel would talk to a Palestinian unity government only if Hamas accepted internationally agreed conditions for its legitimacy, including recognizing Israel, accepting previously signed Israeli-Palestinian agreements and abandoning terrorism. Hamas officials have repeatedly rejected all three conditions.

Israelis on the left said they believed the Fatah-Hamas agreement could prove useful to achieving a two-state solution.

“I have always felt that divisions within Palestinian politics were not good for peace and see this as a step forward,” said Tamar Hermann, who leads public opinion polling on peace questions at the Israel Democracy Institute and was at the Abbas lunch on Thursday.

Efraim Halevy, a former chief of Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, said in a telephone interview that he had always believed that “there will be no serious progress in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict without some way of including Hamas in the process so as to transform them from being part of problem to being part of the solution.”

But this is a minority view in Israel.

In his lunch with the visiting Israelis, Mr. Abbas was asked to provide details about the accord. He said that too much needed to be worked out to say anything now. He said he was taken by surprise on Wednesday to learn that Hamas had agreed to sign and asked for time to work things out.

Asked about the future of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, a favorite of Western powers, he said it remained undecided. But he sought to assure the Israelis that he would never allow Hamas militias to take up positions in the West Bank. Some Israeli officials have said they feared that Hamas could take over the area.

Reporting was contributed by Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem, David D. Kirkpatrick and Mona El-Naggar from Cairo and Fares Akram from Gaza.