EDITORIAL: After three-day reconciliation talks hosted by China, 14 Palestinian factions, including two principal rivals Hamas and Fatah, on Tuesday signed the Beijing Declaration, agreeing to set aside their differences and form an interim national unity government.
The agreement comes as a blow to Israel’s and its key ally the US’ the ‘day after’ plan for Gaza, which was to install a collaborative structure in the enclave headed by an acquiescent Palestinian Authority (PA) at the end of the war on Gaza. Tel Aviv swiftly slammed the deal insisting that “Hamas rule will be crushed”. Its foreign minister Israel Katz also felt it necessary to reject any role for PA President Mehmud Abbas’s Fatah faction in the post-war Gaza Strip saying “Abbas will be watching Gaza from afar.”
The bad blood between the two key factions goes back to 2006 election that led to Hamas taking over Gaza, and a short conflict in which Hamas fighters expelled Fatah from the enclave. They have since been feuding. Several previous attempts to heal the schism have failed, prompting some analysts to predict the present accord too won’t last long. But it is different from the past ones in three significant aspects.
One is that playing the mediating role is a major outside power historically sympathetic to the Palestinian freedom struggle rather than US-aligned regional countries, such as Egypt, which had their own axe to grind. Secondly, as pointed out by Mustafa Barghouti, secretary-general of the Palestinian National Initiative, the Beijing agreement goes “much further than any other reached in recent years”.
Its four main elements being the establishment of an interim national unity government, formation of unified Palestinian leadership ahead of future elections (so far blocked by Israel) the free election of a new Palestinian National Council, and a general declaration of unity in the face of ongoing Israeli attacks.
The third and most important difference is that the agreement arrives at a time Israel is carrying out with impunity genocide in Gaza and also escalating violence in the occupied West Bank, killing Palestinians and confiscating more and more of their land to expand Jewish settlements. Whilst the PA with partial control of the West Bank looks on as a helpless bystander popular support is growing for Hamas in all occupied Palestinian territories.
That has brought the various feuding factions to the negotiating table. Still, as Barghouti rightly averred, “the most importing thing now is to not only sign the agreement, but to implement it.” China has the interest and ability to do that as it demonstrated last year by brokering a peace deal between the two bitter regional rivals, Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Speaking at the signing ceremony, Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi held out the assurance that his country “is willing to strengthen communication and coordination with relevant parties to implement the Beijing Declaration”. That would be a vital achievement for the Palestinian cause.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2024
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