Rival Palestinian militant groups, after six months of behind-the-scenes negotiations, have come close to a breakthrough that could alter the course of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Thirteen factions, including Fatah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, have been meeting regularly in Gaza City to try to end their historic squabbles and put together a united front.
A switch in Palestinian military and political strategy could bring a halt to attacks, including suicide bombings, in Israel. Attacks would be confined to Israeli soldiers and armed Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza.
Samir al-Masharwi, second in command of Fatah in Gaza, said: ”The intention is not to stop the Palestinian fight but to limit the scope of the struggle, and widen popular support, and stop the targeting of [Israeli] civilians.”
But such an agreement could be scuppered by continuing violence. Four Palestinians were killed when a shell from an Israeli tank fell on their home near Gaza last Thursday. Hamas, the most reluctant of the groups to enter into an agreement, vowed revenge.
Less than three weeks ago the rival factions, including Hamas, appeared to have achieved a historic compromise. A two-page draft agreement was reached after a meeting on August 10: it was finalised on August 12. Preparations to make it public, later abandoned, were initiated.
A copy of the draft agreement, A Proposal for a United Programme, has been handed to The Guardian, along with other key documents. The papers provide an insight into the internal arguments, illustrate how close the factions have come to achieving a consensus, and reveal the extent to which Hamas has shown a willingness to make concessions.
The draft agreement sets out three strategic aims: ”An end to Israeli military occupation and the illegal settle-ments from the land occupied on June 5 1967, including Jerusalem.”
”Establish an independent Palestinian state that will have full sovereignty, with its capital in Jerusalem, on the land occupied in 1967.”
”Preserving and protecting the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes they were forced to leave, according to UN Resolution 194 in 1948.”
It calls on the factions to unite under one leader, and an accompanying letter makes it clear this would be Yasser Arafat. The draft also calls for a reform of Palestinian society to build a democracy, with a multiparty system.
The first aim is the most significant in that it seems to resolve the main debate among the Palestinian groups: between those, such as Fatah, which accepts that the best that Palestinians can realistically achieve is a state in the West Bank and Gaza, the territory lost to Israel in the 1967 war, and those, such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, whose objective is a Palestine that includes not only the West Bank and Gaza but Israel too.
The Fatah manoeuvring is aimed at bringing Hamas and Islamic Jihad into mainstream politics in the hope that, in time, their declared ambition to destroy Israel will fade.
In operational terms, the document opens the way for the fight to be confined to the West Bank and Gaza. The Fatah argument is that attacks, especially suicide bombings, inside Israel are counterproductive, alienating world opinion and Israelis who would otherwise be sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. Fatah argues that attacks in the West Bank and Gaza would be seen as legitimate resistance to Israeli occupation.
Within 24 hours of the draft being agreed by all parties, Hamas produced a surprise by presening an alternative draft. It called for ”the removal of the Zionist military and illegal settlers from the Palestinian lands”. It added that the Palestinian refugees should receive their land and compensation, and not, as in the draft, land or compensation.
Some at Fatah do not see the Hamas draft as a rejection. They noted that there was no reference to 1948 and that Hamas opted for an ambiguous reference to ”Palestinian lands”.
Abdel Aziz Rantissi, a Hamas leader in Gaza, is reluctant to take responsibility for the talks failing. ”There are lots of points on which we have consensus,” he said. ”That is why there is a probability of us reaching common ground.” He did not express objections to Arafat becoming the leader of the united front.
Sheikh Abdullah al-Shami, the Islamic Jihad leader, was optimistic about a deal but stressed there was not yet consensus. ”We have not accepted that [a return to the territory of] 1967 is the maximum we can achieve,” he said. He was also concerned that if operations were to be confined to the West Bank and Gaza, how successful this would be, given that the Israelis were well entrenched in Gaza.
The Fatah representative, Abu Ali Shaheen, a minister in the Palestinian Authority, has quit the talks in frustration at Hamas’s behaviour. He said the discussions were ”now history” and blamed Hamas’s external leadership in Damascus, which channels funds from Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries to Hamas, for exercising a veto.
His suspicion is that the Arab countries, seeing the significance of the draft, blocked it in order to present it later in a bigger international arena.
Fatah does not accept that all is lost and has replaced Shaheen at the talks. — (c) Guardian News- papers 2002