The new agreement between the terrorist group Hamas and Fatah, the political party of the Palestinian Authority, to form a unity government would — if implemented — threaten Israel, hurt the Palestinian people and create new obstacles to Israeli-Palestinian peace. No one who seeks peace should support it.
To be sure, Hamas-Fatah agreements of the past have routinely fallen apart. This new one — the so-called Beijing Declaration, created at a summit hosted by China’s leaders in Beijing — came together only around vague concepts, not the details of governance.
The two parties have had rocky relations (and competed for the loyalty of Palestinians) ever since Hamas ousted the Palestinian Authority, which used to run both the West Bank and Gaza, from Gaza in a violent coup in 2007. A similar commitment by the parties in 2011 to a unity government went nowhere.
Nevertheless, the agreement raised the prospect not only of reduced tensions between these rival groups but also, of eventual Israeli-Palestinian peace. That’s because its text calls for a Palestinian state that would include the West Bank and Gaza, implying that that state would live in peace alongside Israel.
But no unity government of this kind would nurture peace. Indeed, consider all the old problems that such a government would reinforce and the new dangers it would create for Israel, the Palestinian people, the United States and those pushing the “two-state solution” of Israel and a new Palestine living side by side in peace.
For Israel: Hamas’s pledge to support a Palestinian state only on what’s considered Palestinian land is surely a sop to the peace-minded international community because Hamas’s leaders have made clear that they retain their genocidal designs for Israel. Also, they’re more confident of destroying the Jewish state after the group’s slaughter of 1,200 Israelis and hostage-taking of hundreds more on Oct. 7.
That means that for any unity government to come into force, the Palestinian Authority would have to accept (at least tacitly) Hamas’s eliminationist goal for Israel. Making matters crystal clear, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a close terrorist ally of Hamas in Gaza, said after the agreement was announced that it still “rejects any formula that includes recognition of Israel explicitly or implicitly.”
The Palestinian Authority is hardly an optimal peace partner for Israel to begin with. It continues to describe Palestinian terrorists who lose their lives as “martyrs,” pay monthly stipends to families of dead or jailed terrorists and enunciate old and new libels against the Jewish state.
Were the Beijing Declaration to become operational, giving both parties a role in a future Palestinian government, Gaza would remain a terrorist haven that threatens Israel from the south and the West Bank would remain a breeding ground for anti-Israeli incitement and terrorist recruitment.
For Palestinians: Day to day, the biggest losers from any unity government of this kind would be the Palestinian people. In Gaza, Hamas rules with an iron fist and, as it’s made clear in both words and action, is happy to sacrifice Palestinian lives — and watch Israel suffer the global public relations consequences — by hiding its fighters within civilian populations and guaranteeing more innocent death when Israel retaliates for terrorist attacks.
In the West Bank, the creaky and corrupt Palestinian Authority also rules in an authoritarian fashion, brooking no dissent. The 88-year-old President Mahmoud Abbas is serving the 19th year of what was supposed to be a four-year term. During his tenure, he has dissolved parliament, blocked elections, purged rivals and ruled by decree. A unity government of authoritarian entities would do nothing to enable average Palestinians to shape their own future.
For the United States: The Beijing Declaration marks another effort by Beijing to wield greater influence across the Middle East and — like the Iran-Saudi rapprochement of 2023 that it helped spearhead — undermine U.S. efforts to nurture Israeli-Palestinian peace and confront Iran’s terror sponsorship and regional expansionism.
Washington, which rightly joined Israel in rejecting the agreement because of Hamas’s proposed participation in a Palestinian government, also should call out the cynical effort by Beijing to exploit the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in ways that would guarantee more terror, more war, and more death.
For “two-staters” the world over: At first blush, a Hamas-Fatah reconciliation seems to buoy Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts by creating one entity with which Israel would negotiate. But, as noted, Hamas’s very raison d’etre calls for making the two-state solution impossible. No one in the region or around the world who truly seeks lasting peace should entertain hopes that a Palestinian political reconciliation of this type would do anything but create more obstacles to peace.
Want Israeli-Palestinian peace? Eliminate, rather than boost, the terror groups that make peace unattainable.
Lawrence J. Haas is a senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council and the author of, most recently, “The Kennedys in the World: How Jack, Bobby, and Ted Remade America’s Empire.”