Folks, the relationship between these two groups of Hamas and Fattah will be short lived. The TT has been saying it from the very beginning that they announced their hudna between themselves. The long knives will come out once the UN General Assembly gets its way for recognizing statehood, or in the event that it’s quashed. Either way, blood letting between the two camps of Alien and Predator is going to happen. KGS
Terrorist Unity and the Push for Statehood
On Thursday, a day after Wednesday’s announcement of a Fatah-Hamas rapprochement in Cairo, Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbassaid he would keep pursuing peace talks with Israel. Almost concurrently, top Hamas official Mahmoud al-Zahar said Hamas would stick to its stance of neither recognizing nor negotiating with Israel, but “if Fatah wants to negotiate with Israel over trivialities, they can.”
Notable here is that Abbas cannot “keep pursuing” talks with Israel because he has almost totally abandoned such talks since 2009. Instead, his statement appears to reflect a strategy of retaining his image as a moderate despite the reconciliation with Hamas—and al-Zahar’s grudging agreement suggests Hamas is willing to play along with the game.
And at whom is the strategy aimed? Not at Israel, which, Abbas knows, would not negotiate in any case with a Palestinian government that includes Hamas. As Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu put it on Wednesday:
The PA must choose either peace with Israel or peace with Hamas. There is no possibility for peace with both…. Hamas aspires to destroy Israel and fires rockets at our cities … at our children….
Probably not at the U.S. either. Senior congressmen have alreadythreatened to cut off aid to the PA if the deal with Hamas holds. The Obama administration—which has already come out against the PA’s push for a unilateral recognition of statehood at the UN in September—also reacted coolly.
