Financial Times, May 3, 2017 – In the long-awaited document, released late on Monday, Hamas, which has traditionally refused to countenance a two-state solution, said it would accept an interim Palestinian state inside 1967 borders.
While the paper, written in the movement’s characteristically fiery language, said its goal was to “liberate Palestine and confront the Zionist project”, it was also notable for avoiding explicit calls for Israel’s destruction — a long-time rallying call by the militant group. It also toned down the blatantly anti-Semitic rhetoric of its 1988 charter.
The document, two years in the making, was released two days before Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian president and leader of Fatah, Hamas’s rival, is expected to hold talks with Donald Trump in Washington.
The US president has pledged to push for an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal with the support of Arab states, including Egypt, which has fraught relations with Hamas.
The release of the policy paper also comes as Hamas faces growing economic pressure from both Egypt, which controls the Rafah border crossing — Gaza’s main gateway to the outside world — and Mr Abbas’ Palestinian Authority. The PA is cutting electricity supply to the impoverished strip of 2m people and slashing the wages of 60,000 employees’ in Gaza in what Palestinians see as a brazen power play.
The hemmed-in territory has been isolated since Hamas surprisingly defeated Fatah in Palestinian elections in 2006 and took control of Gaza.
The six-year war in Syria, which had been an important backer of Hamas, has also weakened the group’s regional ties, adding to its isolation.
Mkhaimar Abusada, a professor of political science at Gaza’s Al-Azhar university, said the new policy document reflected the “maturity on the part of Hamas with regard to the Jews, with regard to the impossibility of liberating all of Mandate Palestine”.
Hamas also made it clear that it would not recognize Israel, renounce violence, or abide by previous diplomatic agreements such as the Oslo accords. These are the three principles established by mediators with the international Middle East Quartet after the 2006 elections.
The group’s policy paper also gave no quarter in its territorial claim on all of historic Palestine — defined in the document as running from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea — and said that its “resistance . . . shall continue until liberation is accomplished.”
And, while it refrained from making explicit threats to destroy Israel, Israelis read its call for a right of return for all Palestinian refugees and claim on all of their historic homeland as tantamount to the same.
