The premier insists that the Fatah-run Palestinian Authority cannot rule the Strip; Mideast experts note the movements have distinct differences – but others see similar goals
Since the start of Israel’s war against Hamas, which aims to topple the terror group’s regime in Gaza after its murderous rampage across southern Israel on October 7, the international community led by the United States has repeatedly called for bringing back the Palestinian Authority to govern the Palestinian coastal enclave.
The PA, run by the Fatah party, was ousted from Gaza in a violent coup orchestrated by Hamas in 2007 after Hamas won Palestinian legislative elections the previous year. Israel withdrew unilaterally from the Strip in 2005.
Despite American and international insistence, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has reiterated that his government will oppose a return of the PA to Gaza, saying that he will not allow “‘Hamastan’ to turn into ‘Fatahstan.‘”
Netanyahu bases his stance on the assertion that Fatah and Hamas are both bent on Israel’s destruction, albeit with different methods, citing the PA’s refusal to condemn Hamas terrorism, its anti-Israel education, as well as its ongoing payments to terrorists and the families of terrorists.
National security adviser Tzachi Hanegbi last week seemed to stake out a more moderate position, saying that Israel has no interest in controlling civil affairs in Gaza and that a reformed PA may be allowed to rule over the Strip with international assistance.
However, speaking in a subsequent off-record briefing to the press, a senior Israeli official said Hanegbi’s comments in the op-ed in the Saudi-owned Elaph news site had been “misunderstood,” insisting that there can be no role for the PA in Gaza after the war because it cannot be trusted to fulfill Israel’s vital day-after requirements, including demilitarizing the territory.
Netanyahu’s comparison between Fatah and Hamas has met with strong criticism by the PA as well as by some Middle East analysts. To ascertain what the points of convergence and divergence between the two nationalist movements are, The Times of Israel spoke with several experts on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a variety of backgrounds.
Equating the two Palestinian movements is “false and irrelevant,” said Middle East researcher and former MK Ksenia Svetlova in an interview with The Times of Israel. Svetlova is a regular columnist in The Times of Israel and its Hebrew sister site, Zman Israel.
Founded at the outbreak of the First Intifada in 1987, Hamas grew out of the Gazan branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, a movement established in Egypt nearly a century ago to progressively Islamize society.
The Muslim Brotherhood is banned in several Arab countries — including its native Egypt — as it is perceived to be a threat to the ruling regimes. To this day, Hamas shares the Brotherhood’s ideology and methods.
“Hamas is characterized by an extremist radical Islamist ideology,” Svetlova said.
“This ideology specifically mentions that you cannot give up any part of an Islamic land to anybody, under any circumstances,” Svetlova explained, noting that the territory of “historic Palestine,” comprising Israel, is also considered an “Islamic land.” Said Svetlova: “That it should never be governed by anybody else but Muslims is a foundational principle of Hamas.”
The Palestinian Authority, however, follows a different approach. “Fatah, the main force in the PLO, is a secular organization. Despite its significant differences with Israel in how to solve the conflict, there can be room for negotiations,” Svetlova argued.
PA’s support for Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre
Netanyahu recently noted that the PA has yet to officially condemn the October 7 onslaught — although criticism of Hamas has reportedly been made by Abbas in private. The Israeli premier quoted a recent poll that found that 72% of Palestinians believed Hamas was “correct” to launch its October 7 onslaught, with 82% in the West Bank and 57% in Gaza backing it.
Gershon Baskin
“Wartime polls are not relevant. We need to look at trends in polls over time. It’s more important to examine what people will be thinking three and six months after the war,”
Baskin said in an interview with The Times of Israel.
“During wartime, there’s a rallying of support around those who are fighting Israel. The only pictures Palestinians and the Arab world are seeing are of the mass destruction and killing of civilians in Gaza.”
“They never saw the pictures of what Hamas did in Israel on October 7,” Baskin said, referencing the widespread atrocities perpetrated by the terror group against Israeli civilians, including rape, burning of entire families, tortures and beheadings.
Some of the brutal acts have been denied by prominent figures in the Arab world, including Jordanian Queen Rania and the Palestinian Foreign Ministry.
“The Palestinians see a very one-sided picture, just as we in Israel see a one-sided picture. We only see October 7 – it’s brought to us in live, vivid color every evening on television. Every evening since October 7, we’re reliving October 7. The Palestinians have never seen it. They don’t believe what happened in Israel. What they see is the daily destruction by Israel,”
Baskin insisted.
Baskin said that “the difference between Fatah and Hamas is like day and night.”
“Not that the Palestinian Authority and Fatah are lovers of Zion, but they made a commitment back in 1988 to make peace with Israel on the basis of two states and accepted a Palestinian state on 22% of the land. And that is still the official position of the PA and the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization, the PA’s diplomatic arm],”
he said.
“Since then, with all the difficulties, the open-ended peace process without any end in sight, they have maintained their political identity as supporting peace with Israel. Whereas Hamas is a religious fanatic organization dedicated to Israel’s destruction,” Baskin said.
The activist has close knowledge of the terror group and played a crucial role in mediating the release of abducted Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit from Hamas captivity in 2011. (In the wake of the October 7 slaughter, Baskin broke off communication with his long-time Hamas interlocutor, Ghazi Hamad, denounced Hamad as having “crossed the line between humanity and inhumanity,” and said Hamas’s actions on October 7 were “not the actions of human beings.”)
“The maximum that you can find within Hamas are so-called ‘moderates’ who believe in the possibility of a one-state solution with Muslims, Christians and Jews living together, but not a Jewish state, not the State of Israel, not a Zionist state,”
said Baskin.
Netanyahu’s perpetual campaign trail
Some believe that Netanyahu’s equating of Fatah and Hamas is less ideological than realpolitik.
“Everyone knows that Netanyahu is making the comparison for his own political agenda,” Asharq News journalist Mohammed Daraghmeh told The Times of Israel. Asharq News, founded in 2020, is based in Riyadh and Daraghmeh is its correspondent for the Palestinian territories, based in Ramallah.
“Since President Mahmoud Abbas came to power in 2005, the Palestinian Authority has shifted completely from the approach of his predecessor, Yasser Arafat. Arafat asked his security apparatus to carry out attacks [against Israelis], but Abbas is anti-violence. He has embraced a peaceful approach to pursue the political goal of an independent Palestinian state along the 1967 borders,” said Daraghmeh.
Svetlova noted that the PA president “dismantled the armed wing of Fatah – the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades – in 2007 in the framework of negotiations with Israel. Some of its men were absorbed into the security structures of the PA, others were jailed, others fled the West Bank. The main point is, Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas’ nom de guerre] disbanded one of the deadliest armed Palestinian organizations that terrorized Israelis and was responsible for a great deal of bloodshed.
“He also fought against the violence of other factions – mainly Hamas and Islamic Jihad – and rejected calls by Hamas for a third intifada, refusing to participate in violence against Israel,” she added.
Abbas has paid a heavy political price for his cooperation with Israel, Svetlova claimed. “Palestinians do not view Mahmoud Abbas the way Netanyahu does — as a supporter of terror — but quite the opposite, as a collaborator with the IDF, as a traitor who submitted to Israel. As he tries to apply the security agreements with Israel, he is caught between a rock and a hard place. He is deeply unpopular among his own people, and at the same time, Netanyahu says very cynically that there is no difference between him and Hamas.”
A security expert says Netanyahu has it right
Brig. Gen. (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser, a security expert and former head of the research division in the IDF Military Intelligence division, emphatically rejects the previous interviewees’ relatively positive views of modern-day Fatah.
“Concerning their ultimate goal, there is no disagreement between the PA and Hamas: Both are committed to the same Palestinian narrative, that the Jews never had sovereignty over the Land of Israel; therefore, they have no right to their own country,” he said.
“Both see Zionism as the result of a malicious plan designed by Western colonialists to get rid of Europe’s Jews and use them as a bridgehead in the West’s fight against Islam. They agree on Palestinians’ absolute state of victimhood, which legitimizes any type of struggle, even though there are nuances between Fatah and Hamas. Fatah considers the diplomatic struggle as legitimate, alongside the armed one, while Hamas considers armed jihad as its only tool to free Palestine,” Kuperwasser continued.
Among his other current roles, Kuperwasser heads up The Institute for the Research of the Methodology of Intelligence, and he is a member of HaBithonistim-Israel’s Defense and Security Forum and a new organization called The Misgav Institute for National Security & Zionist Strategy. At the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA) think tank, he specializes in the security dimensions of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.
“The treaties the PA signed with Israel, and ongoing security cooperation, are an intermediate step in the attainment of its final goal — the destruction of the State of Israel. The PA is not strong enough to confront Israel now, so it compromises in the hope of getting more in the future,” Kuperwasser said, adding that this approach is taken from the Treaty of Hudaybiyah, an episode in the Quran in which the Prophet Muhammad and his followers agreed to a temporary ceasefire with a stronger rival tribe and during the pause beefed up their ranks for a later confrontation, which they won.
Kuperwasser cited as evidence the PLO’s 1974 “Phased Plan,” a 10-point strategy for Israel’s gradual elimination which, in his words, still constitutes the PA’s “doctrine.”
He also maintained that Fatah has never dismantled the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, which is still its armed wing, but that its fighters now mostly operate under the umbrella of other local armed groups, most notably the Jenin Brigades and the Lion’s Den in Nablus.
A voice from the evacuated Jewish settlement bloc in Gaza
“There is no difference between the PA and Hamas,” said Eran Sternberg, former spokesman for the Gush Katif Jewish settlement bloc in the Gaza Strip, which Israel evacuated with its 8,600 residents during its unilateral disengagement from the coastal enclave in 2005. “And if there is a difference, it’s like the one between Mussolini and Hitler, or Stalin and Mao Zedong.”
“The PA carried out many terror operations from Gaza against Israel. The proposal to bring back the fiction that is the Palestinian Authority is an accurate illustration of the saying: ‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results,’” he said.
“The PA ruled over the Gaza Strip until 2006, when it lost to Hamas in the elections. What will be different this time? We need to remember that according to all the surveys carried out among Arabs in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank], Hamas would win in the elections with a high margin over the PA, a corrupt and murderous body, which barely controls Jenin and not even Ramallah [the seat of its government]. How can it rule over Gaza?” he said.
“The real root of the problem is that the Palestinians have no positive national definition. They have no culture, no heritage, no history, no added value whatsoever for the world,” he asserted. “Their whole self-definition as a nation is based on the rejection of the State of Israel.”
Sternberg quoted Ernest Bevin, UK foreign secretary when the Mandate for Palestine ended, who in 1947 summed up the conflict between Jews and Arabs in simple terms: “For the Jews, the essential point of principle is the creation of a sovereign Jewish State. For the Arabs, the essential point of principle is to resist to the last establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine.”
“It is crystal clear that the Palestinians are unable to establish a stable and trustworthy government that will lead to their prosperity,” Sternberg posited. “On a technical level, they lack the necessary infrastructure. Therefore, no Palestinian Authority will ever be able to last here.”
Ramallah’s contentious ‘pay-to-slay’ policy
One of the most controversial PA policies cited by Israel that disqualify its governance of Gaza is what detractors call its “pay to slay” program, whereby Ramallah disburses monthly payments to the families of jailed and slain Palestinian terrorists.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has withheld hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenues that Israel collects monthly on behalf of Ramallah and transfers to the PA, as a retaliatory measure against stipends that allegedly reward terrorist attacks against Israelis.
The payment policy has been defended by Palestinian leaders, who describe it as a form of social welfare and necessary compensation for victims of Israel’s military justice system in the West Bank.
Even many who support the idea of PA-led governance of Gaza agree that the stipends are problematic.
“It’s a custom that derived from the early days of Yasser Arafat. Fatah had a policy of making payments to the widows, to the families, and to the terrorists themselves. Donations to Palestinian terrorists were also made by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, and Libyan tyrant Muammar Qaddafi. It is ingrained in the Palestinian political culture – prisoners are a pillar of Palestinian society,” Svetlova explained.
Journalist Daraghmeh claimed these payments are part of a historic oversight.
“During the Oslo negotiations, Israel did not put a condition to halt the payments. So the PA, after its establishment, continued with it. It is a system used by the PA to politically contain the detainees, and prevent them from joining Hamas. The leaders of the prisoners are very active in the Palestinian street,” Daraghmeh said.
“The Palestinian Authority was a temporary structure that was not supposed to last more than five or six years after the Oslo agreements. It was supposed to be replaced by a Palestinian state after the completion of final-status negotiations – but that never happened. So all kinds of temporary things – like the ‘pay-to-slay’ policy – that were supposed to be part of history by now continue to run to this day,” said Svetlova.
“Maybe that system is a mistake and a miscalculation,” said Daraghmeh. However, PA leaders insist that given the lack of a political horizon, and since PA approval rates have plummeted, repealing the stipends would make the PA “appear in the streets as collaborators with Israel, who do whatever Israel orders us to do without receiving anything in return. So that could be solved if there is a political agreement with Israel.”
Security expert Kuperwasser, by contrast, does not believe that the “pay to slay” scheme is just a relic of history but rather sees it as a deliberate PA policy to encourage terrorism.
“Fatah thinks that terror is a legitimate and admirable course of action for Palestinians to remedy the injustices they suffered, and considers terrorists the fighting component of Palestinian society,” said Kuperwasser.
“The term it uses to describe them is not the usual Arabic word for ‘detainees,’ but a term that refers to ‘war prisoners,’” he noted, “and that is why it claims they deserve to be compensated. That is also why Fatah disburses payments not just to its own jailed members, but also to Hamas terrorists, and members of all other Palestinian organizations,” he said.
Can Hamas ever be eradicated from Palestinian society?
Since the Hamas onslaught, Palestinian leaders have continued to call for the integration of the political wing of Hamas in a future government of national unity. “Hamas is part of our political and social fabric and of our struggle, and their involvement is important,” said Jibril Rajoub, secretary general of Fatah’s Central Committee, in late October.
Palestinian journalist Daraghmeh sees reconciliation between Fatah and other political factions – including Hamas – as a precondition for the PA retaking control over Gaza.
“Hamas cannot be defeated as an ideology and a political movement – and right now, it enjoys wide support in the streets. It can reorganize itself quickly after the war, even if it loses its military wing – and then it can challenge the PA, or any other government that will run Gaza,” said Daraghmeh.
“Hamas can obstruct everything, simply because it still has the power,” he continued. “Even if its military capabilities sustain damage in this war, politically Hamas will still have leverage to hinder or infiltrate the activities of the PA.”
“I’m sure Hamas will accept a reconciliation because it will be in desperate need of money for reconstruction. Hamas knows that from now on it cannot run Gaza. So it will have to make space for the PA,” Daraghmeh predicted.
Israeli experts, however, do not share this view.
“I think that not only Israel, but also any donor county, including the Arab countries around us who despise Hamas for its affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood and political Islam, should insist that any remnants of Hamas stay out of the political process, or else they will not invest money in the reconstruction of Gaza – because Hamas devastated Gaza,” Svetlova said.
However, the researcher cautioned against repeating the mistakes the US made in Iraq after toppling Saddam Hussein’s regime, when it purged the Iraqi government bureaucracy of anyone involved with Saddam’s Ba’ath party – a move that caused great social upheaval and resentment and was one of the contributing factors in the emergence of ISIS.
“If you go too far and take out everyone [that was involved with the previous regime], you risk causing a lot of resentment, and establishing a new Hamas, a new ISIS, and giving rise to some kind of insurgency,” Svetlova said.
“People who committed atrocities, the security elements of Hamas, should be tried and jailed, but not every Gazan public sector worker who received a salary from Hamas should be alienated,” Svetlova said.
Activist Baskin added that
“the idea of integrating an Islamic party into the Palestinian political mechanism is practical, reasonable, and maybe even desirable. But Palestinians need to be required to establish that elections will take place only with parties who reject the armed struggle. Any party that supports the armed struggle should not be allowed to participate.”
“There are limitations in almost every democracy on who can participate and who cannot participate,”
said Baskin. “The Palestinians should not be exempt from that.”
However, Shaul Bartal, a lieutenant Ccolonel in the IDF reserves and research associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies and at the Orient Institute in Lisbon, insisted that any future government ruling over Gaza cannot include Hamas.
“These Palestinian national unity governments have never worked out. There have been a series of reconciliation agreements between Fatah and Hamas in the past, but they never held up,” he said. “Their interests, their history, their international allies are too different. And there is a long history of rivalry between the two movements. In 2007, they faced each other off in a civil war,” Bartal said, referencing the coup in which Hamas took over the Strip from the PA.
“To rule over Gaza, one needs to know the local dynamics. The leadership needs to be native to the place. Ismail Haniyeh, Yahya Sinwar, they rose inside the Strip. Gazans are more religious, they have an Islamist worldview, and a high percentage of them are refugees,” Bartal explained.
“I don’t think the PA could ever manage Gaza effectively. [Current PA Prime Minister] Muhammad Shtayyeh grew up in the northern West Bank; why would Hamas accept his authority in Gaza?” he continued.
Bartal also believes that Israel needs to maintain military control over the Strip. For him, the best-case scenario would be for Gaza to be administrated by an “international entity including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, maybe even Jordan and Western countries, while Israel would manage security and entry points.”
Bartal holds that even if the international community insists on having a revitalized PA to rule over Gaza, Israel cannot agree, because Hamas will never truly be eradicated completely from the Strip, even if it’s defeated — “the same way that ISIS cells are still present in Syria and Iraq, even though the Islamist terror group was defeated,” he said.
There is precedent for exiling the terror group’s leadership, however.
“The Hamas leadership needs to be eliminated, or exiled abroad, the same way the Yasser Arafat and the PLO leadership were exiled from Lebanon in 1982. In exchange, Israel can offer the release of Palestinian prisoners,” suggested Bartal.
The main imperative of a postwar Gaza, Bartal insisted, is that Israel retains security control.
Otherwise, he asked, “Who will prevent the atrocities of October 7 from happening again?”
Originally Published by he Times of Israel at https://www.timesofisrael.com/as-post-war-formula-for-gaza-sought-does-netanyahus-hamas-pa-equation-add-up/
