An aide to Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, who is set to sign a unity pact with Hamas on Wednesday, says the terrorist organization does not have to recognize Israel because Jerusalem does not recognize Hamas.
Nabil Saath told Voice of Israel government radio Wednesday morning that Quartet demands that Hamas renounce violence and recognize Israel “are unfair, unworkable and do not make sense." The Quartet is comprised of the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia.
Concerning Hamas terrorist attacks, Naath reasoned that it is enough for the Quartet to know that Hamas will refrain from violence. The Gaza terrorist organization announced Tuesday at a preliminary signing of a unity agreement with Fatah that it will uphold a ceasefire with Israel. Dozens of announced ceasefires in the past have not lasted more than several weeks, if that long.
Hamas hammered home the contradiction of its joining a unity government with Abbas, who is promoted by the West as a “peace partner” with Israel, by insisting it will never recognize Israel so long as it “occupies” land claimed by the Palestinian Authority.
The definition of "Palestine" is questionable because the Palestinian Authority, while telling the West that it wants to live side by side with Israel, continues to disseminate maps in Arabic showing its proposed state to include all of Israel, from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River and from the Lebanese border to Egypt in the south.
Separately, the Palestinian Authority stated Wednesday that it will stop all terrorist attacks on Israel. Officials did not explain how the PA security forces could prevent rocket and patrol road bombings originating in Gaza. Hamas staged a terrorist coup there four years ago, ousting Abbas’ Fatah-led faction from the region and in effect creating a separate Palestinian Authority besides the one based in Ramallah.
The proposed unity pact calls for the Hamas army to be integrated into the new Fatah army, trained by American generals at a US-funded military base in Jericho.
The unity agreement, despite Hamas’s hard-line stance and condemnation of the elimination of Osama Bin Laden, indicates that Abbas’s strategy is to promote unity at all costs. He apparently is banking on his drive to gain United Nations recognition of the Palestinian Authority as a new Arab country, based on all of the conditions in the 2002 plan proposed by Saudi Arabia.
The 2002 initiative would result in Israel returning to what were supposed to be temporary Armistice Lines in 1949 and are erroneously called "1967 borders" by the media, by ceding all of the land restored to the Jewish State in the Six-Day War in 1967, including the Old City in Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. These are indefensible borders, leaving Israel only several kilometers wide at Netanya. The Saudi plan also calls for Israel’s accepting the immigration of several million Arabs from foreign countries.