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Saleh Al-Naami sees the fruit of dialogue between Palestinian factions

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From the early morning until late at night, Kamil Rawaq, 52, stands at Gaza City's main intersection asking people to sign a petition demanding that President Mahmoud Abbas and the dismissed prime minister Ismail Haniyeh show some flexibility for the sake of ending the Palestinian domestic rift as soon as possible. Patiently, he tries to convince people to read and sign the petition. Some do, and others make apologies because they are in a rush. "I'm prepared to sacrifice myself for the sake of reaching this goal, for unless the rift comes to a close and the West Bank and Gaza Strip are reunited, the national cause will suffer greatly," Rawaq told Al-Ahram Weekly.

His efforts reflect the Palestinian public's fervent desire for the national dialogue, whose sessions are expected to resume in Cairo on Thursday, to be a success. New to the resumed dialogue is the participation of intelligence chief for the Fayyad government, Majed Farraj, in the Fatah delegation. The significance of his participation lies in the fact that he is responsible for the political detentions that primarily affect Hamas leaders and activists in the West Bank.

The dismissed prime minister stresses that the previous dialogue sessions were not a failure. In a press statement he said, "We might not be able to unify the political platforms of the different groups, but we want to establish a new phase in which we can coexist in a way that serves the liberation stage. We realise that we are in a stage of national liberation, and we must stabilise our domestic relations on the basis of not rejecting the other."

Saleh Zidan, Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) politburo member, says that resuming the Palestinian national dialogue with all of its participants depends on the ability of Hamas and Fatah to resolve their disputes on the government's political programme and the electoral system. In an interview with the Weekly, Zidan said he expects the two movements to reach an agreement on the national accord government's political programme since there is a number of formulations that could allow the gap between their positions to be bridged. Zidan stresses that the real dispute is focussed on the electoral system and the election's cut-off percentage, whereby most of the factions differ with Hamas's position on continuing to use the mixed system of proportional and district-based elections. Most of the factions want to use a proportional system only. With regard to the threat made by some Fatah leaders to form a government drawn from the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) should the national dialogue fail, Zidan says that such statements are nothing more than weather balloons launched to place pressure on Hamas.

Yet if we judge on the basis of Hamas's positions as defined in its leaders' media statements, it seems that it will be difficult to bridge the gap between the two sides. Prominent Hamas leader Salah Al-Bardweil says that the national accord government formed following the close of the dialogue should not follow the stipulations of the Quartet committee, and stresses that Hamas rejects the demands of some states that the new government commit to the agreements signed with Israel. Al-Bardweil denies that Hamas has been informed by the Egyptian government that the international community can't accept a Palestinian government that doesn't accept the PLO agreements. In a statement to the Weekly, he said, "We haven't been informed of anything like that, and if we were to be, our response would be clear -- the international community is not the one to determine the fate of the Palestinian cause, but rather it is set by our goals, ambitions, and permanent rights which there is no swaying from."

Al-Bardweil says that one of the most important obstacles to the success of the national dialogue is the continued detention of Hamas leaders and activists in the West Bank. He considers the persistence of the Salam Fayyad government's security forces in arresting Hamas leaders and activists evidence of the continuation of American and Israeli interference in Palestinian domestic affairs. Al-Bardweil stresses that these detentions run counter to the ideal atmosphere of a dialogue, and describes Fatah as "impotent because it can't step beyond the limits of commitment as proscribed to it by the American military coordinator Keith Dayton." Al-Bardweil holds Fayyad's government and its agencies responsible for frustrating reconciliation efforts, and says that he lacks hope because Fatah itself is too weak to counter Fayyad.

Palestinian researcher Hani Al-Masri holds that delaying the dialogue sessions until after the Arab summit in Doha was an extremely poor indicator, and that concern for the summit's success should have produced major efforts to make the national dialogue a success. The failure of the prisoner exchange agreement between Israel and Hamas has had a negative impact on chances of success for the dialogue, he says, stressing that there is a strong relation between the two. "The conditions for a Palestinian agreement are not only Palestinian, but rather a combination of Palestinian factors with Arab, regional, and international factors and the Israeli factor, such that no Palestinian agreement can see the light or find its way to implementation after being signed as long as that is not accompanied by Palestinian- Arab-international-Israeli congruence," he told the Weekly. "No agreement between Hamas and Fatah will be able to succeed in lifting the siege, reopening the borders, and beginning the reconstruction process, because that depends on the closing of a prisoner exchange agreement with Israel," he added.

Al-Masri says that the probability of the dialogue succeeding is slim, but that success is not impossible, for there is international and Arab will for it to succeed. He warns that motivation for reaching an agreement that would end the domestic rift would diminish greatly if an agreement were not reached on a prisoner exchange. Al-Masri stresses that the ball is now in the Palestinian court, and calls for the approval of a national programme for the next Palestinian government that embodies common denominators. He stipulates, however, that this programme include text confirming its reliance on international law and the resolutions of the international community, that the PLO be the authority of the government, and that there be readiness to negotiate on this basis.

Despite the shared timing of the dialogue and the prisoner exchange agreement, however, developments with regard to the latter do not bode well. The Israeli government decided on a series of punitive measures against Hamas detainees following the failure of efforts to reach an agreement, and a prominent minister in the new Israeli government led by Netanyahu has threatened to assassinate Hamas leaders if the case of the abducted Israeli soldier remains outstanding. In a statement to Israeli Hebrew radio, the new Interior Minister Ishaq Ahranovitsch said, "I advise Hamas leaders to remain underground as long as Gilad Shalit remains detained by them."

He promised Hamas "harsh offensive measures", stressing that the new government would deal with negotiations on a prisoner exchange agreement differently from the approach of Olmert's government. Ahranovitsch says that as the official responsible for the prison authority, he would bar Palestinian detainees from seeing their families until Shalit was returned home. Ahranovitsch's statement was made around the same time that the government adopted a series of recommendations to tighten restrictions on the prison conditions for Hamas activists in Israeli jails. These recommendations include the following punitive measures: prohibiting detainees from watching television, reading newspapers, and continuing their education, as well as limiting family visits and barring detainees from meeting directly with family. The government has also decided to promulgate a new law prohibiting the administrative release of detainees and lawyers' visits.

Yet director of Al-Asra (Prisoners) Research Centre Fouad Al-Khafash says that another development has taken place that could lead in the end to an agreement on a prisoner exchange. Al-Khafash, whose organisation focuses on the affairs of Palestinian detainees in Israeli jails, says that a number of Hamas detainees in Israeli prisons have agreed to be temporarily exiled beyond the borders of Palestine should a prisoner exchange take place in the future between Israel and Hamas. In a statement to the Weekly, Al-Khafash said that the leaders of Hamas detainees in Israeli prisons who met recently in Kitsiot prison in the Negev desert have agreed on the principle of exiling a number of detainees to countries non-adjacent to Palestine.

Al-Khafash says that the families of detainees in Israeli prisons who are serving life sentences have agreed for them to be exiled as part of the agreement. The family of Abbas Al-Sayed, leader of Hamas's military wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades, who is serving a life sentence, has agreed to exile to a country such as Turkey. Al-Khafash points out that the prisoner exchange agreement that was reached in 1985 between the Popular Front and Israel stipulated the exile of a number of detainees, and suggests that there is no objection to agreeing on exiling some of the prisoners serving life sentences who Israel refuses to allow to return to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. And Al-Khafash adds that Hamas has asked for negotiations on the prisoner exchange not to resume until Israel ends the retributive and collective punitive measures against Palestinian detainees that have been deployed since the failure to reach an agreement.

Monday's issue of the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot said that the agreement of detainees to be exiled forms a "major shift in the central dispute hampering an exchange deal". The paper pointed out that one of the obstacles in the discussions over a prisoner exchange agreement was Hamas's refusal to exile Palestinian detainees and its stipulation that the detainees themselves agree to it.

It is difficult to predict the outcome of the bilateral dialogue sessions between Fatah and Hamas representatives. Yet Palestinian optimists and pessimists alike have begun to call for punishing the party that holds responsibility for the dialogue failing and for thwarting the opportunity to reclaim Palestinian unity.