As Israelis go to the polls in a general election, Palestinians have no vote of their own in sight.
Their legislative elections, due on 28 November, would have been the first since January 2006, when Hamas won a parliamentary majority.
On 10 October, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas postponed them by decree to September 2027 and set the presidential election, the first since he was elected in January 2005, for the same date. It was the second time in five years he had postponed a vote.
That same leadership is setting the terms of Palestinian unity. Fatah has demanded that Hamas formally accept seven political conditions laid down by Abbas as the price of national reconciliation.
At talks in Cairo on 14 October, a Fatah delegation headed by Jibril Rajoub and including former Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh insisted that Hamas commit itself to the political programme and agreements of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), which include recognition of Israel.
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The delegation also asked Hamas to endorse a two-state solution based on UN resolutions and to confine itself to peaceful popular resistance.
The conditions also include a single legitimate armed authority, a technocratic government appointed by Abbas to administer the West Bank and Gaza, and exclusive PLO responsibility for negotiations with Israel.
Fatah asked Hamas's political bureau to sign these commitments before discussing its representation in the PLO and the Palestinian National Council.
Hamas accepted the document in principle and said it would study it internally, while expressing serious reservations over the two-state clause and the recognition of Israel. The round ended without agreement, and the next session has been postponed until after Israel's elections on 27 October.
Unity cannot be achieved by requiring one movement to surrender its fundamental political positions before it is permitted to take part in national decision-making
The most troubling aspect of Fatah's demands is their underlying assumption that Palestinian reconciliation can only take place once Hamas has accepted Fatah's political programme.
That is a remarkable proposition from a movement whose own strategy has failed to secure Palestinian independence, or even minimal rights, after more than three decades of negotiations.
Palestinian unity is urgently needed. The division between Fatah and Hamas has weakened Palestinian institutions, fractured national representation and compounded the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
But unity cannot be achieved by requiring one movement to surrender its fundamental political positions before it is permitted to take part in national decision-making.
Israel's genocide in Gaza, which has killed at least 74,000 Palestinians, has prompted millions around the world to question the foundations of Zionism and the political order imposed on historic Palestine. Yet Fatah is demanding that Hamas formally recognise that order and accept a diplomatic framework that has failed Palestinians since Oslo.
Oslo's legacy
The PLO's programme is neither sacred nor immutable. It has changed profoundly over the past half-century, often without any democratic mandate from the Palestinian people.
In 1974, the PLO adopted its Ten-Point Programme, opening the door to a Palestinian national authority over any territory liberated from Israeli occupation. The 1988 Declaration of Independence and the accompanying political decisions moved further towards a settlement based on UN resolutions and the 1967 borders. In September 1993, the PLO formally recognised Israel.
Each concession was justified as a necessary step towards independence, although Palestinians secured no binding guarantee of independence, sovereignty or the return of refugees.
Abbas signed the Oslo Accords at the White House on 13 September 1993 for the PLO, along with Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, in the presence of Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin and US President Bill Clinton. Four days earlier, Arafat had recognised Israel on behalf of the PLO.
In return, Israel recognised the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people.
It did not recognise a Palestinian state, agree to end the occupation, accept the refugees' right of return or concede any Palestinian rights in East Jerusalem. Thirty-three years later, Palestinians remain without self-determination, sovereignty or independence.
At the end of 1993, around 116,000 Israeli settlers lived in the West Bank and Gaza, not counting East Jerusalem. By the end of 2023, more than 511,000 settlers lived in the West Bank alone. By August 2026, the West Bank and East Jerusalem together were home to about 780,000 people in settlements that are illegal under international law.
That territory, supposedly reserved for a Palestinian state, has been fragmented by settlements, checkpoints and military infrastructure.
Former US Secretary of State John Kerry, who spent years trying to revive negotiations, said in December 2016 that the two-state solution was "in serious jeopardy", and that it was "the permanent policy of settlement construction that risks making peace impossible".
He also said that settlement expansion and prolonged occupation were pushing towards an irreversible one-state reality. Settlement expansion has continued unabated since.
Expired mandate
The Palestinian Authority remains stubbornly committed to this failed framework. Its institutions, international relationships and security arrangements have all developed around Oslo, even as the prospect of achieving its declared objectives has steadily receded.
Abandoning Oslo would mean conceding that the strategy on which the PA built its authority has failed. Instead, it wants Hamas to endorse that record.
The conditions also go well beyond diplomatic recognition. They would require Hamas to accept a government appointed by Abbas and a single armed authority, under a political system shaped by the Oslo agreements.
Abbas, elected to a four-year term in 2005, is now in his 22nd year in office without a renewed popular mandate, and the parliament Hamas won in 2006 has not been re-elected since.
A leadership that has not submitted itself to national elections for two decades is in no position to make political conformity the price of participation in Palestinian institutions.
The demand for a single legitimate armed authority also cannot be separated from the PA's longstanding security coordination with Israel, which Abbas once described as "sacred". Palestinian security institutions must ultimately be accountable to the Palestinian people and serve their national rights. Arrangements designed to manage an occupation, rather than end it, cannot set their purpose.
The PLO claims to be the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. That claim carries an obligation to represent the full range of Palestinian political opinion, including movements that disagree fundamentally with its current leadership.
The Cairo conditions reverse that principle. Fatah is demanding that Hamas accept its programme before it is allowed into the institutions that supposedly represent all Palestinians. That is political submission, not reconciliation.
Genuine reconciliation must begin with reforming the PLO, so that Palestinians can choose their representatives and determine their national programme without conditions imposed by one faction. The programme should emerge from that process. No one faction can impose it as a condition for beginning it.
Shifting debate
The timing of the Cairo demands makes them all the more extraordinary. The genocide has transformed the international discussion of Palestine.
The destruction of entire neighbourhoods, the killing of civilians on a massive scale, forced displacement, starvation and the devastation of hospitals, schools and universities have exposed realities that western governments and much of the mainstream media spent decades obscuring.
South Africa brought proceedings against Israel under the Genocide Convention in December 2023, and the International Court of Justice issued provisional measures in January, March and May 2024. In July 2024, the court concluded in a separate advisory opinion that Israel's continued presence in the occupied Palestinian territory was unlawful and must end as rapidly as possible.
In November 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Palestinians are being asked to reaffirm the legitimacy of the Zionist project as a condition of national unity
These legal developments have coincided with a broader shift in public consciousness. Students have challenged their universities' ties with Israeli institutions; trade unions and professional associations have questioned the complicity of governments and corporations; and mass demonstrations have brought Palestine into public debate across continents.
The debate has also begun to question the historical foundations of Zionism itself. It is no longer confined to the occupation of the territories seized in 1967. It increasingly extends to the Nakba of 1948, the expulsion of some 750,000 Palestinians, the denial of the refugees’ right of return and the institutional privileges that separate Jewish Israelis from Palestinians.
For many, the fundamental question has changed. It is no longer where the borders of a future Palestinian state should be drawn, but whether a political order founded on settler colonialism, dispossession and ethnic supremacy can ever deliver equality, freedom, justice and dignity.
Western governments continue to arm and shield Israel. But public attitudes are changing, and the legitimacy of the Zionist project is being questioned in ways that would have been hard to imagine a generation ago.
At such a moment, Palestinians are being asked to reaffirm that legitimacy as a condition of national unity. The national movement should be widening the debate about liberation, return and equality. Instead, the PLO leadership seems determined to confine it within a formula that has already failed.
Hamas's concessions
Hamas must also examine its own responsibility for creating openings that others seek to exploit.
In May 2017, the movement unveiled its Document of General Principles and Policies in Doha. It rightly distinguished Judaism as a religion from Zionism as a political movement. But article 20 accepted a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, with Jerusalem as its capital and the return of refugees, as a formula of national consensus.
Hamas insisted that this amounted neither to recognition of Israel nor to the abandonment of any Palestinian right. Yet, in my opinion, by accepting the territorial framework of the two-state solution, it opened the door to demands that it accept the rest of the formula.
The Cairo demands illustrate that danger, pressing Hamas to recognise the two-state solution and accept the PLO's programme. Hamas should have learned from Fatah's experience that political concessions rarely end the pressure for further concessions.
Its handling of the release of the Israeli-American soldier Edan Alexander in May 2025 offered another warning. Hamas gave up a significant negotiating asset after contacts with American intermediaries, without securing any binding commitment from Israel to end its military operations, free Palestinian prisoners or agree a ceasefire. As I argued in August, goodwill proved no substitute for enforceable commitments.
The Cairo demands involve concessions of a far greater and more permanent kind. Recognition of Israel, acceptance of the PLO programme and the abandonment of armed resistance, a right affirmed in international law, would alter the movement's political identity. Once written into agreements, such commitments could not easily be reversed.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad should weigh the implications carefully, particularly when their own strategic decisions require serious scrutiny after the devastation of Gaza.
Responsibility for Israel's mass killing, starvation and collective punishment belongs to those who carried them out and the governments that enabled them. That does not exempt any movement from examining its own decisions and learning from its mistakes.
But the suffering of Palestinians must never be used to extract the surrender of their national rights. Humanitarian relief, reconstruction, prisoner exchanges and civilian administration all require urgent practical arrangements. None should be made conditional on recognising permanent dispossession or abandoning the right of return.
Rebuilding unity
Palestinian reconciliation must amount to more than another agreement between factional leaderships. It should restore a national movement that represents Palestinians under occupation, in the refugee camps and across the diaspora, with institutions that are democratically accountable.
Its programme must protect national rights that no faction has the authority to surrender. The liberation of Palestine from Zionist domination and supremacy, the right of return, self-determination, equality and the rejection of settler colonialism should be its foundation.
Palestinians may disagree over political structures and resistance strategies, and a reformed PLO would have to accommodate those differences rather than suppress them. It would also have to confront the consequences of Oslo, reconsider the relationship between the PA and the occupation, and establish clear accountability for decisions taken in the name of the Palestinian people.
Fatah's alternative is to absorb Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the other resistance factions into institutions whose direction has already been decided, undermining the political independence and democratic legitimacy of the national movement.
The international environment reinforces the case for caution. The PLO entered Oslo shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when American supremacy appeared unchallengeable, and accepted a framework defined by Washington and Israel. That calculation proved disastrous.
The danger lies in making permanent concessions on the assumption that American dominance and Israel's ability to dictate terms will last indefinitely
American power remains immense, but its predominance now faces growing challenges from China, an expanded Brics, and middle powers across the Global South.
In the Middle East, Iran's strategic position at the Strait of Hormuz and the ability of Yemen's Houthis to disrupt shipping near Bab al-Mandab have exposed the vulnerabilities of a regional security order long dominated by the US and its allies.
None of this guarantees Palestinian liberation. It does expose the danger of making permanent concessions on the assumption that American dominance and Israel's ability to dictate terms will last indefinitely.
Strategic patience requires disciplined political work, rebuilding national institutions, educating a new generation and expanding international solidarity. It also requires preserving political independence while the consequences of regional and global change remain unsettled.
The most urgent task is to set out a political vision that speaks both to the historical rights of Palestinians and to the growing international demand for a future without ethnic or religious supremacy. Such a vision must protect the rights of all inhabitants while rejecting the political structures that have sustained Palestinian dispossession.
After 33 years of Oslo, Fatah has failed to secure independence, halt settlement expansion, or restore the rights of Palestinian refugees. Yet it is still demanding recognition of Israel as the price of Palestinian unity.
That demand shows how far its leadership remains trapped in the failed politics of the past. For Hamas to accept it would compound that failure.
Palestinians need unity to pursue liberation, freedom and return, not unity bought by abandoning their national rights. Hamas must not make another historic concession just as the foundations of the old order are being called into question.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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