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The Palestinian National Charter, adopted by the Palestinian National Council (the legislative body of the PLO) in 1968, however, reflects a perspective that is decidedly more nationalistic than anything in the Hamas charter:
• Palestine is the homeland of the Arab Palestinian people…
• Palestine, with the boundaries it had during the British Mandate is an indivisible territorial unit…
• The Palestinian Arab people possess the legal right to their homeland…
• The Palestinian people possess the fundamental and genuine legal right to liberate and retrieve their homeland…
There is not a single reference to Islam or Islamic in this charter, which has not been amended since 1968. And while there is a nod to Palestine as “an indivisible part of the Arab homeland,” there is clearly a readiness to demarcate a “Palestinian homeland” as separate.
The PLO is officially the body that negotiates with Israel; it (or more accurately, its head, Yasser Arafat), signed off on the Oslo Accords that created the Palestinian Authority.
Can we assume then, that the PLO, or the PA, aspiring to a Palestinian state, may ultimately wish to sign off on that “two state solution”?
Clearly not. For its charter defines the future Palestinian homeland as “Palestine within the boundaries of the British Mandate.”
For all their ideological difference, this is where PLO goals and Hamas goals dovetail:
When PA president Mahmoud Abbas and cohorts speak of “resistance,” they are also speaking of driving Jews from all of Palestine, no matter what pretense is advanced for Western ears.
In the end, it matters to Israeli survival not a whit whether the goal is a Palestinian national homeland or a caliphate based on Islamic law: the mutual intent of Hamas and the PLO is the destruction of Israel.
This shared objective is the underpinning of that recent PA-Hamas “unity accord”—the Doha Declaration—no matter what other practical considerations have also come into play or what dissension may ultimately render it not viable.
Abbas was willing to sign with Hamas. This should not be forgotten.
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