The reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas has been signed – the flags are waved, the speeches are held, Cairo and the region record another success. But anyone looking closely knows: the signing was the easy part. The real work – the end of the Palestinian division and the beginning of a genuine national reconciliation process – is a political and social mammoth task that has only just begun.
What reconciliation actually means
Reconciliation is not a press conference. It means one government accountable for the West Bank and Gaza; it means elections that both leaderships risk because legitimacy demands it; it means a reformed PLO in which all Palestinian currents are represented; and it means thousands of administrative questions – civil servants, security services, pensions – resolved without victors' justice.
None of this can be decreed from above. The division of the past years has not only separated institutions; it has separated families, media, curricula and narratives. A society that has been fed mutual distrust for a decade does not heal through decrees.
The social side of the mammoth task
This is why the process must reach deeper than the faction headquarters: into universities, associations, media and mosques, into the places where pictures of the enemy were stored. Reconciliation needs a social infrastructure – encounters, joint projects, truth about what happened – if it is to survive its first serious crisis.
The end of the division would be more than a Palestinian affair. It is the precondition for any credible national representation, and thus for any politics that can answer the questions of occupation, refugees and statehood. The mammoth task is worth every effort – for there is no national liberation without national unity.
