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Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah movement has issued a strong statement against Iran. “We Will Cut Off the Hand’: Abbas’s Fatah Party Slams Iran for Interfering in Palestinian Affairs,” Algemeiner, April 3, 2024:

This external interference, particularly by Iran, has no other objective than to sow chaos in the Palestinian internal arena, which will only benefit the Israeli occupation and the enemies of our people…We will not allow our sacred cause and the blood of our people to be exploited for suspicious plots that have nothing to do with them….We will be on the lookout for those tamperers, and will cut off the hand that seeks to meddle in our affairs, or harm our security services, or any of our national institutions.”

Fatah’s statement is timely, as it was issued after the Palestinian Authority (PA) asked the UN Security Council to vote this month to make it a full member of the UN. The PA is now tactically distancing itself from Iran because Iran is a key supporter of Hamas, as well as being the Palestinian Authority’s foremost rival. Yet “PA officials have been regularly rationalizing Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel and in some cases even denying it took place or falsely claiming Israeli forces carried out the onslaught.”

Only a week after the October 7 savagery, Hamas and Fatah “signed a reconciliation deal after Hamas agreed to hand over administrative control of Gaza.” But that agreement, brokered by Egypt, has fizzled as the PA vies for heightened power and influence via UN membership.

The Fatah movement has an unstable history with Iran, related to the Shia-Sunni divide. Yasser Arafat founded the Fatah movement, a Sunni group that Shia Iran once staunchly backed in common cause with the Palestinian “resistance.” But Iran “eventually broke ties with Arafat after the Palestinian leader supported Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war.” Before the 1979 Iranian Islamic revolution, the distinction between the two countries was less religious than political. The ruling Ba’ath Party in Iraq was secular, socialist and pro-Soviet, whereas the Iranian Shah was an anti-socialist, pro-Western monarch who was an ally of both Israel and the United States. When the Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in Iran, the politics of the entire Middle East shifted. “Muslim clerics harnessed the power of their religious authority to replace a secular, modern state with a theocracy, a key milestone in the ‘Islamic revival.’”

Iran’s support for the broader Palestinian “resistance” is connected to that “Islamic revival.” Obliterating Israel from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea is Iran’s point of cohesion with its Sunni proxies. For this goal, Shia Iran supports Sunni Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in an arrangement of convenience. According to the European Council on Foreign Relations:

Since their inception, Iranian-Palestinian relations have functioned as a marriage of convenience based on Iran’s pursuit of security and the Palestinian need for state sponsorship. Today, Iran provides support to a number of Palestinian groups, including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) most notably.

The prospect of Fatah-Iran dissension could be good news for Israel and the West, but there is another factor at play that has emboldened the Palestinian Authority: the Biden administration’s wrongheaded belief that the Palestinian Authority can actually administer Gaza after the war. The PA and a majority of Palestinians, according to the Washington Institute, support a one-state solution, that is, the total obliteration of Israel. The notion of a two-state solution “has declined steadily since 2018.”

According to Palestinian Media Watch, “as the international community welcomes the formation of a so-called ‘revitalized PA’ under Fatah, the PA and Fatah continue to glorify terrorism. They take pride that the highest number of terrorist ‘Martyrs’ are from the PA Security Forces and Fatah.”

Israel now faces a Biden administration-led global initiative to force the Jewish state to accept a two-state solution, with Abbas’ Palestinian Authority ruling Gaza, Judea and Samaria after the war. This illusory “solution” makes Israel out to be the obstacle to peace, when the truth is that both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority are obstacles to peace. Both groups seek to kill Jews and annihilate Israel. This annihilation will begin with forcing Israel back to its pre-1967 borders, or forcing it to give up even more territory for a Palestinian state. The PA now stands to gain. It envisions gaining expanded powers as it distances itself from Hamas and Iran, but it faces a key obstacle. Although the Biden administration supports the PA’s control of Gaza after the war, the administration does not support the entry of the PA into the United Nations, and is expected to block its entry by veto.