Israel’s Current Crisis Exposes Christian Zionism’s Contradictory Ideals

Evangelical supporters of the country, who have long taken sides in the country’s politics, are neutral about the recent political unrest

Daniel G. Hummel is the author of “Covenant Brothers: Evangelicals, Jews and U.S.-Israeli Relations”

Followers of American evangelical pastor John Hagee chant slogans in support of Israel during a rally in Jerusalem. (Gali Tibbon/AFP via Getty Images)

Ask American Jews about the Israeli government’s controversial judicial overhaul plans and they will have strong opinions, even more so in light of the Knesset’s recent curbing of the Supreme Court’s power despite nationwide protests against the move. Ask evangelical Christians, on the other hand, and you’ll probably get quizzical looks. The difference would be unremarkable — and natural — except that there are millions more evangelical Christians who identify as supporters of Israel than there are American Jews. And there are tens of millions more Christians outside the United States who identify as supporters of Israel than there are in the United States.

Over the past 50 years, Christian Zionists — the term for these mostly evangelical Christian supporters of Israel — have created a global, multifaceted and expansive movement, credited with shaping political debates in multiple countries and becoming increasingly vital to Israel’s own foreign policy.

Why, then, are Christian Zionist organizations practicing a studied neutrality on the judicial overhaul legislation and the momentous political unrest among Israelis during the past several months? These organizations tend to be friendly with the Israeli right, especially with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. They articulate a religious understanding of Israel’s significance that aligns, often purposefully, with religious Zionists in Israel. And they have, in eras past, involved themselves with Israeli politics when it suited their goals.

Yet these factors have to be weighed alongside others. The leading Christian Zionist organizations — the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem (ICEJ) and Bridges for Peace, among others — are now decades old. They have developed deep and broad relationships with Israeli leaders and have gained their own local knowledge of Israeli society. Following early years of raw activism, they have turned professional and become sophisticated advocacy organizations.

They are also tasked with balancing occasionally divergent Christian Zionist perspectives. The ICEJ, for example, is headquartered in Jerusalem and has branches in more than 90 countries. David Parsons, the organization’s senior international spokesman, told me that over and above any specific issue or crisis, the ICEJ is promoting a “responsible brand of Christian Zionism” that stakes out middle positions deemed reasonable both by Christian Zionist opinion and in Israeli politics. In recent years such positions have included opposing the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, encouraging Jewish immigration to Israel and developing media and tourism programming to promote pro-Israel views among Christians.

Still, the ideal of neutrality can seem odd to outsiders. One might still ask: Don’t Christian Zionists have a predisposition to support the judicial overhaul now taking place since they, like the sponsors of the bill, tend to be more religiously observant, more socially conservative and more skeptical of the power wielded by the Supreme Court of Israel?

Christian Zionists do have an unavoidably religious understanding of Israeli society. Parsons echoes other observers who see the court legislation as a signal of a much deeper rift in Israeli society. “At the heart of the current ‘constitutional crisis’ also lies a tug-of-war over the character of Israel as both a Jewish and a democratic state,” Parsons wrote for the ICEJ. Many Christian Zionists are deeply concerned with Israel’s providential and even prophetic destiny, which colors their analysis of daily events. As Cheryl Hauer of Bridges for Peace argues in a recent article for the organization’s magazine, beyond the secular markers of Israel’s exceptionalism is her belief that “Israel is different because God created her to be so. … It is through His people, God said, that nations will eventually recognize who He is.”

Stripped of Christian particulars, many religious Jews could agree with this statement. But shared religiosity does not necessarily mean common goals. There are also deep tensions dividing Christian Zionists and the Israeli right. Earlier this year two ultra-Orthodox Knesset members submitted a bill that would target religious proselytization as an offense punishable with jail time, a measure aimed at Christian missionaries and Messianic Jews — Jewish converts to Christianity. (The vast majority of Jewish sects frown on proselytization, while it is a fundamental tenet among many evangelical Christians.) Such attempts by the ultra-Orthodox routinely come up in Israeli politics, but this time United Torah Judaism, the party in the government sponsoring the bill, had increased its clout. Netanyahu, who has relationships with Christian Zionist leaders that span decades and sees them as a key constituency of Israel’s public diplomacy, quickly dismissed the feasibility of the bill, and Jurgen Buehler, the ICEJ’s president, briskly thanked him publicly. But the disagreement between Orthodox Jews and evangelical Christians persists, and it has existed since before the state of Israel was founded.

Navigating these varied factors has been a decadeslong learning experience for Christian Zionists. Indeed, describing the current domestic unrest as unprecedented or exceptional can obscure the fact that, for many Christian supporters of Israel, there is nothing new in the tension between their theological commitments on the one hand and their unconditional support for Israel and studied neutrality on Israeli domestic issues on the other. Rather, the issues facing Christian Zionists in 2023 are part of the fabric of this relationship and are as extensive as the larger crisis over Israel’s identity, dating to the earliest days of statehood. The problem became more pronounced in the 1970s, with the first shift in ideological and party leadership in the country’s history, and it has reappeared in recent decades under new conditions. In this history are clues not only as to how the Christian Zionist understanding of Israel has developed but also how the Christian Zionist movement has been beset by — and has evolved to address — enduring tensions in its support for Israel.

Likud’s electoral victory in May 1977 prompted Israel’s first coalition change in its political history. Then, as now, it also posed an existential question: Would Israel’s largely secular and Labor-dominated past persist, or would it fall under the sway of the new Israeli right, represented in 1977 by Menachem Begin, the founder of Likud and a presence in Israeli politics since 1948? In The New York Times, Begin’s electoral victory of 1977 was described to Americans largely through his alarming past. “His name is synonymous with terror,” the paper editorialized about Begin’s anti-colonial activities before 1948 as head of the Irgun group, in which, it insisted, there was a disturbing “cult of personality” around the new prime minister.

In the days after Likud’s 1977 election victory, reporting highlighted the National Religious Party, part of the new coalition, which had ties to a radical settler sect, the Gush Emunim. The details and the links implied that while Israeli Labor leaders had largely conformed to the profile of Western-educated, secular and socially liberal, suddenly the new political insiders in Israel were “Orthodox,” “ultranationalist” and “radical.”

Christian supporters had to decide how to respond to the 1977 election, too. Organized Christian support for Israel had existed for decades, nurtured by Labor governments and Labor-appointed officials. In fact, it was often Orthodox Jews who were the loudest opponents of Western Christian support, especially support from American evangelicals who prioritized missions to the Jews. Yet Begin was ultimately an appealing figure to these early Christian Zionists. One leader, G. Douglas Young, who founded Bridges for Peace in 1976, pioneered the embrace of Likud-led coalitions and the Israeli right wing among Christian supporters of Israel.

Young’s history with Israel dated to 1958, when he founded a school in Jerusalem for Western Christians, which became a locus of evangelical-Jewish cultural exchange and Christian Zionist advocacy. In the 1960s and 1970s, Young’s Israeli relationships were largely with Labor politicians and liberal intellectuals who saw interfaith dialogue and Christian theological reform as vital to Israel’s national interest. Yet with the 1977 election, Young signaled a new excitement over Likud’s more religious and more expansionist vision for Israel. Begin was an observant Jew whom Young described, in one 1978 speech, as a fellow “believer.” Begin’s attention to anti-Christian persecution, especially in explaining Israeli military intervention in Lebanon in 1978, won Young’s approval, too. Finally, Begin’s insistence that Israel did not occupy but rather liberated the West Bank from Arab control comported with Young’s views, which he endorsed through ads in The New York Times among other venues.

Christian Zionist leaders in Young’s wake, including famous figures of the Christian right like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, made no bones about their preference for Israeli right-wing leaders and coalitions — or rather right-wing policies prompted by such leaders. These leaders formed groups like the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition to advocate for broad-based conservative policies that included support for Israel. They were U.S.-based and, for the most part, U.S.-centric. Their support for Israel was part of a largely domestic political agenda driven by domestic issues, but there was room in their platforms for foreign policy when it came to anti-communism and support for Israel. The compatibility with right-wing Israeli politicians made sense, and figures like Falwell became invested in supporting Begin and later leaders like Netanyahu.

The response to Begin shows how an earlier generation of Christian Zionists embraced the Israeli right wing. But in recent decades, even as the Israeli and evangelical camps have grown closer, the situation has become more complicated. U.S.-based organizations have faded from the center of organized Christian Zionism. The movement is far more global than it was in the 1970s and far more professionalized than at the height of the Christian right.

The movement is also more singular in its focus on Israel. In the 1980s and 1990s, pro-Israel politics was often integrated into a more comprehensive political agenda among conservative evangelicals. In 1980, for example, Jerry Falwell’s “95 Theses for the 1980s” (modeled on Martin Luther’s “95 Theses,” which in 1517 precipitated the first major schism in Western Christendom), which he sent to each member of the U.S. Congress, included a small section on foreign policy that outlined support for Israel. Today, the lobby organization Christians United for Israel (CUFI) represents American Christian interests in Washington and focuses solely on this issue. Yet CUFI’s most meaningful work is not international but state-level and campus-based activism against BDS initiatives in places like Texas and North Carolina.

Outside the United States, Christian Zionist leadership has centralized in Israel. Like the ICEJ, Bridges for Peace is based in Jerusalem.

The ICEJ, founded in 1980, had by the early 21st century become the largest Christian Zionist organization in the world. The example of the ICEJ’s handling of the Israeli disengagement from the occupied Gaza Strip in 2005 shows that over time Christian Zionists have developed more sophisticated responses to Israeli domestic politics, aided by this proximity.

The forced evacuation of some 8,000 Israeli settlers from Gaza in August and September 2005 deeply polarized Israeli society. On the political right, settlers and their supporters felt betrayed by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, a longtime right-wing politician, while on the left critics regarded disengagement as a cynical ploy for Israel to consolidate its hold over other occupied areas. Massive protests against disengagement (organized by right-wing groups) ensued: A “human chain” stretching 60 miles from the Gaza Strip to Jerusalem and a nationwide protest centered in Tel Aviv each attracted up to 150,000 people. By the deadline for evacuation, polling showed that less than half of Israelis supported disengagement, and the Israeli media hyped the potential for violence between settlers and Israeli soldiers.

With attention on Gaza, Christian supporters were forced to weigh in. The ICEJ’s founding director, Jan Willem van der Hoeven, had spent the 1980s and 1990s (like Young had in the 1970s) vacillating between “unconditional” support for Israel and protestations that a right-wing vision of Greater Israel, including the Gaza Strip, better conformed to God’s will. Criticizing the Hebron Agreement of 1997, which set the terms for a partial removal of Israeli forces from the West Bank city of Hebron, van der Hoeven warned, “Our support for Israel and the Jewish people is based not on Likud policy or Labor policy — but on our understanding of God’s word.” By 2005, however, van der Hoeven’s views were too extreme for the ICEJ. He left the organization in 1996, in large part because his increasingly strident views undermined the image of neutrality.

Subsequent ICEJ leadership was more strategic in situating neutrality within the spectrum of Israeli politics, reflecting a new sophistication to global Christian Zionist organizing in Israel. The next director, Malcolm Hedding, was a white South African with a history of anti-apartheid activism. Hedding added key personnel who remain at the ICEJ today, including the aforementioned David Parsons and Vice President of Finance David Van Der Walt. When the Gaza disengagement plan surfaced in 2003, the ICEJ refrained from advocating for or against, resisting pressure from anti-disengagement groups with whom they saw eye to eye on many other issues, including West Bank settlement.

Instead, the ICEJ offered humanitarian aid to the displaced settlers, including food, shelter and playgrounds for children. The ICEJ did warn that disengagement would lead to an increase in rockets entering Israel from Gaza, but, as Parsons told me, in the aftermath “we didn’t go around saying ‘we told you so.’ There was no place for that sort of thing.”

The larger point for Christian Zionists was the studied and steady neutrality conforming to Israeli politics — “unconditional love” in Hedding’s words — made possible through deep familiarization with local actors and professionalized leadership. The current Christian Zionist leaders in Israel have only become better at their jobs since 2005 and more attendant to navigating the poles that define the relationship.

Local knowledge and professionalization can’t resolve all points of tension between Christian Zionists and Israel, especially when the pressure is ratcheted up. The U.S. national director of Bridges for Peace, Jim Solberg, explained to me by email that his organization “works hard to not take sides in internal Israeli politics, but to respect Israelis working through their internal issues among themselves.” In most cases, including the judicial overhaul legislation and the day-to-day work of the organization, this appears true.

Yet a Bridges for Peace online article in March revealed a less measured perspective. Written by Nathan Williams, the organization’s director of marketing and communications, the article concluded, “While it is important to remain apolitical in our support for Israel, one can recognize that there are those political parties who evidently stand with conviction for the Jewish people’s God-given right to exist in their God-given land.” Those with “conviction” were the “ultranationalists” who have “for better or worse become the moniker for the Zionists of today who are still fighting to keep the dream and reality of a Jewish State for the Jewish people alive.” This perspective reveals that neutrality may be strategically wise, but in terms of underlying values there is, among some Christian Zionists, an expressed preference — in the deeper struggle over Israel’s religious and cultural identity — for the “ultranationalist” position.

The ICEJ, for its part, has made a more studied affirmation of neutrality. Its director, Jurgen Buehler, issued a lengthy “Call to Prayer over the Battle of Israel’s Future” in late March that emphasized the need for unity over any particular political outcome. Buehler acknowledged the warring Zionist visions for Israel without endorsing one. In fact, Buehler undercut a version of the argument put forth by many evangelicals that the ascendancy of religious Zionists would improve Israeli society by recalling past Christian theocracies as cautionary tales, including John Calvin’s influence over the city of Geneva and Savonarola’s over the city of Florence. As Parsons told me, the ICEJ’s chief goal in its work is to “strengthen Israeli internal unity” among all its religious and nonreligious sectors, whatever the issue.

Robert Nicholson of The Philos Project, a much newer organization founded in 2014 to promote “Christian advocacy in the Near East,” rejected the idea that his organization needed to make a statement at all.

“This is a case study in successful democracy,” Nicholson explained of the protests. “Israelis are going out into the streets to have their voices heard. This is not a collapse of the country.” Nicholson’s organization advocates for Christian minorities throughout the Middle East, meaning that in Israel Philos is invested in protecting religious pluralism for Christians, Muslims and Druze, among other minorities. The organization also cultivates a diverse Christian base — subprojects include “Philos Latino” (for “U.S. Hispanics”) and “Philos Black” (for “Black Christian leaders”) — leading to the need to manage diverse responses to the proposed judicial changes. Nicholson insisted that rather than advocate a side, the “real mark of Christian friendship to Israel at this moment of history” is to allow “Jews and minorities to figure it out themselves.”

These varied responses dispel the notion of a single Christian Zionist response to Israel’s domestic strife. Rather, what is shared is a set of tensions that touch on two especially sensitive areas of Christian Zionist organizations today: the deep relations in contemporary Israel that feed Christian Zionist organizational success and the unavoidably religious understanding of Israeli society in Christian Zionist advocacy.

These perennial tensions are accompanied by more recent developments. In the U.S., Latin America and elsewhere, Christian support for Israel has increasingly become a domestic partisan issue. In the U.S. and Brazil, to take two prominent examples, support for Israel has been leveraged in culture war debates. Such cultural polarization rarely relates directly to foreign policy issues, and the extent to which stances of neutrality can resist it has not been truly tested yet. In the U.S., Christians United for Israel’s largely conservative base of support has not translated into advocacy for the judicial overhaul. In a recent interview with Jewish News Syndicate, CUFI’s founder and president, John Hagee — someone with a history of holding controversial views on everything from antisemitism and the Holocaust to the threat of Muslims to U.S. national security — refused to comment, explaining that “Israel is a democracy, and, as in all democracies, there are times of great challenge.”

Christian Zionist norms of neutrality and unconditionality are, like any norms, no more fixed than the people that profess them. They are, in other words, time-bound and dependent. They are the products of a professionalized Christian Zionist leadership that came into power in the 2000s and after. They grew in response to receptive Israeli leaders who preferred, for their own reasons, that Christian supporters increase their involvement in certain ways and not others. These norms were adapted to fit a Christian Zionist-Israeli relationship premised on expansive American power, Israel’s need to curry favor in Western democracies and the identification of existential threats to Israeli security.

As these factors change, so too will the tensions that require Christian Zionist responses. Challenging developments such as higher-than-average turnover in the Knesset or COVID restrictions limiting the ability of lobby groups to meet in person with Israeli politicians have required special attention from Christian Zionist organizations. Parsons was clear that it’s difficult to arrange meetings and communicate to Israeli politicians about the work of the ICEJ. The “new generation” of politicians, produced through five elections in four years, is less familiar with Christian organizations and less informed about the historical dynamics of the Christian Zionist movement. As the ground shifts, and the judicial changes advance through the Knesset and prompt reactions from all corners, practicing neutrality for the sake of friendship has become an instinct among those Christian Zionists closest to the centers of organizational and diplomatic influence.

A Convert to Islam, Sinead O’Connor Will Continue the Battles She Chose via Her Voice

As a warrior against injustice, the late singer found peace in music and Islam

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad is Associate Editor at New Lines magazine.

July 28, 2023

Sinead O’Connor, performing on stage in the Netherlands in 1995. (Niels van Iperen/Getty Images)

Ayear after she converted to Islam, Sinead O’Connor appeared on RTÉ’s “The Late Late Show” to perform “Nothing Compares 2 U,” the song that had catapulted her into global stardom in 1990. The iconic Irish singer, who died this week at a mere 56, had not followed the path of other converts to Islam, who in a rush to reinvent themselves often abandon old lives for a joyless piety. In an interview that preceded the performance, it was clear that her recent travails had done little to diminish her spirit. She was as funny, profane and candid as ever. She was working on new music and preparing for a global tour.

Life and fate, however, were setting her up for another fall. First came the pandemic, which scuppered the tour, then the January 2022 suicide of her 17-year-old son, Shane, which sent her spiraling. O’Connor had confronted the first with typical grace, deciding to retrain as a healthcare professional; the latter devastated her.

Sinead O’Connor’s life had been defined by such reversals. After a difficult childhood in Dublin with an abusive mother, she had been sent to An Grianan, an institution for troubled young women run by Catholic nuns. There her extraordinary talent was spotted by music teacher Jeannette Byrne, who bought Sinead her first guitar and later invited her to sing at her wedding. Her voice captured the attention of Jeannette’s brother, Paul Byrne, whose band In Tua Nua was looking for a singer. Paul gave her a tape and within a day she had prepared the lyrics and melody. The mix of kindness and cruelty she had experienced from the nuns became the material for her first recorded song. “Take My Hand” drew from the times when as a punishment Sinead had been required to spend the night in the hospice of a Magdalene asylum, the Catholic-run sanctuaries that housed Ireland’s “fallen women.” Some of these women were rape victims, some impregnated by the powerful, all of them wasting away in their cloistered disgrace.

The transcendent quality in O’Connor’s voice is already there in “Take My Hand,” but it is mournful and controlled. It is only after moving to London that she would also find her rage and, consequently, her range — from tender to ferocious, fragile to fierce, and every shade of emotion in between. Her encounters with Portobello Road’s Rastafarians also broadened her responses to injustice: It was no longer enough to simply rue it; she would henceforth rage against it.

The art was electric and the artist out of the ordinary. The record company had a goose in its hands whose natural talent, irrepressible presence, ethereal beauty and undeniable charisma seemed to guarantee a lifetime of golden eggs. But the talent was of a piece with the attitude, and the rebellious sensibility wasn’t about to yield to the expectations of industry suits. Before her first record was out, O’Connor had shaved off her hair and was pregnant with a child. Defying record company executives, she kept her child, turned her shaved head into an iconic identity and produced a record of such originality and scope that it endures as one of the greatest debuts in rock history. “The Lion and the Cobra” was certified gold and the song “Mandinka” earned O’Connor her first Grammy nomination.

If “The Lion and the Cobra” had established her artistic bona fides, it was her 1990 album “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got” that confirmed her status as a global icon. The record had many memorable songs, but it was O’Connor’s rendition of a throwaway track from a Prince side project, “Nothing Compares 2 U,” that catapulted her into superstardom. The record sold 7 million copies, and the song has never been off the airwaves.

Yet by 2020 the once-invincible rebel had been diagnosed with PTSD and had spent years in psychiatric treatment, which had left her with only about $10,000 in her account. In her long struggle against injustice, exploitation and abuse, she had found few allies. But in vilifying and ostracizing her, many of her fellow artists and much of America’s entertainment industry revealed their small-mindedness, narrow ambitions and blinkered provincialism.

O’Connor was never meant to be a pop artist. She described herself as a “punk,” a “protest singer.” And she embodied that role, regardless of the consequences. Her dissent was not indiscriminate; it wasn’t a posture. She picked big battles. At her 1989 Grammy performance, the young singer appeared with the Public Enemy logo painted onto the side of her head to protest the Grammy’s refusal to recognize rap as a legitimate genre as well as her son’s onesie tied behind her jeans, a statement against record executives’ suggestion that motherhood was incompatible with a music career.

Her second album secured four Grammy nominations, but she refused to attend the ceremony in protest against the Gulf War. In New Jersey, she riled American patriots by refusing to perform if the “Star-Spangled Banner” was played at the event. And then came the infamous “Saturday Night Live” (SNL) moment, when after an a capella performance of Bob Marley’s “War” (with lyrics amended for the occasion), she made a statement in support of the children whose abuse had been hushed up by the Roman Catholic Church. She capped the performance by ripping a picture of Pope John Paul II that her mother once hung on her wall.

The responses were telling. Americans calling themselves patriots drove bulldozers over her CDs, radio stations stopped playing her songs, and many picketed stores selling her music. Frank Sinatra threatened to “kick her ass”; rapper MC Hammer offered to pay her ticket back to Ireland; SNL banned her for life and a week later invited Joe Pesci, who bragged in a monologue about how he would have given her “such a smack” (SNL has erased all records of O’Connor’s performance, but the Pesci monologue is still on its official website); David Letterman hosted obscure comedians to make crude jokes about her appearance; and still bitter at her heavily marketed album being upstaged by O’Connor’s, Madonna used her own SNL performance to mock her and, amid efforts to promote her book “Sex” and her new album “Erotica,” chided O’Connor for hurting Christian feelings.

But the rebel was not about to be undone. When O’Connor traveled back to Ireland, she sent the bill for her flight to MC Hammer (whose money failed to be where his mouth was); she donned a wig and attended a protest against herself and, using a fake American accent, had great fun denouncing her own actions to a television crew. She dismissed the suggestion that the SNL protest had derailed her career: “I feel that having a No 1 record derailed my career,” she countered. The response to Sinatra was delivered by her father, who said that “at his age, [Sinatra] couldn’t kick his leg high enough.” (O’Connor got the last laugh when 10 years later Ol’ Blue Eyes was dead while she was the star guest at Dublin’s annual Sinatra Ball.)

The moment of truth came days after the SNL incident, when O’Connor was invited to sing at Madison Square Garden for a celebration of Bob Dylan’s career. She was meant to perform Dylan’s “I Believe in You” to the packed audience; but half of it started booing. In a video of the event, you can see her taken aback by the response. She paces the stage before returning to the mic and instead of the Dylan song, launches into a furious version of Marley’s “War,” the song she had sung on SNL. The organizers sent Kris Kristofferson to stop the performance, but instead he gave her a hug and told her: “Don’t let the bastards get you down.”

“I am not down,” the rebel replied. But she did walk away from stardom.

Even as the music icon receded, the rebel carried on. She spoke out against wars, spoke up for rape victims being denied abortion, championed abused children and denounced police brutality. And two months after the SNL incident, in response to an appeal from the Red Cross, she donated her $750,000 Hollywood mansion to help famine-stricken children in Somalia. Ten years later, the Boston Globe published a series of reports exposing the scale of abuse inside the Catholic Church (an investigative triumph dramatically rendered in the 2015 movie “Spotlight”). In 2010, Pope Benedict XVI finally apologized for the years of abuse that the church had tried to conceal. No apologies were offered to O’Connor, either by the church or by the entertainers who had abused her. Nor has SNL yet done so.

Meanwhile O’Connor’s health suffered. And after a traumatic hysterectomy in 2015, her mental health declined. In 2017, she caused much alarm when she posted a 12-minute video admitting to suicidal thoughts. A year later, she appears to have found peace in Islam. Islam, too, appears to have found a generous interpreter in O’Connor. In her memoir, she writes: “I’ve done only one holy thing in my life and that was sing”; and to her “The Koran is like a song” and God “an incredible songwriter.”

She reveals that her journey to Islam began in song. She had been playing the call to prayer at her events for years. “The language and intelligence of the call to prayer led me to listen to the Koran,” she wrote. “I was home. I’d been a Muslim all my life and never realized it.”

She took to wearing the hijab because “I like representing. Because Islam gets a hard time.” For her it was a marker of both identity and solidarity. She would have as easily discarded it had someone tried to force it on her.

“I don’t think anyone should be forced to wear hijab,” she wrote. “But I don’t think anyone should be forced not to wear it either.” She made her choice. “Everything I wear to work is a statement.”

She could be the kind of Muslim she became because she lived in a place with religious tolerance (secured in large part by rebels like her). It is doubtful that she would have liked the social conservatism of many Muslim societies. Had she grown up in one, she would have rebelled against it. In Iran, she would have burned the hijab. Islam in the West is tolerant largely because it is separated from power.

Sinead O’Connor never did anything halfway. She defined an age, creating an iconic image and reinventing its sounds. She embodied a form of uncompromising artistry that is becoming rarer with each passing decade. She was grunge before there was grunge; a punk who could speak to angels, a balladeer who could summon demons. From eclectic influences she created a style all her own. She drew on sources both sacred and profane.

Like her compatriot Bono, she assimilated Dylan and Springsteen as well as the Scriptures. But where U2’s music is defined by its earnest devotional quality, hers was Joycean in its subversiveness; where U2 embraced stardom and became inoffensive, O’Connor saw celebrity as a burden and increasingly challenged her audience. When both came together to record a song for the 1993 Daniel Day-Lewis film “In the Name of the Father,” they created magic.

Sinead’s art was inseparable from her politics. It was born of both experience and need. She called it a substitute for therapy, but it was also the hammer she used to try to dismantle the structures that had disfigured her life and those of others. Conscious of her own fragility, she had created something immortal that would endure. Because even if the bastards did get her down, the imperishable part of her would still rebel on.

O’Connor was possessed of a generous spirit. In a postscript to her 2021 memoir “Rememberings,” she directly addressed her father, thanked him for his love and absolves both him and her mother of any responsibility for her traumas. She forgave her mother, seeing in her a fellow victim, who was as much in need of kindness as she was. But unlike her mother, her rage was directed both inward and outward; and unlike her mother’s, it was not indiscriminate. In the end, the William Butler Yeats verse she drew on to describe her mother’s unfocused rage better describes the long wars of her own short life.

What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?

A Private Company Provokes an Energy Crisis in Puerto Rico

Many islanders believe that LUMA has badly mismanaged electricity distribution since it was awarded control of the island’s power grid two years ago

Collin MayfieldCollin Mayfield is a freelance journalist

August 3, 2023

Protesters in San Juan demonstrate against LUMA Energy in August 2022. (Collin Mayfield)

Near La Fortaleza, a 16th-century fortress converted into the Puerto Rican governor’s palace, the streets filled with tear gas. Members of the San Juan police’s SWAT team ran toward us with shotguns holding nonlethal rubber rounds. Straggling protesters met police-grade pepper spray. Only two were arrested on that particular night in August 2022.

Tear gas and pepper spray don’t just burn the eyes or make breathing difficult. They seep into the skin with a burning itch, and the discomfort lingers long after you’re away from the miserable fog.

The streets were tightly packed and rambunctious but not chaotic. Hundreds of San Juan residents assembled on Fortaleza and Cristo streets, as close as possible to the governor’s palace, for the regularly scheduled protest against LUMA Energy. The common protest spot near the governor’s palace has been christened “la esquina de la resistencia” (“the corner of the resistance”). Protesters contend that LUMA Energy has mismanaged the island’s ubiquitous energy problems. Blackouts and power surges are a day-to-day occurrence.

There have been several hundred anti-LUMA protests in San Juan. They happen mostly at LUMA headquarters or near the governor’s palace. In fact, Puerto Ricans have been demonstrating continually against LUMA Energy since the company bid on and was awarded control of the island’s power grid in June 2021. The protesters believe LUMA has mismanaged electrical distribution — causing power surges, increased prices and the long periods of total blackout that wrack the island. The fact that citizens had no say in who took control of the electric grid only intensifies the anger. Some of these protests are large events with several hundred attendees, while others are “cacerolazos” (“saucepans”), at which a few dozen people bang pots and pans at night.

When I was there, orange plastic barricades had been placed in front of the police lines to keep protesters away from the governor’s palace. Only tourists who had rented properties behind the barricade were allowed through. But it was difficult for tourists who needed passage to get the attention of police while stuck amid the throngs of unruly protesters shouting “LUMA, pal carajo” (“LUMA, go to hell”).

I was allowed through the barricade after a brief argument between two police officers over whether to accept my press documents. Ultimately, one policeman escorted me to the Spanish fortress. When I asked why he appeared to break with law enforcement protocol, he expressed sympathy for the LUMA protesters.

“I don’t like LUMA. It’s gotten much worse here [in Puerto Rico]. Before [LUMA took over], I paid $180 a month for power, and now I pay close [to] $320,” my anonymous escort said.

Police sympathizing with protesters isn’t a good sign for LUMA.

Puerto Rico suffers from much higher poverty rates than the U.S. mainland but pays significantly more for electricity: twice as much on average, which translates to about 8% of Puerto Ricans’ income, compared with 2.4% for Americans living on the mainland. This is despite the fact that Puerto Ricans use significantly less power. Prices have nearly doubled since 2020 and continue to rise even as services worsen.

The crisis has grown to the extent that Puerto Ricans from across the political spectrum have united in protest against LUMA. They shout “Fuera, LUMA!” (“Get out, LUMA!”) to the rhythm of drums and banging pots.

Multiple rental properties are within the vicinity of the governor’s palace, so part of the protest strategy is to annoy tourists with loudspeakers and noise. (Puerto Rico relies heavily on tourism.)

Demands from protesters — who include young and old, teachers, former electricity-union workers and local residents — are clear: They want an end to the LUMA contract. Puerto Ricans say they are sick of extended periods of blackouts, power surges, increasing prices and general company mismanagement.

“They are exploiting and taking advantage of us by raising the prices,” the elderly Miguel Rodrigues told New Lines. “We are angry and tired of this. It is not fair. This is abuse. They are not Puerto Ricans. [LUMA] is controlled by American interests. We have been tricked by LUMA and by the United States government.”

LUMA cites infrastructure damage and the poor condition of the grid it inherited as reasons for higher prices. Because it is an island, Puerto Rico obviously can’t connect to the continental American grid. Fuel must be imported to generate power. The Jones Act, which heavily taxes non-U.S. ships arriving in Puerto Rico and sanctions Russian and Venezuelan oil, also contributes to high energy prices.

I didn’t expect the first protest to grow heated, but Carnival Cruise Lines did. The company canceled its Aug. 25, 2022, cruise, citing potential unrest. I joked earlier that day that Carnival was scared of elderly Marxists and what looked like a block party, not at all anticipating the tear gas and arrests that would happen a few hours later.

After midnight, the demonstration became violent as protesters and police clashed. Police Commissioner Antonio Lopez alleges that a small group of more militant, mostly young protesters was responsible for escalating the violence by throwing rocks and other objects at the SWAT team. Police responded with tear gas. Lopez claims four police officers were injured.

Direct action against the San Juan Police Department is largely unpopular with the Puerto Rican public and is carried out by individual protesters rather than any specific group. Most anti-LUMA demonstrators and organizations are firmly committed to the ideals of nonviolent resistance, although, when I was there, no peaceful protesters stayed to criticize the more militant protesters clashing with the cops.

Again, most protests are nonviolent, and there is rarely any anti-police sentiment at the protests. Police shake hands with activists at protests from time to time. After all, even some police hate LUMA Energy.

LUMA Energy distributes, or delivers, electricity throughout Puerto Rico, but the company isn’t even Puerto Rican. It’s a joint venture between Houston’s Quanta Services Inc. and ATCO Group of Alberta, Canada. Power was previously distributed by the state-owned Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA). But PREPA went bankrupt, abandoning $9 billion of unpaid debts. In 2018, then-Gov. Ricardo Rossello announced that all PREPA assets would be denationalized. The Puerto Rican government, through the Office of Public-Private Alliances, decided to privatize the entire electric grid. Power distribution was the first thing to go.

PREPA itself had been afflicted with power outages, especially after hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017. The storms devastated the electrical grid and left some islanders without power for an entire year. Unrelenting hurricanes galvanized the government to move toward a more resilient electrical grid distribution as well as increased renewable energy. LUMA CEO Wayne Stensby decided that the company would incorporate solar and wind power into the existing electrical system, but scoffed at the idea of completely abandoning the current grid.

Yet nearly two years after Stensby said the electrical grid would decentralize and incorporate renewables, little has changed. Only about 4% of power distributed is renewable energy. Gov. Pedro Pierluisi has begrudgingly admitted that the island is significantly behind on its goals to transfer to renewable energy. The island is required by the 2019 Puerto Rico Energy Policy Act to reach 40% of its renewable-sources energy goal by 2025 — a seemingly impossible goal. For example, the island’s government recently launched a campaign to provide low-income households with solar panels, but the initiative has made little progress. LUMA hasn’t begun any significant renewable projects either.

In 2021, LUMA won the contract to repair the damaged electrical grid and distribute power. Pierluisi and PREPA signed the electric grid over to LUMA after only a 43-minute discussion about a 300-page document full of legalese. Most Puerto Ricans didn’t know about the electrical transfer, let alone have any say in it. Besides, Puerto Rican finances are directly managed by the U.S. government through the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico, which took control in 2016. Puerto Ricans colloquially call the unelected, mostly white board of bureaucrats the “junta.”

LUMA’s provisional contract of 18 months, which expired Nov. 30, 2022, was intended to provide ample time to restructure PREPA’s debt. The provisional contract was extended indefinitely until the restructuring is complete. The Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico released a new fiscal control plan in late June 2023. The new plan is more forgiving to the debt-laden PREPA. It attempts to rescue PREPA from much of its debt, proposing that PREPA repay $2.5 billion rather than the $5.86 billion it owes. The fiscal plan needs to be approved by bondholders, creditors and U.S. District Judge Laura Taylor Swain, who oversees Puerto Rico’s debt. After a successful debt restructuring, the final contract stipulates that LUMA will take control of the electric grid for 15 years. (LUMA doesn’t own the grid or control the power generators themselves — PREPA still owns the grid. But LUMA presides over power distribution and maintenance of the grid.)

In addition to controlling the distribution, LUMA is in charge of customer service and billing. It also controls money disbursed to PREPA by the Puerto Rican authorities for electrical maintenance and modernization.

After LUMA took over Puerto Rico’s electrical grid, thousands of PREPA employees, mostly line workers, found themselves unemployed. They were either dismissed by LUMA or transferred to other government positions. Some 3,000 PREPA employees, including about 600 linemen, found themselves unemployed after the takeover.

Genera PR — a subsidiary of the New York-based New Fortress Energy, already a major supplier of liquefied natural gas to Puerto Rico — won a bid to take over electrical generation from PREPA in early 2023. While there was some resistance to this, the company took over electrical generation on July 1, 2023.

The Electrical Industry and Irrigation Workers Union, which represents PREPA employees, said many former employees chose not to join LUMA because they considered the new working conditions worse. Workers saw their healthcare plans change, and they lost pension benefits as well as previously earned seniority. However, about 3,000 former PREPA employees remained on the LUMA payroll.

Poor customer service is another source of contention. Customers lament glitches on LUMA’s website and hourslong wait times on the phone. Originally, LUMA didn’t even have Spanish-speaking customer service representatives. It took upward of a month after the takeover for the company to get bilingual representatives on an island where most people don’t speak English. Even now, LUMA will sometimes issue English-only press releases. Spanish is, amazingly, still an afterthought. When representatives do speak Spanish, customers who need electricity restored will often wait hours to reach them, if they can be reached at all.

The opaque nature of privatization was in itself a matter of controversy. The undemocratic, secretive transfer was doomed to be unpopular. Thousands of Puerto Ricans turned out for the initial protests.

Some slashed tires and vandalized company vehicles, though no people were attacked physically. The protesters also spray-painted and broke the windows of LUMA buildings, where they also blocked entrances. In response, LUMA sued the Electrical Industry and Irrigation Workers Union and the Electric Power Authority Retirees Association for damaging its property. The lawsuit requested that the organizations “cease and desist any actions of intimidation, violence, vandalism, or that limit the enjoyment of the property or that disturb the senses in violation of constitutional rights.”

Despite the allegations made by LUMA, there is no evidence that the organizations were themselves behind any of the sabotage. Slashed tires and broken windows came from individuals. Some union supporters have damaged LUMA property, but the union as an organization has not. Meanwhile, LUMA said the suit was not against the right to protest but was, rather, for making demonstrators “take control of their actions.”

LUMA began distributing power in June 2021 and immediately ran into difficulties. LUMA built a website so that customers could pay bills easily and report outages, but the site didn’t work. One representative speculated that this was because of high traffic. Then LUMA claimed there was a denial-of-service attack, though so far no evidence corroborates this.

A shadowy transfer and inoperative websites are the least of LUMA’s problems. After the takeover, LUMA had to contend with the infamous blackouts. The power grid has long been afflicted by mismanagement, corruption and failure to maintain antiquated equipment. A few months after the takeover, Stensby testified before a U.S. House committee, calling Puerto Rico’s electrical grid “arguably the worst in the U.S.”

LUMA pointed blame at the already damaged power grid, tropical storms, hurricanes and sabotage. But even taking into consideration these preexisting problems, the electricity crisis has become much worse. The Puerto Rican government hoped that privatizing the electrical grid would lessen the electrical crisis, but the grid has only deteriorated further.

For example, a transformer exploded at the Monacillos Substation on June 10, 2021, leading to a fire throughout the facility. The Electrical Industry and Irrigation Workers Union estimated that half the island lost power because of the fire — including San Juan, Trujillo Alto, Bayamon and several other municipalities. Outages at water plants left 13,000 without water services. Some 700,000 people were left in darkness.

So far, no evidence of the alleged sabotage has surfaced. Puerto Rico’s secretary of public safety, Alexis Torres, said the fire was the accidental result of a technical error; law enforcement and PREPA also determined that the fire was caused by a technical error. Nevertheless, the Monacillos explosion is under investigation by the FBI.

Another outage in June 2021 left upward of 337,000 people without power. Many of them were recuperating from another outage that had happened only days before. Some mayors declared states of emergency and distributed ice and generators to needy citizens. When LUMA said they lacked the employees necessary to repair the grid, local governments outsourced work to other construction crews.

Over 250,000 Puerto Ricans were without fresh water because of power outages at La Plata Dam in July 2021. Pumps that have no power are a common cause for lack of water across the island.

An outage in April 2022 left almost the entire island without electricity after a power plant in Guayanilla caught fire. As a result, many were in darkness for three to five days. Schools were temporarily suspended, and court cases were canceled. Businesses that could not afford to run generators were forced to cut hours, losing revenue. The Mayaguez Medical Center lost power, and the hospital struggled to turn on its backup generator. The intensive care unit lost power, endangering patients who were already in critical condition. Four patients had to be intubated.

Food spoiled, so people dumped their wasted groceries in front of LUMA’s San Juan office. This has become a common form of protest: rotted food and fried, derelict electronics are discarded at LUMA properties. Puerto Ricans call this “basura combativa” (“combative trash”). Several restaurants, including major franchises, sued the conglomerate for over $310 million in damages later that April. Wendy’s, Red Lobster and Olive Garden are among the plaintiffs in the ongoing lawsuit.

When outages aren’t the problem, power surges are. Thousands of appliances have been destroyed by voltage surges, which, of course, are then dumped at LUMA corporate buildings. A fried refrigerator is expensive to replace, especially for someone living on Puerto Rico’s median income of about $21,000. Many unplug their electronics when not in use, both to save electricity and to avoid damage from unexpected power surges.

Despite staunchly defending the company, Pierluisi claimed LUMA was under “probation” after a series of outages in August 2022. He is increasingly frustrated with the company and the public backlash. But he still maintains that the 15-year contract needs to be signed.

Electrical problems are so common that no one is even surprised by them. I was in a cafe in San Juan’s Miramar area when a transformer on the street corner blew up. It startled three Venezuelan tourists seated nearby, and I saw the small blast in my periphery. Our barista shrugged it off.

“Just another day in Puerto Rico,” he said.

Afew weeks after I left, LUMA’s already untenable position became worse. Hurricane Fiona hit the island in September 2022. The storm, which hit as a Category 1 hurricane and ended as a Category 4, caused at least 44 deaths across the region. Flooding was devastating in some areas. Roads and bridges were washed out. Some power substations were submerged in floodwaters. Puerto Rico had not yet recovered from Irma and Maria.

Fiona caused an initial island-wide blackout. Fresh water became unavailable; the aqueducts and water stations needed electricity to operate. Sewage pumps failed without electricity, contributing to the filthy water that flooded parts of the island. Some blackouts were caused purely because LUMA failed in its responsibility to trim vegetation around power lines. Downed trees led to outages because they were not cut back in time.

On Sept. 21, 2022, when 70% of the islanders still lacked power, President Joe Biden approved federal relief, issuing a disaster declaration for Puerto Rico. It’s relief, however, that islanders are understandably skeptical about, given the government’s 2017 response to Irma and Maria.

As epitomized by Donald Trump’s paper towel debacle, when the then-president playfully and condescendingly tossed rolls of towels into a San Juan crowd needing relief, federal aid has proven to be a consistent disappointment. Some federal funding allocated after Hurricane Maria hadn’t even been fully disbursed when Fiona hit.

The previous mismanagement of FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) is also a fresh memory. Few FEMA personnel on the island spoke Spanish, delaying and confusing aid distribution. Bureaucratic forms were sometimes mistranslated, and pertinent information was sometimes available solely in English. Water spoiled and food was left to rot, never distributed to those in need. Power and water were not restored for months after the hurricanes.

FEMA assistance is also provided on a reimbursement basis. After the natural disaster, a bankrupt Puerto Rico was expected to foot the bill until it could be compensated by the federal government. Reimbursement was an incredibly slow process.

Some houses damaged by Hurricane Fiona in 2022 shockingly still had tarps on their roofs from the 2017 destruction.

Biden visited the island in October 2022, a few weeks after Fiona made landfall. He announced $60 million in aid to the island and stressed that Puerto Ricans would receive “every single dollar promised.” Biden made clear that this federal response would not be like the Trump administration’s response to Hurricane Maria. Biden also stressed, in an official statement in Ponce (Puerto Rico’s fourth-largest city) that this federal response would have adequate Spanish-speaking personnel, in contrast to the Trump administration’s response.

Biden further promised “a supercharged effort” to repair the power grid through the newly created “Puerto Rican Grid Recovery Modernization Team” under the Department of Energy. The team is directed by Augustin Carbo, the first chairman of what is now the Puerto Rico Energy Bureau.

According to Washington, the modernization team will work with the Puerto Rican government to identify and solve problems in the electrical grid and provide “clean, reliable, and affordable power.”

After Fiona, LUMA’s director of renewable energy, Daniel Hernandez, said that the company’s primary focus was on restoring power to the most important recipients, “hospitals and other key infrastructure.” Yet much key infrastructure continued to lack power, and dozens of hospitals were still relying on dilapidated backup generators for weeks after the hurricane.

Ponce was devastated by Fiona. When LUMA workers didn’t arrive to restore power, Mayor Luis Irizarry Pabon hired his own electrical brigades. The mayor alleges that LUMA employees threatened to call the police on line workers and file charges against the municipalities for interfering with LUMA’s power distribution. Three other mayors also claimed to be threatened. LUMA denies this.

LUMA claimed to have restored power to the entire island, but this was disputed by local governments. Mayor Gregory Gonsalez of Penuelas Municipality claimed that 125 homes were still without power as of last November.

“We still see that there are poles and lines on the ground,” the mayor said. LUMA staff, he alleged, said that “the emergency situation has basically gone into the background,” and it is no longer a priority for the company. Other municipalities, such as Mayaguez and Ponce, recount similar experiences.

As of last December, LUMA claimed power had been completely restored. But 800 customers said they still lacked electricity. It seems there are always some customers without power.

The Puerto Rican Senate is largely against the new contract and fought to cancel the deal. In early November, the Senate voted to approve House Joint Resolution 315 (HJR 315) to cancel LUMA’s contract. HJR 315 would have forced PREPA and American Public Power to end their contract with LUMA, but the bill failed to advance in the House of Representatives. Had it advanced, Pierluisi would have vetoed it.

The governor has said that reneging on the deal and going back to PREPA control “would be a horror movie.” Instead, Pierluisi proposed a continued audit of LUMA. He has also vetoed six legislative measures regarding PREPA and LUMA.

The governor’s office and LUMA initially stalled and declined to answer whether the provisional contract would be extended or whether the 15-year contract would be signed. The two parties denied privately discussing the extension of the contract, despite a leaked draft of the contract extension that has been circulating since Nov. 16, 2022.

Last fall, it became increasingly clear that PREPA’s debt would not be restructured in time. On Nov. 29, 2022, the government confirmed that a contract extension had been approved by the “junta” and the Public-Private Partnership Authority. The extension will last until the debt is restructured.

Pierluisi defended the extension as an alternative to jumping into the final contract. In a news conference, the governor declared that “the extension of LUMA’s supplementary contract is in the public interest.” Despite LUMA’s troubles, the governor continues to regard the private company as Puerto Rico’s best chance at electrical recovery.

Protests from citizens and lawmakers failed to end the contract, and activists are now demonstrating against its extension. Many of LUMA’s opponents want a return to PREPA control.

The island’s path seems dismal, and power outages will likely continue. Now, an extended provisional contract reigns and, if PREPA’s debt is restructured by 2023, LUMA and Genera PR will control the grid for the next 15 years.

At this point, it is quite unlikely that any other entity will be asked to distribute power. But whether LUMA stays or goes, two things are certain: People will suffer under blackouts until the power grid is adequately repaired, and Puerto Ricans will continue to protest what they view as corruption, mismanagement and neglect, which are, in their minds, the legacies of the colonial relationship between the island and the U.S. Such reminders of colonialism are the cornerstone of the resistance.

Why breaking the deadlock in Palestinian politics remains elusive

Analysis: As Palestinian factions met in Egypt amid growing differences, analysts are sceptical about the possibilities for change in internal Palestinian


Qassam Muaddi
West Bank
31 July, 2023

A meeting of Palestinian political factions in Egypt to mend internal political divisions concluded on Sunday with Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas announcing the formation of a joint committee on intra-Palestinian reconciliation.

"I hope that we can meet again on the brother soil of Egypt to announce to our people the end of the [Palestinian] division and the restoration of national unity," Abbas said.

"We must return to a single state, a single system, a single law and a single legitimate army," he added.

Earlier on Sunday, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh had urged Abbas to end security coordination with Israel and political arrests, while also calling for the "restructuring of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)" and democratic elections.

Three Palestinian groups - the PFLP-General Command, two Syrian-based 'Saiqa' organisations, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), a major player in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip - boycotted the talks.

"The meeting is another attempt to administrate the political division, not to end it"

Earlier last week, the PIJ announced that it would not attend the meeting unless the PA released all political detainees it continues to hold in custody, especially those belonging to the group.

On Tuesday night, the PA’s security forces arrested a senior leader of the Jenin Brigades, the Palestinian resistance group based in the northern city, who belonged to the PIJ.

Earlier in July, the PIJ accused the PA of breaking a deal reached with the Jenin Brigades by not releasing two of their PIJ members, despite the group guaranteeing calm in Jenin during the visit of Mahmoud Abbas to the city. The PIJ and the Jenin Brigades rallied Palestinians to protest against the PA’s detentions.

A divided PLO: The future of Palestine's national movement

The PA’s governor in Jenin, Akram Rujoub, denied that such a deal even existed, adding that the Palestinian president needs no permission from anyone to visit any part of the PA-controlled territory.

The meeting in Cairo between the Secretary Generals of Palestinian factions was organised by Egypt with the aim of breaching differences between Palestinian political camps.

On Wednesday, the PIJ Secretary General, Zyad Nakhaleh, said in an interview with the Egypt-based Arab satellite channel Al-Ghad that the meeting “will fail anyway”, pointing out that there is not enough common ground to reach any significant agreement.

Nakhaleh reaffirmed his group’s position of refusing to attend unless the PA releases all political detainees. He also revealed that Palestinian and Arab mediators had tried to reach a middle ground ahead of the meeting, stressing that “they presented nothing new that might change the current position”.

A Palestinian man helps an elderly woman to take cover as Fatah members clash with Hamas in Gaza City on 13 June 2007. [Getty]

Administrating Palestinian divisions

The meeting was the most recent of a series of attempts to overcome the Palestinian political rift that has dominated internal politics since the division between Fatah and Hamas following the latter’s takeover of Gaza in 2007.

Most Palestinian observers agreed that it would unlikely change the current status quo of Palestinian politics.

“The meeting is another attempt to administrate the political division, not to end it,” Hani Al-Masri, a leading Palestinian political analyst and director of the Ramallah-based Masarat think tank, told The New Arab.

“Both sides of the equation, namely Fatah and Hamas, refuse to give up their political gains,” he said.


"This is an example of both sides trying to maintain and capitalise on political gains, while knowing that there is no visible scope to end the political division"

“For Hamas, running the Gaza Strip is a major gain, and it seeks to keep its influence there at least, while for Fatah, the survival of the PA depends on its control of the security situation, in opposition to the line of resistance against the occupation,” Al-Masri explained.

Neither party are necessarily comfortable with the status quo, the analyst said, as the blockade of Gaza creates pressure for Hamas while Fatah knows that its political policy of negotiations has no horizon in light of a far-right Israeli government that rejects a Palestinian state and insists on expanding settlements.

“This means that there needs to be a political compromise to build a new national strategy, and the crisis of detainees between the PIJ and the PA shows that there is no common ground to create such a unified strategy,” he added.

Mahmoud Abbas and the PA's succession dilemma

Splitting political shares


For Ubai al-Aboudi, a civil society activist and director of the Bisan research centre in Ramallah, who was previously detained by the PA, “the only way to end this deadlock is to hold national elections, for which the PA is not ready”.

In May of 2021, Palestinians were scheduled to vote for the first time in 15 years to elect a new president and a new legislative council for the PA. The Palestinian president called off elections one month prior, announcing that no elections will be held unless Israel allows Palestinians in Jerusalem to vote freely.

“Both sides of the decision know that there is no scope currently to overcome the division, but they need to agree on the arrangement of other interests while the division is still in place, like the Israeli facilitation of goods to the besieged Gaza Strip and the distribution of the Palestinian share of Gaza's natural gas,” Aboudi told TNA.

In June, the Israeli government announced its readiness to arrange with the PA the exploration of natural gas from the Gaza Marine field, situated in Palestinian waters near the coast of Gaza, through Egyptian mediation and guarantees.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas makes a speech during a meeting of Palestinian groups' general secretaries in El Alamein, Egypt on 30 July 2023. 

At the same time, Israeli media reported the beginning of negotiations between the PA and Israel through Egyptian mediation to arrange the exploration of the Gaza Marine field.

Hamas, for its part, announced that the only Palestinian side that has the right to make a deal on Palestinian natural resources is a democratically elected Palestinian government, threatening to sabotage the negotiations.

Later, Hamas agreed to the development of the Gaza Marine field, in return for receiving a share of the revenues. Meanwhile, the PA denied reaching any agreement with Israel on the subject.

“This is an example of both sides trying to maintain and capitalise on political gains, while knowing that there is no visible scope to end the political division,” said Aboudi.

"The frustration of the Palestinian street is symptomatic of a dying Palestinian political system"

Social pressure and political frustration

“The Palestinian public opinion is increasingly frustrated with the lack of unified policy, while Israeli raids and settler violence continues, which explains the re-emergence of armed resistance in the West Bank,” Aboudi pointed out.

With Hamas caught between a resistance discourse and the political game, and the PA continuing to depend on opposing resistance and maintaining stability for its survival, together with the absence of elections, political and social pressures are increasing.

"[It is] heading towards a possible explosion," Aboudi said.

In June 2021, a wave of Palestinian protests swept across the occupied West Bank after the death of Palestinian political dissident Nizar Banat during his arrest by Palestinian security forces.

A new generation of Palestinians emerges to resist Israel

Later in 2022, Palestinian lawyers protested against law-by-decree amendments to the judicial procedures law introduced by President Abbas. Also in 2022 and later in 2023, Palestinian public teachers staged several months-long general strikes in the West Bank, described as the largest social movement in Palestine in years.

According to a poll published last June by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, 69% want general Palestinian presidential and legislative elections, although 67% said don’t believe that they would happen.

The poll also showed that 38% of Palestinians think that the most pressing problem confronting them is the Israeli occupation, while 22% said it is corruption, and 13% said it is the split between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. An overwhelming 71% supported armed resistance groups and 86% opposed the arrest of its members by the Palestinian security forces.

“The frustration of the Palestinian street is symptomatic of a dying Palestinian political system,” Omar Assaf, a civil society activist and leading member of the grassroots ‘Popular Conference’, which is calling for Palestinian national elections, told TNA.

Israeli settlers in the Palestinian neighbourhood of Sheikh  Jarrah, East Jerusalem in 2021

The status quo and a new political reality

“The Palestinian factions who are part of the political division and continue to hold on to their individual gains are part of the problem, not the solution,” Assaf said. “This is why, despite all previous meetings and signed accords between them, the general status quo hasn’t changed, and this new meeting will not be different,” he noted.

“Both sides of the equation, the PA and Hamas represent this system, which is increasingly separated from the pulse of the Palestinian street, which expresses itself in many ways,” said Assaf.

“The emergence of armed resistance groups, many times surpassing factional affiliations, and at the same time the increasing social pressure reflected in protests, strikes, and civil mobilisation, are all indications that a new internal Palestinian reality is making its way into existence”.

This new reality could overcome old divisions, notably the geographical fragmentation of the Palestinian people, and unite all Palestinians across historic Palestine and the diaspora, as reflected by the 'unity Intifada' of 2021, Assaf said.

In May 2021, Palestinian protests against Israeli attempts to expel Palestinian families from the Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah, and against Israeli police raids on Al-Aqsa mosque evolved into a full-scale uprising lasting several weeks.

Palestinians in Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Palestinian communities in Israel took part in protests and confrontations with Israeli forces and settlers, while Palestinian groups in Gaza engaged in an 11-day-long military escalation with Israel.

The uprising culminated on 18 May, with a Palestinian general strike observed in all of Israel and the Palestinian territories, for the first time in decades.

“However, this new political reality needs time to become a concrete project,” he said. “In the meanwhile, the status quo will continue, maybe with some minor changes."

Qassam Muaddi is The New Arab's West Bank reporter, covering political and social developments in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Follow him on Twitter: @QassaMMuaddi