Responding to Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and other resistance forces in the Gaza Strip’s rejection of the so-called “ceasefire proposal,” Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas lamented, “The Palestinian factions’ refusal to deal with the Egyptian proposal for ceasefire with Israel has disappointed all of us.”

That ceasefire called for the end of rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip, but said nothing of the Israeli occupation, siege, and blockade from which those rockets were born. It was, in other words, not a ceasefire proposal at all. With his comments, Abbas, the leader of Fatah and the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, distanced himself from the rest of the Palestinian factions.

Since the 2007 Hamas–Fatah conflict, the Palestinian political spectrum has polarized. Divisions between the two main factions are not merely geographical, institutional, ideological, or political. Most centrally, they run along the fault line of their conflicting agendas: resistance and anti-resistance.