JERUSALEM, May 11 (UPI) -- Prominent Palestinian security prisoners belonging to various political groups have drafted a "National Accord Document" that envisages an independent Palestinian state living beside Israel and focuses activities inside the occupied territories rather than Israel.
The 17-item document was drafted in talks among inmates incarcerated in the same bloc in Israel's Hadarim Prison, northeast of Tel Aviv.
Over the years, Israel has arrested many senior commanders of the various militant groups and some of them are now in Hadarim. They are held in separate cells but can talk during their break for walks, in the joint showers, communicate through messengers, and possibly cellular phones smuggled into their cells.
As veteran commanders of the Palestinian struggle for independence they have considerable influence outside the prison's walls. "The public at large highly respects the prisoners and it would be difficult to find personalities who would dare criticize (the document)," noted the Haaretz newspaper's expert on Palestinian affairs, Danny Rubinstein. The document might be a basis for the national Palestinian dialogue due to begin on May 23, he predicted.
Kadurah Fares, a former minister who heads the Prisoners' Club in the West Bank and is a close associate of Fatah's Marwan Barghouti -- who is serving life sentences in Hadarim, told United Press International the prisoners were concerned over the signs of "an internal Palestinian collapse" and "the international situation."
Three people were killed in recent Fatah-Hamas clashes. Then, Thursday, a bomb exploded at the doorstep of a Preventive Security officer and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights noted it was the fifth explosion of its kind targeting mostly Preventive Security officers. Also Thursday, gunmen shot and wounded two bothers of a senior Fatah Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades activist who were traveling in his car. Within hours the activist shot and wounded two Hamas men, PCHR reported. An international embargo on aid has left the Palestinian Authority bankrupt. The government has failed to pay its 160,000 employees for the second month running.
The prisoners felt they had to intervene "without waiting for someone to ask them," Fares said.
The document's signatories are Barghouti, who led Fatah's list of candidates in January's elections to the Legislative Council; Abdel Khalek al-Natshe, a Hamas legislator who was backed by members of his movement's military wing, including Rawhi Mushtaha, one of the five people who established Hamas in Gaza; Abdel Rahim Malkuh, who represents the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in the Palestinian Liberation Organization's Executive Committee; Mustafa Badarna of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine; and Sheikh Bassam al-Sa'di of Islamic Jihad.
They signed the document but could not get it out of the prison because no physical contact with lawyers and other visitors is allowed. Each person confirmed its text to his lawyer, Fares said.
The document talks of establishing an independent Palestinian state in all the lands Israel occupied during the 1967 war. That means the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem.
If these are the envisaged borders, then Israel is their neighbor. This seems to be a break with Hamas' vision of crushing Israel.
The document's reference to the "Arab legitimacy" seems to accept the decisions of the 2002 Arab summit in Beirut. There, Israel was offered peace with all Arab states in return for a complete withdrawal from the occupied territories.
The paper does not renounce violence but hails the Palestinians' right to maintain "the option of resistance in all forms, focusing resistance in the territories occupied in 1967." The militants most painful attacks have been carried out in Israel proper.
For decades Hamas refused to accept the PLO as "the sole legitimate representative" of the Palestinian people. The radical Islamic Hamas refused to recognize Israel or negotiate with it, but new document hints at change.
"The PLO and its Palestinian Authority president is the authorized party in managing the negotiations," the document says.
It thus gives Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas a green light to negotiate with Israel, but says, "Any agreement must be endorsed by the new PLC (the Palestinian Legislative Council) or put before a general referendum."
Fares highlighted Abbas' desire to have "one authority, one gun, one law." The idea is to place the violent resistance groups in one unit, under control, and thus separate the members of the militant organizations from the "criminals," said Fares.
Abbas welcomed the move, telling Palestinian reporters it conforms to "more than 95 percent of what I think," a participant in the meeting related.
"It is an accepted document," the spokesman for Hamas' faction in the Legislative Council, Khaled Suleiman, told UPI.
Other Hamas leaders have not referred to the document and Rubinstein surmised they were finding it difficult to acknowledge making concessions in face of the heavy pressure from Arab countries and the international community.
The PFLP and the DFLP said the memo lays a proper and comprehensive foundation for a national consensus, the PA's State Information Service reported. Islamic Jihad added a footnote to the text, stating its opposition to talks with Israel.
An Israeli analyst, Brig. Gen. in the reserves Shalom Harari, of the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism, told UPI that security prisoners of all factions "are usually more pragmatic... Because they're in jail, they suffer more... (and) are ready for changes and tactical flexibility."
"All day long they are cell-by-cell, share the suffering, and there is a readiness to listen (to one another)," Harari added.
Fares predicted widespread acceptance of the document. "All the factions will struggle under one umbrella and one political plan," he said.
When the Palestinians accept a state in the 1967 borders, "the world will have to treat Hamas differently than it does now," Fares added.
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(UPI's Sana Abdallah contributed to this report from Jordan.)
