Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas swore in the new unity Palestinian government today, presenting it as a “black page” that has been turned in Palestinian history.
The Palestinian government split seven years ago, with Hamas taking over the Gaza Strip and Fatah taking the West Bank. The new unity government aims to end that division, and make way for new elections.
Yet there was no sign that the “unity government” was unifying anything, and the indications are that the West Bank-Gaza split will remain intact, with the new “unity” government at best trying to better manage those divisions.
There’s a lot of skepticism about whether the elections, nominally the whole reason for the unity agreement, will even happen, and many expected a long, drawn out fight on every issue of the electoral law.