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| A previous meeting between Palestinian and Chinese officials |
This happens every few years, with big announcements and no follow-up.
The participating parties were Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Palestinian People’s Party, the Palestinian Popular Struggle Front, the Palestinian National Initiative Movement, the PFLP-GC, Fida, the Palestine Liberation Front, the Arab Liberation Front, the Palestinian Arab Front, and the vanguards of the Popular Liberation War.
As with all the previous attempts, they issued a general statement of their plans for unity their goals and their tactics.
Every Palestinian party agrees that terrorism is legitimate.
The second principle that they all agreed upon in Beijing stipulates "the Palestinian people's right to resist and end the occupation in accordance with international law, the United Nations Charter, and the right of peoples to self-determination and their struggle to achieve it by all available means."
It is ambiguous enough for wishful thinking Westerners to think that this only means peaceful resistance, since it invokes the UN. However, Palestinians have consistently claimed (falsely) that the UN gives them the right to mount terror attacks. They base this on a 1990 UN General Assembly resolution that "Reaffirms the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial domination, apartheid and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle."
Both Hamas and Fatah use this resolution and similar ones to claim that their attacking Israeli civilians is legal under international law, and top Palestinian legal "experts" have written many articles making the same point.
And whenever Palestinians attack Israeli civilians, the same groups justify it because they consider all Israelis to be either "soldiers" or "illegal settlers."
"By all available means" is unambiguous to Palestinians. It includes major terror attacks that they still celebrate and pay families of the terrorists for. You will be hard pressed to find a single Palestinian official today who condemns the Munich Olympics massacre, or the Coastal Road massacre, the Sbarro pizza shop massacre, or any other specific terror attack. (Some pretended to condemn them under American pressure at the time. But the previous deadly attacks are treated as sacred in official Palestinian media and school textbooks.)
Hamas and Fatah agree on this. Fatah is more reluctant to say it explicitly to the West, but it is part of its party platform. And the western media does its part by pretending that most Palestinians seek peace, not the destruction of Israel "by all means possible. "
