Read Part 1 here.
The 2017 Re-Brand
In 2017, Hamas issued a “Document of General Principles and Policies”. Among Hamas’s apologists today, the document is called the "New Charter", or "2017 Charter", because they hope that it will “replace the international narrative and expert analysis of the 1988 Charter”, notably “the antisemitism it contains, and the oratorical, emotional, almost liturgical tone”, as Paola Caridi writes.
This Charter is clearly written with Western sympathisers in mind. Article 17 says “Hamas does not wage a struggle against the Jews because they are Jewish but wages a struggle against the Zionists who occupy Palestine”. The document, in fact, has two positions on Israel. Article 2 sets the boundaries of Palestine “which extend from the River Jordan in the East to the Mediterranean in the West, and from Ras al-Naqurah in the North to Umm al-Rashrash in the South”. That is to say, all of Israel is Palestine, and “the Zionist entity therein does not annul the right of the Palestinian people to their entire land”. Again, in Article 19, “whatever has befallen the land of Palestine in terms of occupation, settlement building, Judaization, or changes to its features or falsification of facts is illegitimate”.
In the 2017 Hamas Charter, all of Israel is Palestine. At the same time, only the occupied territories are Palestine.
However, in Article 20 it says, “Hamas considers the establishment of a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along the lines of June 4, 1967, with the return of the refugees and the displaced to their homes from which they were expelled, to be a formula of national consensus”. What that meant was that Hamas would accept two states on the basis of the pre-1967 borders—except that this was to be a temporary concession “to make our national reconciliation easier”.
The 2017 Charter was written to persuade people in the West that Hamas was willing to compromise, but in effect, its authors had their fingers crossed behind their backs.
The leadership of Hamas changed around the time that the new document was produced. Khaled Mashal stood down and Ismail Haniyeh became political leader, while Yahya Sinwar rose to be the leader in the Gaza strip. While these changes were presented by Paola Caridi in 2023 as the emergence of a more pragmatic, less ideological leadership, by 2025 she was talking about “the failure of the pragmatists”, which is to say “all the people of the West Bank who decided to go for elections”. But “the failure of 2007 [the violent rupture between Hamas and Fatah]”, she goes on to state, “really radicalized the youngest part of the activists of Hamas”:
“They said to me in Gaza, look what happened, we didn’t get any result, so let us go for the muqāwama, the resistance”. The turn to violence in 2023 is portrayed by Caridi as a response to Israeli intransigence.
Jeroen Gunning argues in the same vein: “The rise of the hardliners within Hamas over the last five years is in part because of the failure of these negotiations and the refusal of successive Israeli governments and Western governments to respond to Hamas’s political overtures and engage it”.
These “hardliners” turn out to be the same people that were “pragmatists” yesterday.
These “hardliners”, though, turn out to be the same people that were “pragmatists” yesterday. The main takeaway, for Caridi and Gunning, is that the decision to attack on 7 October was an inevitable response to Israeli intransigence, rather than a considered choice.
The United Nations vs. Israel
The European Union is not the only transnational institution that has redressed the balance between Israel and the Palestinians in the post-cold war era. As we have seen, the United Nations General Assembly and the Security Council were often the sites in which the conflict between the supporters of Israel and of Palestine were played out. Over time, and especially since 1990, the United Nations, in tandem with a growing number of affiliated NGOs, has created many more agencies with responsibility for Palestine.
In February 1993, for the first time in its history, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights decided to appoint a “Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Violations in the occupied Arab Territories, including Palestinian Territories”. At the time, this was was René Felber, who had been a member of the Swiss government (the Bundesrat). Felber visited the West Bank and took evidence of human rights breaches from Palestinians. In 1999, Giorgio Giacomelli, the third Special Rapporteur, visited the West Bank and reported to the UN Commission on Human Rights on Israeli demolition of the homes of terror suspects. After Giacomelli’s report, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, visited the Occupied Territories and concluded that “the most persistent allegation brought to the attention of the High Commissioner was that Israeli security forces have engaged in excessive force, disproportionate to the threat faced by their soldiers”. In 2006, the UN Country Team in Palestine was created to coordinate the different agencies of the Office of the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process (UNSCO).
In 2004, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that the construction of the security wall that the Israelis began building along the Green Line separating the two communities on the West Bank was “in violation of international law and the fundamental rights of Palestinians, such as freedom of movement, access to essential resources and services”. “Above all”, wrote the occupant of the now renamed position of “United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967”, Francesca Albanese, in her 2026 book, When the World Sleeps, the wall is a violation of “the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people”. According to Albanese, “according to the law on the international responsibility of states, [the Court’s decision] must be upheld by all the member states of the United Nations and implies an obligation on all of them not to recognize the illegitimate situation created by the occupation”.
The Green Line wall dividing the West Bank “is a violation of the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people”. (Francesca Albanese)
Behind the argument on the ICJ decision are two very different conceptions of international law. Albanese’s critics accuse her of overstating the authority of international courts and indeed of international human rights law overall. They say that she is trying to win for Palestinians in the courts what they have failed to win either diplomatically or militarily.
White Saviour Complex
Francesca Albanese is herself a controversial figure, who stands accused of a “campaign of political and economic warfare against the United States and Israel”, after she called to support an economic boycott of some US and Israeli companies. In retaliation, the US froze her American bank account. In the public eye, Albanese is either the fearless champion of the Palestinian people or a hopeless patsy for Hamas—a very modern instance of the “white saviour”, that has arisen in the relationship between the United Nations and Palestinian representatives...
