ISTANBUL (Dispatches) -- History will show no mercy to the Arab nations that recognize Israel, Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, has told Middle East Eye.
Asked about the recent "normalization” pacts agreed with the Zionist regime by the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, Haniyeh said that any deal an Arab country makes with Israel will eventually threaten that country.
"We know Israeli leaders better than them. We know how they think. We would like to tell our brothers in the United Arab Emirates that they will lose as a result of those agreements because Israel’s only interest is to seek a military and economic foothold in areas close to Iran,” Haniyeh said.
"They will use your country as a doorstep. We don’t want to see the UAE being used as an Israeli launchpad.”
The Emirati and Bahraini agreements with the occupying regime of Israel, which were signed at the White House last month, have prompted speculation that Saudi Arabia could be preparing to follow its two close Persian Gulf allies’ lead.
"The Zionist project is an expansionist project. Its objective is to create a greater Israel. We don’t want to see the Emiratis or the Bahrainis or the Sudanese being used as vehicles for this project. History will show no mercy, the people will not forget, and humanitarian law will not forgive,” Haniyeh said.
Last week, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who served as Saudi ambassador to Washington for over 30 years, described Palestinian leaders as failures who had consistently missed opportunities for a settlement with the Zionist regime.
His remarks, in an interview with the state-run Al-Arabiya TV, were interpreted as a sign of a softening of King Salman’s policy of refusing to recognize Israel before a Palestinian state is created.
They represent the position of the crown prince, Muhammad bin Salman, for whom both Bandar’s daughter and son work as ambassadors in the U.S. and UK respectively.
Haniyeh said Hamas had detected "positive changes” on the ground in the West Bank as a result of reconciliation talks with rival Palestinian faction Fatah aimed at forming a national unity government.
Senior Palestinian sources told Middle East Eye that the Palestinian Authority’s security cooperation with Israel in the West Bank had "almost” stopped.
Haniyeh said Hamas had been vindicated by the collapse of the Oslo peace process, based on the 1993 agreement between the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the occupying regime of Israel which created the Palestinian Authority but entrenched Israeli military control over much of the occupied West Bank and failed to halt the expansion of Zionist settlements.
"From the day it was announced, Oslo bore the seeds of its own destruction… Oslo was a failure from day one because it was a security agreement, not a political one,” he said.
Oslo had died, Haniyeh said, when both its signatories, Zionist PM Yitzhak Rabin and PLO leader Yasser Arafat, were killed.
Rabin was assassinated by an Israeli ultra-nationalist in 1995, while Arafat’s death in 2004 is alleged by some to have been a result of poisoning.
"Abu Mazen (Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas) himself, who engineered Oslo, has announced abandoning Oslo and therefore, yes, we feel vindicated,” said Haniyeh.
"We could have saved time had the PA recognized early this disaster. Had it been overturned early on, we would have saved our people the miseries they endured. But better late than never.”
Haniyeh told MEE that three factors had forced Abbas to rethink his approach.
"Firstly, nothing is left for Abu Mazen to bet on. Secondly, Abu Mazen feels personally insulted by the Americans and the Israelis. Thirdly, there was a decision by the Arab League to bypass the PLO and make peace with Israel.”
The Arab League last month dropped a draft resolution condemning the Israeli-UAE agreement.
"In other words, the Palestinian Authority was no longer necessary as a bridge for the Israelis to make peace with the Arabs, while at the same time the PA felt abandoned by its Arab brothers, both politically and financially.
"These factors… made Abu Mazen think he needed to find a new approach. Hence his positive response to the initiative by Hamas,” Haniyeh said.
Haniyeh said that Hamas and Fatah are considering running a joint list in Palestinian elections set to take place next year for the first time since the 2006 vote that left Hamas in control of Gaza and led to armed clashes between the factions in which hundreds died.
Such a move would be attractive to Fatah, which fears being wiped out at the ballot box after years of unpopularity.
Addressing the seizure of Palestinian

 territory by Zionist extremists who claim to be returning to lands inhabited by their ancestors, Haniyeh said: "The land belonged to us long before them.”
"We are talking about a land engraved in our history, we are talking about Al-Quds, which was the first Qibla (direction in prayers) for Muslims and was the place to which the Prophet Muhammad was taken on a nightly journey (when he ascended to heaven); we are talking about the Palestinians who belonged to the land long before the Zionists arrived from Europe.
"We will never give up our homeland or concede any part of it. We will spare no effort to liberate it, and what we cannot liberate we will leave for future generations to liberate.
"Even with Oslo, Israel showed it was not a regime which is in pursuit of peace. The nature of the Zionist movement is to promote itself through force. It does not respect human rights or the norms of international law. Might is right for them.”