WHEN Palestine’s sparring factions, the secular nationalists of Fatah and the Islamists of Hamas, last agreed in 2007 to form a single government, it endured for a dismal three months and collapsed into a three-day civil war that left Palestine split in two. Hamas took over the Gaza Strip, while Fatah ran the West Bank, the core of a would-be Palestinian state. The previous unity government was weakened at the outset because the most influential foreign countries boycotted it and withdrew aid. This time the prospects seem a bit better. The main donor governments, including America’s, feel more comfortable with the ministers and policies listed by Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president. Funds should continue, for the moment, to flow.

When Mr Abbas tried the same thing seven years ago, half of his unity cabinet, including the prime minister, belonged to Hamas, which most donors had put on a terrorist blacklist. This time the team is technocratic and Hamas-free. It recognises Israel and disavows violence. It is led by Rami Hamdallah, an ally of Mr Abbas who was already his prime minister in his West Bank fief. Western donors hope soon to return to Gaza, bringing it back into the fold.

America’s tentatively positive response has left Israel “deeply troubled”, says its prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu. He and his ministers say Mr Abbas, by embracing Hamas, is endorsing terrorism. But the Israeli leader’s hostility to the new government seems to be glueing the Palestinians together. Even the Americans, smarting from their failure to effect a peace deal between Israel and Mr Abbas’s bit of Palestine, are irritated by Mr Netanyahu’s reaction. Hamas is bowing to Mr Abbas and not vice versa, say American officials, not least by backing a government that seeks a two-state solution.

Those who wish to give Hamas a fresh chance say Mr Netanyahu’s accusations of terrorism are out of date. Hamas leaders stopped ordering suicide-bombings nearly a decade ago; despite Israel’s continuing blockade of Gaza, it has largely abided by ceasefire agreements. The Palestinians note bitterly that Israel has killed several hundred Palestinian civilians since Hamas took over Gaza, whereas rockets fired from the enclave into Israel in the same period have killed less than a score of Israelis.

How hard will Israel try to stymie the deal? So far, it has barred four ministers from Gaza from going to the West Bank for cabinet meetings. And West Bank officials, from the president down, are afraid to go to Gaza lest Israel stop them from coming back. But despite Israel’s refusal to engage the new government, both sides say their security co-ordination is intact. Tellingly, Israel has transferred on time and almost in full the monthly customs revenues that keep Mr Abbas’s Palestinian Authority afloat, something it refused to do in 2007.

But the new Palestinian government’s own problems may yet sink it. Hamas has bowed out of office in Gaza after seven years, but it is not yet out of power. It retains its forces, its weapons and its civil servants. Its military wing staged a parade the night before the new government was unveiled. Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s outgoing prime minister, hailed it as “Palestine’s army”. Hamas’s security forces seized a Fatah man on his way home to Gaza.

After his first cabinet meeting in Ramallah, the Palestinians’ administrative headquarters on the West Bank, Mr Hamdallah shunted the trickiest issues into committees. His ministers sound clueless about who would run their Gaza offices. Would the sermons preached on Fridays in Gazan mosques that Hamas considers its own be loyal to the new government? The minister for religious affairs, Yousef Ideis, gives a shrug. After seven years of separation, the administrative and cultural gaps will not easily be bridged by telephone.

Mr Abbas will find it hard, too, to induct Hamas into a steering committee of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, the nationalist umbrella group to which it does not belong, to arrange the revival of the Palestinian parliament, where Hamas won a majority at the last election, in 2006. A fresh poll is to be held in six months.

Day-to-day management will provide tension enough. Mr Hamdallah says he is telling the 70,000 public servants in Gaza loyal to Fatah, who have been getting full salaries since 2007 while staying at home, to go back to work. Yet Hamas people say the deal provides for their 52,000 government employees to stay on in their posts on full pay. In the scramble for new jobs, factional rivalries could quickly revive.

A lack of funds for Hamas’s payroll will fuel tension, too. Qatar previously pledged $500m a year to make up the shortfall, but has so far, says a Hamas man, advanced only $100m. Western donors are loth to foot the bill. “Hamas only signed up to the deal because it could no longer pay its way,” says one of the new ministers, a technocrat. “The tragedy is, neither can we.”