Maybe he’s not bluffing this time. The eminently reliable Ethan Bronner seems to think Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader, may well make good on his threat to quit. If he’s gone, the Palestinians are going to scuffle to find a new leader. Odds are, in such a fraught circumstance, they choose a tough guy, a hard-liner–to match the Israel’s intransigent Netanyahu.
If Abbas is serious, this is horrible news. And, clearly, the Obama Middle East initiative has come a cropper. I’m hearing, from several sources, that there’s serious White House displeasure with special envoy George Mitchell. That’s probably unfair…but there is a serious need for an Administration rethink of this crucial policy area.
Marc Lynch at Foreign Policy (sorry quotes not working):
“Most of the Palestinian and Arab commentary I’ve seen since his announcement falls into three basic trends: the first thinks he’s bluffing, attempting to leverage his weakness into pressure on the U.S. and Israel; the second thinks it’s irrelevant, because the elections will not actually be held in January; and the third is cheering his departure, and hoping that it will lead to a collective admission that the PA’s strategy has failed. The three perspectives are obviously not mutually exclusive. When I asked leading Palestinian academic Salim Tamari yesterday about the impact it would have on the peace process, he just looked at me quizically and said “what peace process?”There’s been a collective moment of clarity over the last week about the disastrous course of the attempt to get to serious peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians. Hillary Clinton’s comments about the Israeli “unprecedented” positions and the prospect of starting talks without a settlement freeze have thrown people into paroxysms of premature postmortems. I don’t think her comments actually changed very much — the dynamic was bad before she came to the region, it’s still bad. At least now maybe the shock of this sudden view of the abyss will concentrate people’s minds and get them to try something new.
This all gets back to the basic point I’ve been harping on for months (for instance in the CAP report I co-authored with Brian Katulis in the early summer): the administration has lacked a viable strategy for, or an adequate appreciation of, intra-Palestinian politics and the implications of the deep structural weakness of the Palestinian Authority. Now, perhaps, they’ll have to get it. There’s no viable path forward which doesn’t include alleviating the blockade of Gaza and reunifying it politically with the West Bank, and no serious prospect that the institutions of the Palestinian Authority can be built up along Salam Fayyad’s model without also dealing seriously with the political horizon of peace talks aimed at rapidly achieving a two state solution. The settlement freeze demand, which is being blamed wrongly for the current problems, was not a luxury — it was essential for the Palestinian political track. And now that track needs a serious American re-think.”
Daniel Levy at Talking Points Memo
John Podhoretz at Commentary:
With Bibi Netanyahu and Barack Obama slated to meet this evening, the New York Times has splashed a story written in a tone of deep alarm across the front of its website: “Collapse Feared for Palestinian Authority if Abbas Resigns.”
The central theme is: He really means it this time! He’s gonna quit! And it’s Israel’s fault! The true purpose of the piece is to ensure that Obama and Netanyahu do nothing but discuss the condition of Mahmoud Abbas’s tenure as president of the Palestinian Authority. Because they have so little else to talk about. Like Iran. Nothing to talk about there.
Ethan Bronner assumes a startlingly inappropriate tone in this article — an elegiac, mournful spirit:
The prospect that the Palestinian Authority, the government in the West Bank, might fall apart loomed on Monday, as those close to its president, Mahmoud Abbas, said that he intended to resign and forecast that others would follow. “I think he is realizing that he came all this way with the peace process in order to create a Palestinian state, but he sees no state coming,” Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian peace negotiator, said in an interview. “So he really doesn’t think there is a need to be president or to have an Authority. This is not about who is going to replace him. This is about our leaving our posts. You think anybody will stay after he leaves?”
Mr. Abbas warned last week that he would not participate in elections he called for January. But many viewed that as a ploy by a Hamlet-like leader upset over Israeli and American policy, and noted that the vote might not actually be held, given the Palestinian political fracture and the unwillingness of Hamas, which controls Gaza, to participate. In the days since, however, his colleagues have come to believe he is not bluffing. If that is the case, they say, the Palestinian Authority could be endangered.
Evidently the crime of the Israelis is that, as Bronner writes, Netanyahu wants “negotiations without preconditions.” Usually in a negotiation, that would be considered a good thing. But not in this negotiation, because in this negotiation, Israel is supposed to come to the table having already agreed to the creation of a Palestinian state “within the 1967 borders and Jerusalem.” Netanyahu, Bronner writes, “declined” this preposterous demand of Hillary Clinton’s — preposterous because the idea that Israel would agree to surrender parts of Jerusalem and would preemptively agree to the loss of neighborhoods like Maale Adumim even before talks commenced is to presume magic fairy dust has been sprinkled upon the land of milk and honey and caused pacific and loving feelings to swell within the breasts of both parties.
This is not an article about Abbas and the tragic possibility of his early departure along with Saeb Erekat, a mouthpiece propagandist who is a Palestinian “peace negotiator” like I am a Jewish “pentathlete.” This is an article intended by design to overshadow the meeting of the American president and the Israeli prime minister and to make the “collapse” of the ineffectual and dishonest Palestinian Authority leadership the news of the day. It has the quality of an indulgent babysitter running to a parent to report breathlessly that a 5-year-old has threatened never to eat again because it is his brother’s birthday and he doesn’t like the flavor of the cake.
Saree Makdisi at Foreign Policy:
Never an appealing or charismatic figure, Abbas has been losing popular support since his first day in office five years ago (his term technically expired in January 2009). Since the 1993 Oslo Accords, in which he played a prominent role, the official Palestinian leadership has been pursuing a formula for peace — the two-state solution — that has yielded nothing more than the intensification of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. Those 16 years have been characterized by the further immobilization and immiseration of the Palestinian people, and an ever-growing list of civilian casualties, most recently in Gaza.
We are left with no other conclusion than this: that the so-called peace process with which Abbas has been indelibly associated, albeit as the Israelis’ junior assistant, was calculated to produce exactly these results. The very first step of the Oslo process, undertaken with Abbas’s assent in 1993, was to fragment and separate the occupied territories into shards of land, disconnected from each other and from the outside world, under total, institutionalized Israeli domination. Take one look at a map and you can’t miss the separation of Gaza from the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the further internal splintering of the West Bank, all of which is the direct result of Oslo.
Today, the Palestinian Authority (PA) over which Abbas presides is seen as a puppet. It has become the manager of the day-to-day burdens of military occupation, responsible for the hassle and expense of administering a restless population. All this is done on behalf of the Israelis, who have meanwhile gone on expropriating Palestinian land, bulldozing Palestinian homes, and building exclusively Jewish settlements in violation of international law (doubling the population of settlers since peace talks began). To all Palestinians other than the tiny clique who benefit from this arrangement, the sight of Abbas’s U.S.-trained and Israeli-armed PA militiamen cooperating with Israeli forces — if not taking direct orders from them — is nothing short of grotesque. And when Abbas recently succumbed to Israeli and U.S. pressure and dropped his support for the Goldstone report, a U.N. Human Rights Council-mandated investigation into last year’s Gaza incursion, many Palestinians saw it as the last straw both for Abbas — and for the PA itself.
UPDATE: MJ Rosenberg at Talking Points Memo
November 9, 2009...8:10 pm
Know When To Fold ‘Em
Joe Klein at Swampland at Time:
Marc Lynch at Foreign Policy (sorry quotes not working):
“Most of the Palestinian and Arab commentary I’ve seen since his announcement falls into three basic trends: the first thinks he’s bluffing, attempting to leverage his weakness into pressure on the U.S. and Israel; the second thinks it’s irrelevant, because the elections will not actually be held in January; and the third is cheering his departure, and hoping that it will lead to a collective admission that the PA’s strategy has failed. The three perspectives are obviously not mutually exclusive. When I asked leading Palestinian academic Salim Tamari yesterday about the impact it would have on the peace process, he just looked at me quizically and said “what peace process?”There’s been a collective moment of clarity over the last week about the disastrous course of the attempt to get to serious peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians. Hillary Clinton’s comments about the Israeli “unprecedented” positions and the prospect of starting talks without a settlement freeze have thrown people into paroxysms of premature postmortems. I don’t think her comments actually changed very much — the dynamic was bad before she came to the region, it’s still bad. At least now maybe the shock of this sudden view of the abyss will concentrate people’s minds and get them to try something new.
This all gets back to the basic point I’ve been harping on for months (for instance in the CAP report I co-authored with Brian Katulis in the early summer): the administration has lacked a viable strategy for, or an adequate appreciation of, intra-Palestinian politics and the implications of the deep structural weakness of the Palestinian Authority. Now, perhaps, they’ll have to get it. There’s no viable path forward which doesn’t include alleviating the blockade of Gaza and reunifying it politically with the West Bank, and no serious prospect that the institutions of the Palestinian Authority can be built up along Salam Fayyad’s model without also dealing seriously with the political horizon of peace talks aimed at rapidly achieving a two state solution. The settlement freeze demand, which is being blamed wrongly for the current problems, was not a luxury — it was essential for the Palestinian political track. And now that track needs a serious American re-think.”
Daniel Levy at Talking Points Memo
John Podhoretz at Commentary:
Saree Makdisi at Foreign Policy:
UPDATE: MJ Rosenberg at Talking Points Memo
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Tags: Commentary, Daniel Levy, Foreign Policy, Joe Klein, John Podhoretz, M.J. Rosenberg, Marc Lynch, Palestine, Saree Makdisi, Swampland, Talking Points Memo, Time