read between the lines, and it says: (to me at least: PA leader Abbas was a short sighted fool, he's resigning, Hamas fills the void, UN condemns Israel, US and Israel stand alone, Israel attacks Iranian nuke infrastructure, Arab street goes rabid"=new era")
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November 10, 2009
Collapse Feared for Palestinian Authority if Abbas Resigns
By ETHAN BRONNER
RAMALLAH, West Bank — 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.
Four top officials made the same point in separate interviews. Mr. Abbas, they say, feels at a total impasse in negotiations with the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has declined to commit to a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders including East Jerusalem. Mr. Netanyahu favors negotiations without preconditions.
Azam al-Ahmad, head of the Fatah bloc in the Palestinian Legislative Council, said he spoke with Mr. Abbas on Saturday and that he was likely to resign in the next month or so. “Nobody will accept to be president under this situation,” Mr. Ahmad said. “We could witness the collapse of the Palestinian Authority.”
Ali Jarbawi, the Minister of Planning, spoke in similar terms in an interview, asking, “Why do we need anybody to take his place if the whole process is failing? If the authority is going to go on forever, who needs it?” But he suggested that the crisis was aimed at persuading the United States and Europe to become more actively involved in bringing about a two-state solution.
What a collapse of the Palestinian Authority would mean is far from clear. All legal definitions in Palestinian politics have grown fuzzy since the 2007 split between the Fatah-dominated West Bank and Hamas-run Gaza. What is clear is that Mr. Abbas and those who work closely with him were shocked when the United States backpedaled on a demand that Israel freeze settlement building in the West Bank.
Mr. Netanyahu was due to meet President Obama in Washington on Monday night, and Mr. Abbas’s threat was expected to be a part of their talks. When Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was in Jerusalem last week, she asked Mr. Netanyahu to include in negotiating guidelines specific references to the creation of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders and Jerusalem. He declined. President Obama took his time before granting the prime minister’s request for a meeting.
Mr. Abbas, who is 74, is not only the president of the Palestinian Authority but the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the chairman of the Fatah political movement. Known as Abu Mazen, he took over from Yasir Arafat upon his death five years ago and was hailed by Israeli and American leaders as a very different man.
Rather than military fatigues, Mr. Abbas wore suits. He made a point of condemning Palestinian military actions against Israel as “terrorism” and saying that the Palestinian uprising that began in late 2000 was wrong. He gained the confidence of former hardliners like Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert and he was widely admired on the Israeli left, some of whom now worry deeply about his decision, blaming the government.
As Ephraim Sneh, a former liberal cabinet minister, wrote in an opinion article in the daily Haaretz on Sunday, “The conduct of Abbas, the most courageous partner we have had, is in large measure a byproduct of our missed opportunities.”
As Mr. Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, said of Mr. Abbas, “He has invested more patience into this process than anyone else. His name should be Mahmoud Patience. But he has come to the realization that it is over and there is no point in continuing.”
Not everyone regrets his expected departure, saying his problem is not Mr. Netanyahu but the fact that he does not control Gaza and has no way of gaining control of it. Those critics, even moderate Israelis, say that a year agoEhud Olmert, while still Israel’s prime minister, offered Mr. Abbas a deal that included nearly all of the West Bank, land swaps for limited settlement blocks and shared sovereignty over Jerusalem. But Mr. Abbas turned it down.
Then after first agreeing not to press the United Nations report led by Judge Richard Goldstone that assailed Israel’s behavior in the recent Gaza war, he reversed position, first upsetting Palestinians, then ruffling Israelis.
“Abbas’s tenure as Arafat’s successor has proved an unmitigated disaster,” David Horovitz, center-right editor of The Jerusalem Post, wrote on Friday . “He lost the Palestinian parliamentary elections to Hamas in 2006. He lost Gaza physically to Hamas in the coup of 2007. He lost much of Israel in spurning Olmert, and even more of Israel, right now, in leading the calls for the Goldstone-facilitated international prosecution of Israel over Operation Cast Lead. And with quite spectacular ineptitude, he has managed to simultaneously doom himself among the Palestinians over the self-same issue, for the ‘crime’ of initially agreeing not to champion Goldstone’s viciously skewed indictment.”
Mr. Abbas misunderstood the political significance of the Goldstone report, some who know him say, because like the Israelis and Americans he actually has little faith in international bodies like the United Nations. He then felt blindsided when attacked over this by some of his own aides and Arab leaders and switched positions.
Given the split with Hamas, the accusations of being an Israeli collaborator and the American reversal on a settlement freeze, the aides said, Mr. Abbas had simply lost any appetite for staying in power.
“He feels betrayed on all sides,” said Nasser al-Qidwa, a former Palestinian foreign minister.
But while aides and colleagues say they understand, they also fear his departure and many have been urging him to stay. Some thousands turned out to urge him to change his mind when he made a public appearance in Hebron and Bethlehem on Sunday. The maneuvers of the coming weeks will be complicated, and for Mr. Abbas to change his mind there will have to be clear gains.
“He understands that this is not a game where he can lose the argument and retain the position,” said Ziad J. Asali, a friend of Mr. Abbas’s and president of The American Task Force on Palestine , a nonprofit group in Washington. “We have to very carefully assess the significance of this political move on the state building project which is a very real project and should continue.”
But Martin Indyk, vice president of the Brookings Institution and an adviser to George J. Mitchell, the administration’s envoy to the Middle East, was not optimistic.
“At the end of the day, I fear that the United States, Israel and the Arabs will fall short of meeting Abu Mazen’s requirements for staying on. More than likely, we are entering a new era.”
