Another Tack: Save the scarecrow

Sarah Honig
JPost
12 November 09

Some scarecrows are charmers. They cannot maintain their upright position without outside support, but there's a wide engaging smile scrawled on their faces and their incontrovertible cute-factor makes everyone adore them.

Just hear all that pretentious poppycock spouted at us by world opinion (as ever, resonated shrilly by our own left wing). According to trendy conventional wisdom, the Palestinian Authority's scarecrow - Mahmoud Abbas - can do no wrong. At the same time, the Israelis who keep him from keeling over can do no right. Simple isn't it?

Abbas was universally lauded for purity of heart and purpose when he first ascended Yasser Arafat's vacated throne in 2004. After his recently announced retirement, Abbas is piteously beseeched to please reconsider. As per pompous Western pundits, the scarecrow shakily ensconced in Ramallah is our last viable hope for peace. The scarecrow must be saved. Without him the sky is sure to come crashing down.

And who instilled all that dejection and gloom in our upstanding scarecrow? Who is responsible for his desperation, for the I-can-go-on-no-longer melancholy? Only one answer exists: intransigent settlement-building, concord-stifling, conquistador Israel.

BUT BEFORE we subscribe to the international community's premise of Israeli culpability for all that goes awry (and plenty does), there are four critical questions to ponder: Does Abbas deserve his good-guy credentials? Why has he proven such an abysmal failure? Who truly undermined him? And is he worth saving?

1. Is Abbas really righteous? Holocaust-denier Abbas is indisputably a more urbane version of Arafat, with better PR-sense and a closer shave (not that Arafat in his day wasn't adulated as the harbinger of optimism and harmony). True, Abbas sings Arafat's song, but, oh, how much more genteel the rendition!

Abbas has no use for Arafat's in-your-face hysterical chants. He'd never send us to drink from Gaza's sea nor openly exhort millions to march on Jerusalem. His style is slyer than that. To paraphrase Roberta Flack's 1973 hit, mild-mannered Abbas is "killing us softly with his words."

His repertoire consists of the same reliable old Arafat standbys - back to the 1949 armistice lines, Jerusalem is Arab Palestine's capital, no antiterrorist campaign, no end to incitement and no relinquishment of the right to inundate the Jewish state with hostile Arabs.

But Abbas does offer compromise. While he insists the Western Wall be placed under exclusive Muslim control, he magnanimously agrees to permit small numbers of Jews to pray at a limited section thereof under conditions stipulated in 1930 by the Mandate's post-Hebron-massacre Shaw Commission (which forbade the blowing of the shofar). Abbas pledges to generously allow us to reassume our once-lowly status. Big of him.
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