After announcing last Thursday that he would not run in January’s Palestinian election, which he himself called, Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) upped the ante this weekend by threatening to dissolve the entire PA. Both are moves in a well-known game that the Israeli media call “saving Abu Mazen.”
PA officials are open about its purpose: to extort additional concessions from Israel and, especially, the U.S. This time, they want America to publicly pledge East Jerusalem as the capital of the Palestinian state and support Abbas’s demand that negotiations be conditioned on a complete halt to settlement construction.
This game, which Abbas has successfully played many times before, rests on a simple premise: he is the most moderate Palestinian leader conceivable and therefore the best hope for Israeli-Palestinian peace. Hence, if he is weakening, he must be bolstered by new concessions.
The problem is that this premise is utterly false. He may indeed be the most moderate Palestinian leader conceivable, but that just shows how unready Palestinians are for peace — because Abbas has proved decisively over the past four years that he is no “peace partner.”
First, his negotiating positions preclude any deal. This is true on several counts but is particularly obvious in his demand for a “right of return” for 4.7 million descendants of Palestinian refugees. Combined with Israel’s 1.5 million Arab citizens, they would easily outnumber its 5.6 million Jews and could thus vote the Jewish state out of existence. Conditioning any deal on Israel’s self-destruction is hardly proof of peaceful intent.
Indeed, Abbas’s total lack of interest in a deal was evidenced by his handling of Ehud Olmert’s (overly) generous September 2008 offer, which included 94 percent of the territories, 1:1 territorial swaps to compensate for the remainder, international Muslim control over the Temple Mount, and absorption into Israel of several thousand refugees. Last week, Abbas said that he and Olmert “almost closed” a deal, implying that the current impasse stems from Olmert’s replacement by Benjamin Netanyahu. But in reality, Abbas never even bothered responding to Olmert’s offer until nine months later, long after Olmert had left office — and even then, he did so via a media interview rather than directly. And, most important, he rejected the offer, saying “the gaps were wide.”
Even Abbas’s vaunted opposition to terror has proved false. In 2005, his one year in sole control over the PA before Hamas’s electoral victory, Palestinians killed 54 Israelis and wounded 484, while 1,059 rockets and mortars were fired at Israel from Gaza. Yet not only did Abbas never order his forces to combat this terror; he explicitly and repeatedlyrefused to do so. He first cracked down on Hamas only in 2007, after its violent takeover of Gaza convinced him that Hamas threatened him, not just Israel. And he recently agreed to end this clampdown under a reconciliation agreement with Hamas.
In short, there is no point in “saving” Abbas. Instead, the world should finally admit the truth — and let him go.
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Jen and Jonathan, I don’t think Obama really can recalibrate. He has staked his strategy on repositioning the United States as an “honest broker” between Israel and the Arabs, a long-standing demand of the Left, which claims — as Obama reiterates — that the Bush administration neglected the peace process for eight years because of its affection for Israel. In other words, the peace process is something the Arabs want but Israel doesn’t. This, of course, couldn’t be further from the truth, as in reality Bush inherited not a peace process but the violent and bloody consequences of a failed one.
Nonetheless, George W. Bush attempted for the first year of his administration to carry on as Clinton had, despite the human bombs going off all over Israel. Even this became implausible when, a few months after 9/11, the IDF intercepted the Karine A ship carrying 50 tons of illegal weapons from Iran to Yasser Arafat. Meanwhile, Israeli intelligence had uncovered irrefutable proof of Arafat’s deep complicity in the suicide war. Yes, at that point the “peace process” went on the shelf for a little while, at least compared with the frantic standard set in the last months of the Clinton administration. Can anyone argue that it shouldn’t have? Well, Obama can, of course, if only to score political points. The “Quartet” and the “road map” were created during this period of alleged neglect, but Obama never mentions that.
Obama’s advisers have been telling him that Abu Mazen is weak but also doing a terrific job of being a Palestinian moderate. Obama knows that things might really fall apart if he presses him, and then he will be in Bush’s position — without a Palestinian participator. Plus, he has staked a large portion of his foreign policy on a rapprochement with the Arab world, which demands that America take the Palestinian side and get tough with Israel. The problem with this strategy is it ties his hands with the Palestinians — if he criticizes them, his larger Middle East stagecraft will suffer.
Obama has walked very far down a road that he is discovering leads to a dead end. The Palestinians and the Arab states, witnessing Obama turn on Israel, are digging in, hoping for more, and seizing the opportunity to do nothing. Obama is probably also not noticing, as evidenced by the Fatah convention, the extent to which Hamas continues to set the tone of Palestinian politics.
The only benefit for Obama from this larger strategy is that he can enjoy the appearance of improved relations with the Arabs at very low immediate cost. The drawback is that he has to depend on them not to make him look foolish. Right now he might be discovering the downside of this strategy: he is already starting to look foolish. The frightening thing is that we can’t tell whether Obama understands he’s creating short-term good PR at the expense of longer-term problems, or whether he thinks the PR is actually solving the problems.
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