Abbas & Fayyad: Do They Have a Mandate?

Khaled Abu Toameh
Hudson New York
24 August '10

A president whose term in office expired a long time ago, and a prime minister who won about 2% of the vote when he ran in an election, have now been invited by the US Administration to hold direct peace talks with Israel on behalf of the Palestinians.

Mahmoud Abbas, the president, and Salam Fayyad, his prime minister, have even won the "backing" of two key decision-making bodies that are largely controlled by their supporters: the PLO Executive Committee and the Fatah Central Committee.

The 18-member PLO Executive Committee, which met in Ramallah last week to approve the Palestinians' participation in the direct talks with Israel, is dominated by unelected veteran officials.

Only nine PLO officials attended the meeting. The PLO constitution requires a minimum of 12 members for a quorum. This means that, contrary to reports in the Palestinian and international media, Abbas and Fayyad do not have the support of the PLO committee to negotiate directly with Israel.

With regards to the Central Council of Fatah, it remains unclear whether its 21 members ever endorsed the US invitation to hold direct talks with Israel.

Elections for the committee were held on July 8, 2009. The results of the vote, which has been denounced by many Fatah officials as unfair, was that only Abbas loyalists were elected.

Some of the committee members have even issued contradictory statements over the past few weeks regarding the direct talks. In the beginning, most of them seemed to oppose such talks unless Israel agreed to stop settlement construction and recognized the 1967 lines as the future borders of a Palestinian state.

Now, however, most of the committee members appear to have changed their minds -- clearly as a result of immense US pressure on Abbas and the Palestinian leadership.

It is not easy for a committee member who receives his or her salary from the Palestinian government to speak out in public on controversial matters.

So here is a president whose term in office expired in January 2009 -- and who has won the backing of only some of his traditional loyalists -- preparing to negotiate with Israel about extremely important issues such as borders, refugees, Jerusalem, settlements and security.

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Many possible Israeli concessions would be suicidal

George F. Will
The Washington Post
22 August '10

JERUSALEM 'Twas a famous victory for diplomacy when, in 1991 in Madrid, Israelis and Palestinians, orchestrated by the United States, at last engaged in direct negotiations. Almost a generation later, U.S. policy has succeeded in prodding the Palestinians away from their recent insistence on "proximity talks" -- in which they have talked to the Israelis through American intermediaries -- and to direct negotiations. But negotiations about what?

Idle talk about a "binational state" has long since died. Even disregarding the recent fates of multinational states -- e.g., the former Soviet Union, the former Yugoslavia, the former Czechoslovakia -- binationalism is impossible if Israel is to be a Jewish state for the Jewish people. No significant Israeli constituency disagrees with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu: "The Palestinian refugee problem will be resolved outside Israel's borders."

Rhetoric about a "two-state solution" is de rigueur. It also is delusional, given two recent, searing experiences.

The only place for a Palestinian state is the West Bank, which Israel has occupied -- legally under international law -- since repelling the 1967 aggression launched from there. The West Bank remains an unallocated portion of the Palestine Mandate, the disposition of which is to be settled by negotiations. Michael Oren, now Israel's ambassador to the United States, said several years before becoming ambassador:

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[English adds critical word by mistake] PM Netanyahu welcomes the invitation of the United States to begin direct negotiations without preconditions.

Dr. Aaron Lerner
IMRA
22 August '10

[Dr. Aaron Lerner - IMRA:

While the English translation of the announcement has PM Netanyahu saying that the desire is to reach a peace agreement "that will protect Israel's national security interests, foremost of which is security" (see below) the original Hebrew message reads "that will protect Israel's national interests, foremost of which is security."
www.pmo.gov.il/PMO/Communication/Spokesman/2010/08/spokedirect200810.htm

The addition of the word "security" to "national interests" in the English translation was an honest mistake, but is important to correct.

Israel's "national interests" go well beyond security.

Israel has a "national interest", for example, that for generations to come, Jews will continue to be able to pray at ancient sites sacred to Judaism in places such as Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Hebron. And this while taking into account that historically, Moslems consider it blasphemy for Jews to pray at these ancient sites that have been adopted by Islam, and that no matter what "iron clad" guarantees of access one might put on paper - should a foreign sovereign control these sites, there is, realistically, no way to insure that those "iron clad" guarantees don't rust out over time.

Put simply, if the IDF had a special gizmo that could satisfactorily protect Israel's national security interests with Israel finding itself on the '67 lines - including the complete division of Jerusalem, Israel still would have national interests to address on the other side of that line.]

PM Netanyahu welcomes the invitation of the United States to begin direct negotiations without preconditions.
20/08/2010
www.pmo.gov.il/PMOEng/Communication/Spokesman/2010/08/spokedirect200810.htm

Prime Minister Netanyahu welcomes the invitation of the United States to begin direct negotiations without preconditions.

The Prime Minister has been calling for direct negotiations for the past year and a half. He was pleased with the American clarification that the talks would be without preconditions.

The Prime Minister added that Israel wants to conduct serious and comprehensive talks.

"Reaching an agreement is a difficult challenge but is possible. We are coming to the talks with a genuine desire to reach a peace agreement between the two peoples that will protect Israel's national security interests, foremost of which is security." [AL: Should read "national interests"]

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Short takes: Hamas likes mosque, AP distorts, Harvard doesn’t divest

Fresnozionism.org
16 August '10

AP blames Israel for Palestinian intransigence

Here’s what I read this morning in the Fresno Bee:

By Karin Laub, Associated Press

RAMALLAH, West Bank — Israel will not accept conditions for resuming direct negotiations with the Palestinians, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and top Cabinet ministers affirmed in a meeting late Sunday, reflecting a hard line just as invitations to the talks appeared to be near.

“Hard line?” Are you nuts, Karin Laub? Netanyahu has been agreeing to direct talks without preconditions for months. What could be less hard line than that? Isn’t the function of negotiations to, er, negotiate?

The Palestinian Authority (PA), on the other hand, has refused to talk unless their demands are met in advance. In Laub’s words,

Abbas wants Israel to accept the principle of Palestinian statehood in the lands Israel occupied in the 1967 Mideast war with minor modifications, and wants all Jewish settlement building to stop during negotiations.

I’ll note yet again the deliberately misleading formulation “Jewish settlement building” to mean “any construction activity outside 1949 lines,” suggesting that Israel is building new settlements or even expanding the boundaries of existing ones, which has not happened for years.

The PA wants negotiations to pick up where they left off when various generous offers — the Clinton-Barak ideas of 2000-1, and Olmert’s 2008 proposal — were made. Of course, these were presented by Israel as absolute final offers, which were rejected by the PA as inadequate. It’s ludicrous for them to become starting points for new talks, in which the PA will demand even more — not to mention that the response to the Clinton-Barak offer was to start a war.

The AP’s original headline, “Israel: No conditions for talks with Palestinians” is not so bad. My friends at the Bee changed it to this: “Israel refuses conditions on talks”, to make sure that everyone gets the message that it’s Israel’s fault.

What are my neighbors in Fresno likely to think when they read this propaganda disguised as news?

(This is a multi-topic piece. Click here for full post)

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Internal Palestinian Memo: Resist Obama Pressure--Talking Directly To Israel Is Political Suicide

Daled Amos
27 July '10

This to the leader who has been avoiding elections for a year and a half!

Those around Abbas are fighting the idea of direct talks with Israel tooth and nail: talk face to face:

A senior U.S. envoy warned the Palestinian president that he must move quickly to direct talks with Israel if he wants President Barack Obama's help in setting up a Palestinian state, according to an internal Palestinian document obtained by The Associated Press on Monday.

The 36-page memo, sent to senior Palestinian officials, advised Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to resist growing U.S. pressure, warning that rescinding his conditions for face-to-face negotiations with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would be political suicide.

On the other hand, Obama seems to finally be applying pressure to talk directly with Netanyahu and stop relying on the US to do all of the work for him:

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Palestinians Freak — No Direct Talks!

Jennifer Rubin
Contentions/Commentary
08 July '10

This makes it clear just how petrified by the prospect of direct negotiations the Palestinians are:

The Palestinian Authority has added new conditions for resuming direct talks with Israel, presenting new demands that in effect preclude negotiations.

The stipulations stated to the BBC by PA chief negotiator Saeb Erekat reflect a previously stated strategy of waiting “a year or two” for the United Nations to recognize it as a new Arab country instead of trying to reach a compromise agreement with Israel. …

Erekat told the BBC that in order for direct talks to resume, Israel also must accept former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s proposal as a starting point. Olmert has said that the PA never replied to his offer, which accepted most of the PA’s demands on Jerusalem but did not satisfy its insistence that Israel allow the immigration of millions of foreign Arabs claiming ancestry in the country.

You almost get the idea that the PA has neither the will nor the ability to make a deal and has been banking on Obama to deliver Israel (or what would be left of it ) on a platter.

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