The Peace-Achieving Moderate
The man who succeeded the terror-monger Yasser Arafat, and who co-founded Fatah with him, deplored the militarization of the Palestinian uprising. The First Intifada, in the wake of the 1993 Oslo accords, of which Mahmoud Abbas himself was the chief Palestinian architect. Which had led to a semblance of semi-normalization with Israel, with Israel encouraging and helping to achieve the development of a civil infrastructure, a policing agency, an atmosphere of normalcy on the way to advancing the future of the Palestinians.Like most typical Palestinians, Abbas was himself conflicted about the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians, but he was prepared to make a good level of accommodation on the way to serving his people that Yasser Arafat never was prepared to accept. Both were masters, in the final analysis, of claiming to represent the best interests of the Palestinian people. Arafat excelled in bleeding vital funding from the UN and Western sources to his own pockets, and to surreptitiously urging guerrilla action on Israel while presenting himself outwardly as a partner for peace.
Mahmoud Abbas deplored the corruption of the Arafat associates, and one assumes he never did feel entitled to do the same on his own behalf. And he also viewed askance, initially, the growing violence encouraged by Arafat, against Israel. Yet, Abbas also succumbed to the encouragement of Palestinians to view Israel and Jews as their mortal adversaries, committing himself to peace outwardly to the West and their media, and dedicating himself to fomenting violence against Israel internally.
Grooming his countrymen on the one hand to anticipate the outcome of a Palestinian State, demonstrating to them how all-encompassing that state could be, sans the presence of Israel, as a future prospect. While sitting at the bargaining table with his Israeli counterparts, accepting of the potential of two side-by-side sovereign states. His Fatah party reiterating their intention to destroy Israel, but in a more muted manner than their rivals, Hamas, who see no point in shielding the world from the reality of their Israel-destructive charter.
Emboldened by the presence of a new American president, bringing a fresh new perspective to the weary and wearying conflict through his speeches of reconciliation to the Muslim world on behalf of the United States, Mahmoud Abbas became resolutely intransigent. All or nothing. Right of return. Jerusalem as capital. Withdrawal of West Bank settlements. Re-drawing of borders.
Just remember to shut the lights as you go. Leave valuable properties intact as a goodwill gesture. And with those preconditions well understood, then bargaining - in good faith - can get underway.
Himself facing conflicting opinions from his American population, his advisers, his political adversaries, his international colleagues, President Barack Obama saw fit to alter his initial position to more closely reflect traditional U.S. advocating and activities vis-a-vis Israel's needs. The balance became unutterably skewed, in the opinion of Arab countries as a result, and the Palestinian Authority apoplectic with rage.
Now the moderate Palestinian leader upon whom the West and Israel depends to authorize, legitimize and advance peace talks with a view to settling once and for all the conflict between Arab and Jew in the Middle East (as though that were so readily attainable even through the eventual appearance of a Palestinian State) insists he has lost faith in the bargaining process, and most particularly in the leading protagonist, the U.S.
This is the moderate Palestinian whose doctoral thesis denied the historical existence of the Holocaust, no less. His 1982 book, "The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and the Zionist Movement", denying the existence of the Holocaust, and refuting the "fantastic lie that six million Jews were killed" during the Holocaust years; that the gas chambers were merely disinfection chambers, quoting "scientific studies" of anti-Semitic Holocaust deniers who had preceded him, mark him as a credulous purveyor of slanderous lies.
This is the man in whom Israel, the United States, the United Nations, the European Union, place their trust to help end a viciously brutal conflict between cultures, traditions and religious adherents. This is good faith, a representation of the best that can be expected from the trustworthy conclave of the Palestinian people.
Labels: Israel, Middle East, United States
posted by Pieface @ Friday, November 06, 2009
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