[Marxism] Abbas' Moment of Truth

[Dbachmozart at aol.com]

by Khalid Amayreh 
Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Mahmoud  Abbas  feels quite  depressed 
these days, having been   unceremoniously told by President Bush that the US 
administration won’t pressure  Israel to halt Jewish settlement expansion nor 
commit itself to  a total  Israeli withdrawal from the Palestinian territories 
occupied  in 1967. 
Some of Abbas’s  aides have described his recent  visit to Washington as the “
straw that broke the camel’s back.” Abbas himself  described  the  visit as “
a clear failure.”   
One Palestinian commentator from Ramallah   labeled the visit  “ a gigantic 
and monumental fiasco,” arguing that it  amounted  to  a virtual  breakdown of 
Abbas’s entire strategy of  counting on the Bush administration to create a 
viable and contiguous  Palestinian state, with East Jerusalem as its capital. 
According to sources in Amman, Abbas informed Bush  that he wouldn’t run for 
a second term as Chairman of the PA. 
One source quoted an aide to Abbas as saying that the  chairman concluded his 
meeting with Bush by telling him “you can look for  another donkey to preside 
over the Palestinian Authority.” 
The PA chairman  reportedly asked Bush to  declare his support for the 
creation of a Palestinian state on the entirety of  the West Bank, Gaza Strip and 
East Jerusalem and also to pressure Israel to put  an end to Jewish settlement 
expansion in the occupied territories, especially  East Jerusalem. 
Abbas, according to aides, was stunned when Bush told  him that he couldn’t 
meet Palestinian  demands since that would violate  the  letter of guarantees 
he gave former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel  Sharon on 14 April, 2004. Bush 
further argued that any departure from the  infamous letter would lead to the 
downfall of the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud  Olmert’s government. 
“President Abbas felt as if he was talking to  the  wall,” one Palestinian 
official was quoted as saying. “Both Bush and  (US Secretary of State 
Condoleezza) Rice refused to discuss details related to  the current peace talks with 
Israel. We are very depressed.” 
Rice arrived in Israel-Palestine Saturday evening, 3  May, apparently to save 
“the peace process” from an imminent danger of  collapse. 
Rice  told the Israeli media  that the  purpose of her visit was to press 
Defense Minister Ehud Barak to remove some of  the roadblocks the Israeli 
occupation army maintains throughout  the West  Bank in order to punish, torment and 
control the estimated 2.5 million  Palestinians  living in the West Bank. 
The US  has asked  Israel for the umpteenth  time to remove the roadblocks in 
order to ease up Palestinian  daily life  and boost Abbas’s popularity in the 
eyes of his people. 
For its part, Israel made numerous promises to remove  the barriers, but to 
no avail.  Last month the Israeli  government   said it was removing some of 
the key roadblocks in the  West Bank in order to facilitate the flow of goods 
and services throughout the  West Bank. 
However, Palestinians, peace activists and human  rights organizations 
operating in the occupied territories have accused the  Israeli army of practicing 
deception and of creating fictitious barriers in the  morning and removing them 
in the evening in order to give Washington a false  impression that Israel 
was honoring the pledges it had made to Rice. 
This protracted, lingering  procrastination,  along with the absence of any 
substantive progress in Israeli-Palestinian talks,  especially over the 
so-called core issues, such as Jerusalem, the refugees and  the settlements, is 
obviously exasperating the Palestinian leadership, desperate  and eager to “clutch 
an achievement” which it would use to convince the  increasingly desperate and 
skeptical Palestinian masses that Abbas’s way, not  Hamas’s, was the right 
and only way to wrest Palestinian rights from Israel’s  parsimonious hands. 
Now, however, the manifestly  deleterious effect  of Abbas’s policy of 
over-trusting and over-relying on  the Bush  Administration, are  becoming obvious. 
Abbas is now realizing, belatedly if not too late,  that  Bush has never been 
 truly serious about pushing for a dignified  and even-handed resolution of 
the Palestinian plight. 
I am saying “belatedly or too late” because Abbas  nearly wrecked his 
relations with his own people, especially since the Gaza  events of last year, all 
for the purpose of appeasing Bush and Rice and  receiving from them a 
certificate of good conduct. 
He thought, out of naivety, ignorance, and weakness  of character, that the 
neocons in Washington would award him for his  subservience and obsequiousness 
by pressuring Israel to end the occupation and  halt unrelenting theft of 
Palestinian land. 
However, Abbas’s most scandalous blunder has been his  uneducated  conviction 
that the big liar of Washington, the man who  invaded, occupied and destroyed 
two sovereign Muslim countries based on lies,  would behave honestly and 
straightly with the Palestinians. 
Now it would be very hard  for  Abbas   to salvage his legacy by trying to 
undo or at least rectify some of the blunders  he and his regime committed 
against the Palestinian masses and their enduring  just cause, all in order to 
please Washington. 
As Chairman of the PA, Abbas and his hangers-on  abducted, detained, tortured 
and even killed political opponents  in order  to demonstrate Palestinian 
commitment to peace to the malicious duo of the US  and Israel. This happened at 
a time when Israel continued to murder Palestinians  in droves and grab more 
Palestinian land for Jewish settlement expansion. 
Abbas also readily  accepted, even  welcomed,  naked  American interference 
in Palestinian internal  affairs to the point of allowing Washington to 
conspire in coordination with  certain Palestinian security officials to corrode and 
overthrow the  democratically elected government led by the Hamas movement. 
More to the point, Abbas went as far as tacitly  collaborating with Israel 
and the US in maintaining the  Nazi-like blockade  of 1.5 million Gazans, all in 
order to weaken Hamas.   
I don’t really know if Abbas has the moral courage  and intellectual honesty 
to say to Washington “enough is enough.” 
If he does, he should do it now, because tomorrow  might be too late.
_http://www.palestine-info.co.uk/En/_ (http://www.palestine-info.co.uk/En/)  




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