Throughout the Arab-Israeli peace process over the years two key elements have been constant and remain critical today as Israelis and Palestinians gather again around the same table. First, recognition that direct talks between Israel and credible Arab partners can achieve durable peace accords. Second, the critical role of the United States in facilitating the direct talks and sealing the peace deal.
From my latest column on Fox News.
Now, with active prodding by President Obama, including individual White House meetings with Abbas and Netanyahu in July, the Palestinian leader found that he could no longer remain unresponsive to the West’s entreaties to accept Israel’s continual overtures to return to direct talks, lest the Palestinians be perceived, correctly, as the obstacle to peace.Mahmoud Abbas, however, may be able to salvage his strategy. The one-year timeline the U.S. set to conclude direct talks creates an aura of expectation, but also conveys to Abbas that he has more time to be indecisive, with all the perils that entails.
From my latest op-ed on Fox News, here.
Indeed, it is probable that Hamas’ future will be largely determined in the West Bank, rather than in Gaza. Its role as a spoiler cannot be underestimated, but Hamas’ long-term fortunes depend on an irrevocable failure of the national strategy of negotiations and of the PA state- and institution-building program. If either or both of these policies succeed, Hamas’ single-minded promotion of the strategy (though certainly not always the practice) of violent resistance and insistence on the non-recognition of Israel - even in the context of Palestinian independence - will become increasingly hollow and unappealing. If the PLO and PA strategies unequivocally fail, however, there is little to prevent Hamas from inheriting practically uncontested the leadership of the Palestinian movement and transforming it from a nationalist to an Islamist one.
Hussein Ibish’s reading of the stakes involved in the battle between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, here.
… at least for the time being. That’s not the view of the hairier elements of the Israeli right, it’s the view of the Mahmoud Abbas, President of the PA.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is opposed to lifting the naval blockade of the Gaza Strip because this would bolster Hamas, according to what he told United States President Barack Obama during their meeting at the White House Wednesday. Egypt also supports this position.
The rest here
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Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who lost authority over Gaza three years ago this month in the very bloody Hamas coup, is suddenly asserting responsibility for the 1.5 million Palestinians living there. His nemesis, Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, already was way ahead in feeling the world love as European governments, in the wake of the May 31 flotilla clash, joined with the ranks of traditional Hamas backers in the Arab and Islamic worlds in calling for lifting the blockade of Gaza. President Obama, meeting with Abbas, put icing on the Hamas cake by calling the situation in Gaza “unsustainable.”
The absolutist Palestinian demand for a complete halt to settlement construction was cemented at the Fatah party congress in August. But the US had eased away from insisting on a wholesale cessation of settlement activity. After all, both the Bush administration and Israeli-Palestinian negotiators had recognized that any final peace arrangement would involve some kind of territorial swap, withIsrael retaining major settlement blocs and handing over some territory within its pre-1967 border.Abbas remained adamant, refusing to return to negotiations that had been ongoing since the 1993 Oslo Accords. He rebuked Netanyahu’s announcement in November of a 10-month freeze on new settlement construction - a move the Obama administration welcomed and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called “unprecedented.” By then, however, Abbas had announced his readiness to resign as PA president, fueling speculation about the future of democratic PA government.
AJC’s Kenneth Bandler in the Jerusalem Post - read the entire piece here.
This is a guest post by Kenneth Bandler, Director of Communications for the American Jewish Committee.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas must regret the failure of Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beteinu to get Balad, the nationalist party in the Israeli Arab sector, banned from the Knesset elections earlier this year. Balad party head Jamal Zahalka is now openly calling on Abbas to resign.
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