In May of 2009, The Washington Post’s Jackson Diehl wrote a scathing assessment of Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and his disingenuous approach to the peace process called Abbas’s Waiting Game:
Abbas and his team fully expect that Netanyahu will never agree to the full settlement freeze — if he did, his center-right coalition would almost certainly collapse. So they plan to sit back and watch while U.S. pressure slowly squeezes the Israeli prime minister from office. “It will take a couple of years,” one official breezily predicted. Abbas rejects the notion that he should make any comparable concession — such as recognizing Israel as a Jewish state, which would imply renunciation of any large-scale resettlement of refugees.
Instead, he says, he will remain passive. “I will wait for Hamas to accept international commitments. I will wait for Israel to freeze settlements,” he said. “Until then, in the West Bank we have a good reality . . . the people are living a normal life.” In the Obama administration, so far, it’s easy being Palestinian.
On Friday (February 18th), the Washington Post published an unsigned editorial with another scathing assessment of Mahmoud Abbas called “Abbas proves he prefers posturing to a peace process”:
PALESTINIAN PRESIDENT Mahmoud Abbas claims to be interested in negotiating a two-state peace settlement with Israel. For two years he has enjoyed the support of a U.S. president more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause than most, if not all, of his predecessors. Yet Mr. Abbas has mostly refused to participate in the direct peace talks that Barack Obama made one of his top foreign policy priorities – and now he has shown himself to be bent on embarrassing and antagonizing the U.S. administration.
Mahmoud Abbas has treated Barack Obama worse than the “Palestinians” have treated any U.S. President except for Bill Clinton who was also embarrassed by the outcome of the peace talks he tried to push through in late 2000.
Barack Obama didn’t learn anything from Bill Clinton’s experience and neither did Bill Clinton, judging by his insistence this past year that a peace deal like the failed offer in 2000 could still be the answer to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
The “Palestinians” are once again doing what would clearly be counter-productive for people who actually want a state.
Mr. Abbas’s stubbornness might seem spectacularly self-defeating – but only if one assumes that he is genuinely interested in a peace deal. In fact, the U.N. gambit allows him to posture as a champion of the Palestinian cause without having to consider any of the hard choices that would be needed to found a Palestinian state. It enables him to deflect criticism from the rival Hamas movement about his friendly relations with the United States. It might even allow him to head off a popular Palestinian rebellion against his own autocratic behavior – Mr. Abbas has failed to schedule overdue elections, including for his own post as president.
Obama is banging his head against the same wall as Bill Clinton:
The Obama administration has all along insisted that Mr. Abbas is willing and able to make peace with Israel – despite considerable evidence to the contrary. If the U.N. resolution veto has one good effect, perhaps it will be to prompt a reevaluation of a leader who has repeatedly proved both weak and intransigent.
It would nice to think that Obama’s Middle East policy advisers are reading op-ed pieces like this and doing some more realistic reassessments of the “peace process” while watching the Arab nations collapsing one by one into what is likely to become a 21st Century Muslim Brotherhood Hell.
While I certainly agree that Obama has made the world a more dangerous place on purpose, I don’t think he was expecting to be embarrassed by the “Palestinians” and I think his head may be spinning over it a bit.
It’s good to see The Washington Post slap them both around in an unsigned editorial.
Tags: Bill Clinton, Mahmoud Abbas
