Which Abbas
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas seems to embody a great many opposing impulses in the Palestinian national movement. Ostensibly the heir to Arafatās violent meshing of Islamism and anticolonial nationalism, the octogenarian Abbas has spent the better part of the past two decades battling against the very violence and terrorism that Arafat so eagerly promoted. Yet like his predecessor, he has gone to extraordinary lengths to lionize and celebrate the killers of Israeli civilians, naming city streets and schools after them and providing large budgets for their familiesā welfare from the PAās paltry treasury.
The contradictions donāt end there. Abbas demands Palestinian independence, but has vehemently opposed unilateral Israeli withdrawals such as the 2005 pullout from Gaza, as though how Palestine is liberated is more important to him than that it is liberated.
Abbasās relationship with Israelās Arab citizens is no less bewildering. One example: He is adamant that they must never be given citizenship in the new independent state of Palestine.
In 2009, in a conversation with Palestinian negotiators leaked to the British daily The Guardian, Abbas was asked point-blank by an Israeli Arab member of the PAās negotiating team if he, the Israeli, would be eligible for Palestinian citizenship.
āThe answer, strategically, is no,ā Abbas replied. āYou should stay where you, protect your rights are [sic] and preserve your community. You donāt need a passport to prove that you are a Palestinian. In 1948, Palestinians in Israel were 138,000 and now above a million. That homeland is your homeland. You must remain there and this does not detract whatsoever from the fact that you are Arabs and Palestiniansā¦Raise two banners. Equality [in Israel] and an independent state for your brothers in the occupied territory.ā
This was not a one-off comment. Five years later, in a November 2014 interview with the Egyptian daily Akhbar al-Yawm, translated by MEMRI, Abbas said, āNetanyahu once told me that it was an āidea from hell,ā from his perspective, for him to give me the Triangle [an area in northern Israel densely populated with Arab towns] and everything in it. It was occupied in 1949 and at that time it had 38,000 residents. Today, it probably has about 400,000 residents. I said: āI will not take anyone. Forget it, because honestly, I will not allow, or force, any Arab to relinquish his Israeli citizenship.ā You might be surprised, but this is important. As far as Iām concerned, this is sacred.ā
Not only would he refuse to give Palestinian citizenship to Palestinian-Israelis, he would refuse to accept any part of Israel where Palestinian-Israelis live as part of a newly liberated Palestinian state.
(full article online)
Why peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians keep failingThis is not a conflict between two nations, the Palestinian narrative insists, but between an authentic, rooted people battling a political program sustained by nefarious ideologues. Israel is at its core a ācolonialā project, or āapartheid,ā or āimperialistā ā the specific terminology or injustice Israel is accused of hardly matters. What is important to Palestinian discourse about Israel is the category.
That is, Israel is not a nation, but merely a political structure like those from which epithets like āapartheidā or āimperialistā are drawn. And that matters, because political structures can be peeled off a land or a people. Nations cannot. Nations may make mistakes, they may commit crimes, but nothing they do can lose them the one fundamental right granted to all nations by natural law: existence itself.
In other words, this is not an argument about Israelās injustices or inequalities, but about its nationhood, and thus its fundamental legitimacy.
Indeed.
It's in good form to provide a citation for your cutting and pasting.
Indeed.