Mahmoud Abbas' Time Has Passed

by John Taylor | Antiwar, June 26, 2008

Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, is a collaborator with the his peoples' chief tormentors, Israel and the United States. Without Israeli and American support, Abbas would be gone in an instant. The general commanding Israeli forces on the West Bank, Gadi Shamni, put it best: "He's a joke, a nothing. We are the only force propping him up. Should we withdraw from the cities, Hamas will sweep him and his men away as they did in Gaza." To be fair, Abbas' predecessor as president of the Palestinian Authority, Yasir Arafat, Mr. Palestine himself, made huge mistakes dealing with the Israelis, perhaps the result of his addiction to the trappings of power and statehood. Arafat loved to jet around the world, meet kings and presidents, and pretend to govern Palestine, which he had in no way liberated from Israeli occupation. Not only did Arafat indemnify the Israelis in the Oslo Accords for everything they had done in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem since the 1967 war, he became the first leader of a national liberation movement to sign an agreement with an occupier to keep its occupation in place. What Arafat received from Israel was authority over a few non-contiguous strips of land, but no control over borders, air space, water resources, or Israeli settlements already dotting the occupied territories. Mahmoud Abbas went Arafat one better: he tried to stamp out Palestinian armed resistance to the Israeli occupation. Abbas demanded "an end to all military action, full calm, a full end to violence." Thus Abbas called on the Palestinians to cease doing what is legal under international law, resisting an occupation, and accept what is illegal under national law, the colonizing of an occupied territory by the occupying power. Settling the West Bank is so much easier when the natives don't fight back. No wonder Abbas is beloved in Washington and Tel Aviv! Continued . . .