Palestinian authority President Mahmoud Abbas[/caption]
In 2007, the Bush administration, with Israel’s blessing, embarked on a clandestine program to arm and assist the secular Palestinian Fatah movement in its increasingly violent rivalry with the Islamist Hamas. The brief but bloody civil war that followed left Hamas with control over Gaza and the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority holding sway over the West Bank.
Rather than reviving the peace talks as an empowering gesture to Fatah and its leader, Mahmoud Abbas, who is also president of the Palestinian Authority, Israel and its U.S. ally squeezed both sides - Hamas, by incarcerating Gaza behind a ring of blast walls and pillboxes, and Fatah by imposing on it responsibility for Israeli security. If the PA prevented militant groups from attacking Jewish settlements, so the argument went, Israel would feel secure enough to trade land for peace.
Among rational minds, the notion that an occupied people should protect its occupiers would be received as ludicrous. (However much of a botched job Washington made of post-invasion Iraq, for example, it did not as a matter of policy retaliate against the Iraqi people for hostile action committed against U.S. troops there.) In the pathology that is the U.S.-Israeli relationship, however, there is nothing odd about layering one inhumanity upon another for the sake of a Greater Israel.
The arrangement worked well enough for Israel though not for Abbas, and the bill may soon be served in the form of a Third Intifada. In a recent column for The New York Times, Nathan Thrall of the International Crisis Group noted that thanks to Abbas’ labors, “Israelis have come to believe they can eat their cake and have it, too. A majority of citizens polled earlier this year said their state could remain Jewish and democratic without relinquishing any of the West Bank.” Relieved of pressure from the campaign-mode Obama administration to exploit a choice opportunity for peace, Thrall writes, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is similarly unencumbered at home, despite warnings from his own spymasters that a third Palestinian uprising is “imminent.”
Thrall quotes Matti Steinberg, a former senior adviser to Israeli security chiefs, describing Abbas as the most “obliging, non-violent Palestinian leader Israel has encountered” and he laments how the Jewish state “argues that it cannot make peace while there is violence, and when there is no violence it sees little reason to make peace.”
Thrall’s column was matched a week later by The Economist, which pointed out that Israel, despite Abbas’ efforts to propitiate it, has failed to reciprocate with even the sop of a settlement freeze, let alone a resumption of peace talks. An empty-handed Abbas is now struggling to prevent a mutiny within his own security cadres, The Economist notes, while Palestinians muse about the likelihood of another intifada “aimed as much at the PA as the Israelis occupying the West Bank.”
Not long after Abbas took power seven years ago, a World Bank official told me in Jerusalem that both the Israelis and their American patrons were taking Abbas for granted. “This poor sap hasn’t been able to deliver a thing,” he said. “Israel and the U.S. has done a dismal job of allowing him to prove himself.” It was, the official implied, a good time for Israel to pursue a peace deal.
If Thrall is correct, however, it is too late. In his column, he saves the last word for Basem Naim, Hamas’s health minister: “Israelis had a golden opportunity to sign an agreement with Abbas. But the chance has already passed. They will not get it again.”
