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One more Abbas peace plan

Sep 09,2014 - Last updated at Sep 09,2014

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas approached the US administration with a fresh peace plan.

According to press reports, his chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat delivered the plan to US Secretary of State John Kerry in Washington recently.

Abbas discussed his idea in meetings with Khaled Mishaal and other Hamas leaders in Doha, in late August, in the presence of Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad Al Thani.

The plan, according to various reports, is mainly based on a PA demand that the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land end within a specific time limit of no more than three years and that a Palestinian state be established along the 1967 lines, with East Jerusalem as its capital.

Abbas wanted to bring his plan to the Americans first (some reports mentioned the Quartet as well) and if they had accepted it, he would have engaged in a new round of negotiations with the Israeli government, probably with American patronage, to define the borders of the envisaged Palestinian state.

Once the borders were agreed, Abbas thought, they would move to other final status issues, which would not take more than nine months in total — three months for agreeing on the borders and six months for resolving all the other so-called final status issues.

In case the Americans did not approve the PA plan, the Palestinians would have headed straight to the UN Security Council seeking a resolution demanding that Israel end its occupation of the land of a UN member state, and if blocked there by the American veto, they would have moved to the General Assembly.

The Palestinians would also go to other UN bodies to sue Israel and its leaders for war crimes committed against the Palestinian people in former wars if their UN bid failed totally.

Apparently, and as expected, Kerry liked the idea and so did the Israeli government.

What better than buying every side, including the Palestinian initiator, ample time, at least a year, without any specific commitment or political risk?

The two-state solution, a slogan on which there is common consensus, does, though vaguely, call for the establishment of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital and that obviously implies an end to the occupation.

But the slogan is one thing and the reality is another.

According to the secret minutes of the Doha meetings between Abbas and the Hamas leaders, as published by the Lebanese daily Al Akhbar, Hamas leaders were not impressed by the move. They wanted to be part of the decision-making system rather than just be informed.

They also complained that the little they were informed of was of a general nature, is not new and could not form an adequate basis for a joint Palestinian national strategy.

The Palestinians and the Israelis have been negotiating since 1993, for more than 20 full years now, to settle their conflict on the very basis of recycled terms Abbas is now proposing, but without any progress.

Actually things have been going backwards, while on the Israeli side, massive colonisation of the land earmarked for the Palestinian state moved ahead, rendering any implementation of the peace clichés practically impossible.

Kerry was desperate to prolong the failed talks he sponsored at the beginning of his State Department term, but the Israelis aborted every idea of his and continued their unchecked defiance.

What Abbas is offering now is a return to the negotiations, the same negotiations that failed miserably and repeatedly over the past two decades.

It was always easier to agree on general principles, but never on details.

Abbas wants to guarantee approval of the idea before moving to reach agreement on the Palestinian state’s borders, as if that were a straightforward matter.

In fact, and when faced with persistent Israeli rejection of US proposals to freeze settlement construction while talks were proceeding, US President Barack Obama suggested that agreement on the borders would render the controversy on settlement construction irrelevant. So did Kerry.

But defining the borders has been a major obstacle in the way of all negotiations, particularly the last round, when Israel not only insisted on keeping all its illegally built settlements on occupied Palestinian land but also wanted to keep the Jordan Valley and Jerusalem.

That, with the Israeli refusal to respect the terms of a former agreement to free the last group of Palestinian prisoners, was the specific reason for the failure of the most recent Kerry peace mission.

Why should future negotiations be any different if replicating exactly what has been tried over and over again with assured failure?

The 51-day war on Gaza left many parties with a hard-to-conceal bitter harvest.

The resistance, often dismissed as no more than a mere nuisance, emerged as a major factor in any post-battle adjustments.

Israel could not blunt the Gaza resistance by war nor disarm it by agreement during the following negotiations.

Talk of a possible Security Council resolution ordering the removal of Gaza weapons did not seem to materialise either. All such attempts were tried with Hizbollah in Lebanon after the unsuccessful 2006 Israeli attack, without success.

Then comes the Abbas peace plan to rescue the Gaza adventure losers.

One year or more of negotiations would conveniently prolong the life of the PA, whose validity has expired and whose standing among the Palestinians has been further eroded by the heroic performance of the resistance.

The Americans would jump on the opportunity of resumed negotiations because that was specifically what they wanted when Kerry’s mission reached the wall last spring.

Renewed negotiations would also buy Israel needed extra time to reassess its losses from the war on Gaza and to continue its illegal construction on Palestinian land.

Moreover, during renewed negotiations, Israel would be assured that the PA does not take any action against its war crimes to the UN organisations and the International Criminal Court.

But there is more to the Abbas plan than that.

Apparently, his insistence on keeping the decision of either war or peace in his hands, as well as his demand that there be no weapons except in the hands of the official security organisations of the current unity government, sounds like preparing the ground for disarming the resistance in Gaza, just like in the West Bank.

“If Hamas does not accept the establishment of a Palestinian state with one government, one law, and one weapon, there will be no partnership between us,” said Abbas in a meeting with Egyptian journalists last Saturday.

He also demanded that the PA be the only party responsible for making any decision to declare war or sign a peace agreement with Israel.

This condescending attitude towards an important Palestinian faction clearly reflects a strange understanding of the meaning of reconciliation.

Apparently Abbas views his accord with Hamas as a takeover, rather than an even partnership.

His persistent complaint that Hamas continued to run daily affairs in Gaza after the formation of the unity government ignores the fact that that government stayed away from Gaza while under attack. Its absence thus contributed to the impression that Gaza was an alien out-of-control entity.

In other words, Abbas wants to act on Israel’s behalf to disarm the resistance. What the Israeli army could not accomplish in battle would now be achieved by the Palestinian Authority.

This would be in keeping with Abbas’ previously stated view that security collaboration with Israel is his “sacred” duty.

Abbas has already threatened to break off the reconciliation government and to end ranks with Hamas if the latter does not stop to act as a shadow government.

If the threat is carried through, it will realise one more of Israel’s war aims, which is the destruction of the Fateh-Hamas reconciliation.

As reflected in the secret minutes of the Doha PA/Hamas talks, Abbas is acting with much nervousness and some panic.

While all Palestinians want unity, and paid a heavy price to get this far, it is difficult to see how such unity can work when the PA and Abbas insist on delivering to Israel what it could not win in battle.

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