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Abbas goes to Washington

May 02,2017 - Last updated at May 02,2017

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ arriving in Washington this week will almost certainly summon a sombre sense of déjà vu. 

Donald Trump will be the third US president that the 82-year-old Palestinian leader visits in the Oval Office since 2005. And while much has changed in Washington in the past few months, the bilateral agenda, at least for Abbas, has not: Resumption of negotiations and financial aid.

Abbas has not set foot in the White House since March 2014, when president Barack Obama made a feeble attempt to revive the stalled peace process between Israel and the Palestinians.

Back then, as now, the thorny issue of freezing Jewish settlement building in East Jerusalem and the West Bank hindered any hope for meaningful progress.

Since then, the US chose to take a step back and abandon efforts to bring the two sides together.

Obama felt frustrated by an intransigent Benjamin Netanyahu and while his administration poured billions of dollars on Israel, relations between the two men remained frigid at best.

Little did that help the Palestinians.

Israel unleashed aggressive settlement building plans while discrediting Abbas and his troubled Palestinian Authority.

Without further US intervention, Israel’s insatiable appetite for more
Palestinian lands was never checked.

Now Trump believes he can do better.

In the first 100 days of his presidency, he met Netanyahu, King Abdullah and Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi.

While raising eyebrows over his apparent indifference to the two-state solution, Trump invited the Palestinian president to pursue and ultimately conclude “a conflict-ending settlement between the Palestinians and Israel”.

What this settlement will look like or what it will be based on is unclear.

Observers say that Trump’s Middle East policy remains a work in progress.

Before his arrival, the pro-Israel media launched a campaign to undermine Abbas.

He was taunted for his weak and divisive leadership and failure to
upend Hamas in Gaza.

He was attacked for heading to the United Nations and its agencies to gain recognition for the state of Palestine. And he was mocked for demanding that Israel cease its settlement activities in the occupied territories — an unacceptable precondition for Netanyahu.

On the Palestinian side, he was accused of failing to support the Palestinian prisoners’ hunger strike for fear that it may weaken his grip over the waning Fateh movement.

Certainly his invitation to Washington worries the Israeli leadership. No one knows what Trump will say or commit himself to, in spite of the fact that his appears to be the most Zionist-leaning administration in decades.

On the other hand, Abbas knows that he cannot afford to alienate Trump.

Without US mediation and active involvement, the peace process has no chance of forging ahead.

Can he afford to remain steadfast in his uncompromising positions? Or will he consider his mere audience with the US president as a satisfactory victory after years of appearing irrelevant?

After all, his PA is financially starved and his popularity in the West Bank is at a historic low.

From his solitary prison cell, the charismatic Marwan Barghouthi, who is serving multiple life sentences in Israel, is indirectly challenging Abbas’ leadership.

His recent decision to slash the salaries of Gaza employees did not win him any friends in the besieged strip.

And his insistence on maintaining security coordination with Israel has alienated him from the young and rebellious Fateh cadre.

Still, he is expected to publicly reaffirm his commitment to the two-state solution and to the Arab Peace Initiative, which was revived at the latest Arab summit at the Dead Sea.

He may even dare plead the case of the 1,600 Palestinian prisoners on hunger strike for more than two weeks — including hundreds in administrative detention — who are demanding better prison conditions.

And he must bring up the controversial subject of Israeli settlements, which make the prospect of realising the objective of a Palestinian state weaker than is has ever been.

Trump may have other ideas: Holding a regional peace conference that picks and chooses elements of the Arab Peace Initiative, i.e., normalisation before statehood.

Certainly departing from the two-state solution foundations will open the conflict to all sorts of alternative scenarios. And Netanyahu has one or two up his sleeve.

There is no doubt that in spite of Arab support at the recent summit, the Palestinian leader feels that he is very much on his own.

The Middle East is in a mess and Trump’s priorities, so far, centre on defeating Daesh and checking Iran’s regional expansion.

The US president will visit the region at the end of this month to discuss these pressing issues.

How far he will go to put the peace process back on its tracks and secure a final deal remains an open-ended question.

 

 

The writer is a journalist and political commentator based in Amman.

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