Abbas pushes UN statehood plan forward
The Palestinian Authority views Benjamin Netanyahu's government as a hopeless case, so it plans to move forward on four tracks to achieve UN recognition of Palestine by 2015.
"Permanent status negotiations between the state of Palestine and the State of Israel is what we want to see in 2015," a senior political Palestinian source in Ramallah told Al-Monitor. A long monologue followed about Palestinian frustration with reduced international attention to the Palestinian predicament — a frustration shared by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. What the Palestinians see from their telescope is a weaker US President Barack Obama, Europeans horrified by the Islamic State, Israel more messianic than ever and a self-centered Arab world. They now seek to restart negotiations only from a status of equality with Israel.
The Palestinians refuse to remain, from their point of view, the only country in the world under occupation. The old guard of Fatah — the group that served late PLO leader Yasser Arafat — knows it is their last opportunity. Abbas is 79 years old. The young guard is disillusioned with the path of two decades of futile negotiations; some yearn for an intifada, some want to see the more militant Marwan Barghouti as a main leader and others fall into the arms of Hamas. For many in the Palestinian Authority (PA) leadership, it's now or never.
Sources within Abbas' inner circle of associates feel fortified by the arrangements worked out with Hamas under Egyptian stewardship in Cairo on Sept. 25. They claim that Egypt played a pivotal role in pressuring Hamas to agree to a technocratic government leading the Gaza reconstruction and for Fatah's Presidential Security Forces to oversee all border crossings. This is by no means the end of Hamas, but it gives Fatah a new foothold in Gaza and bolsters its position toward Egypt and Israel. Israel now becomes more dependent on Fatah for security coordination.
Above all, it allows Abbas to speak of a two-state solution in the name of all the Palestinian territories. Abbas' feisty Sept. 26 speech at the UN General Assembly marked the demarcation of the Palestinian efforts — no more negotiations with Israel without an agreed border, a campaign at the UN for statehood with an agreed time line and the strengthening of the Fatah leadership in the eyes of Palestinians and the Arab world.
