On Dec. 17, Palestinian Minister of Civil Affairs Hussein al-Sheikh met with top Civil Administration officials in Jerusalem to give them an overview of the miserable state of affairs in the Palestinian Authority (PA). After news of the meeting became public, Sheikh told the Palestinian Ma'an News Agency that Egypt and Jordan had asked him to warn Israel that if it continues its policy of opposing Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and the PA, it would have to “bear the consequences.”
Israel maintains an open channel of communications with Egypt over the situation in Gaza and is also in contact with Jordan. So it is doubtful that either of those countries pressured Sheikh to meet with the Israelis. It is far more likely that this was Sheikh’s way to justify the meeting. Given the current situation in the PA, any contact it initiates with Israel could be interpreted as collaboration with “the enemy.”
Ever since he was first appointed president in November 2004, Abbas has never been as weak. In contrast, Hamas is on the rise, not only in Gaza but also in the West Bank. Sheikh is seen by the Israeli colleagues as someone whose assessments are trustworthy. When someone like him warns Israel that it will have to “bear the consequences” for its actions, what he is actually saying is that if Israel continues behaving toward Abbas as it does now, it will find that Hamas has replaced him and is now sitting along its fences in the West Bank, just as happened in Gaza in 2007.
In January 2006, Hamas won the election to the Palestinian parliament with 74 seats to Fatah’s 45 seats. It is worth noting that Abbas was forced by President George W. Bush to call these elections to signal that he was upholding democracy in the PA In the time between his announcement of elections and the date that they were held, Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip during what became known as the “Disengagement” in the summer of 2005. As far as the Palestinians were concerned, the Disengagement was seen as a Hamas victory over the Zionists. They succeeded where Abbas and his predecessor, PLO leader Yasser Arafat, had failed.
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