The Palestinian leadership follows with disdain and frustration the establishment of the new Israeli government: “With the outgoing government we thought it could not get any worse, but it seems that we were wrong,” a senior official in the entourage of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas told Al-Monitor. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, did say that the advantage of the extremist nature of the Israeli government to-be is that now the Palestinian statehood issue would be put to the test, without international demands for incremental progress. “It’s a make-it-or-break-it time,” he said.
The Palestinian leadership, according to this source, is planning at the very outset of the new government to put a policy strategy in place to try to convince the international community to deal with the Palestinian issue again, despite the focus on the Iran negotiations.
