Abbas draws two-year timeline

With the general commotion in Israel over the security flare-up in the north on the one hand and the possible indictment of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the other, one tends to forget a key player in the Middle Eastern region — the Palestinians.

Visiting Ramallah these days, one comes away with a sense of the deep despair the Palestinian leadership is feeling. Faced with the radicalization of the pro-Iranian axis and with a recent surge of violence in the West Bank, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas finds himself between a rock and a hard place. While he does not want to appear reluctant to join a possible regional cycle of uprising, violence is actually the last thing he is interested in.

A senior PLO source said that he was recently present at a policy meeting in reaction to the US positions. Together with two other confidants, he heard a long monologue from Abbas about the state of the struggle for Palestinian statehood and about his own destiny. The official did not give Al-Monitor a verbatim account of Abbas’ words, but rather a sense of what they constituted.

According to the source, although Abbas is in a grim mood, he is keeping his fighting spirit. The Palestinian president will not, under any circumstances, agree to any version of a US negotiation plan. He believes that US President Donald Trump and Netanyahu are coordinating together in order to weaken him.