Livni's duplicitous coalition game
The source for this story is DEBKA, which as you all know sometimes goes out on a limb, but this story sounds too plausible not to run and besides - nothing about coalition formation is 100% reliable anyway. It is Abbas' intention to unveil his Palestinian unity administration simultaneously with the presentation of Binyamin Netanyahu's broad national government. By this means, he expects to maneuver the Americans into non-cooperation with Israel unless its new government swallows the Hamas component of a legitimate Palestinian government.Read the whole thing - there's a kick-up in terrorism that (of course) goes with this scenario.
Hamas, for its part, is making hay. Not only are the Islamist fundamentalists not asked to meet international demands and give up their avowed aim to destroy Israel, they have cornered Abbas by requiring him to give up his security partnership with the United States and Israel. He has responded with a directive to Fatah negotiators to promise that their joint regime will in time edge out of this partnership.
The undercover Palestinian moves climax Wednesday, Feb. 25 at a formal Palestinian reconciliation conference in Cairo chaired by Egypt's intelligence minister and senior Palestinian negotiator Gen. Omar Suleiman.
Cairo has reopened Gaza's Rafah gateway for three days as a gesture to Hamas.
Abbas is therefore moving along his own underhand track unrelated to the Palestinian pretext Kadima's Livni is using to opt out of Netanyahu's coalition government. She wants him to commit to the two-state solution of the Israel-Palestinian conflict as his government's top priority. Netanyahu argues that the Olmert-Livni talks with Abbas over many months got nowhere, while the perils posed by Iran and its advance on Israel's borders are immediate and existential.
Some of Livni's key associates in Kadima have launched their own freelance approach to Abbas. It aims at discrediting the Netanyahu administration from the moment he presents his lineup to the president. At that moment, on their advice, Palestinian Authority leaders will announce the break-off of contacts with Israel until the new Israeli prime minister publicly states his commitment to a Palestinian state living side by side with Israel and a halt to settlement expansion.
Livni's close circle is thus hoping to use the Palestinians as a blunderbuss to beat the Netanyahu government into accepting Kadima's point of view or face international condemnation.
Unfortunately, it sounds too plausible.
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:09 AM
2 Comments:
I wouldn't be surprised at Kadima's duplicity. It wants to force Israel's next government to accept a political concept Israeli voters rejected in the past election. They want to have it both ways but that sounds like something a party with no ideology would do.
There's a whole tradition of Israel's failed politicians undertaking private foreign policies to embarrass their nation.
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