Israel Matzav

We don't need to hear from Abu Mazen either

In Friday's JPost, editor David Horovitz argues that it's not Barack Obama from whom Israel needs to hear, it's Mahmoud Abbas Abu Mazen Bluff. And after this past week's Fatah conference in Bethlehem, Horovitz - and most Israelis - don't expect that to happen.

AN OBAMA visit would be encouraging, welcome and almost certainly constructive. Israel would certainly be pleased to hear directly from the president. But the voice we need to hear is that of Abbas - an Abbas speaking to his people and to ours in terms he did not employ at Fatah's Bethlehem gathering. An Abbas countering the duplicitous Arafat's assertion to the Palestinian public that the Jews have no rights and no legitimacy here. An Abbas explaining to his people and to ours that we are fated to live together and that he will meet us on the road to a better future.

The trouble is that it gets ever harder to believe that Abbas is indeed a Palestinian leader devoted to compromise when he, by his own admission, so derisively rejected Ehud Olmert's unprecedented peace overtures. It gets ever harder when Abbas presides over the relegitimization of the murderous Aksa Martyrs Brigades at a Fatah conference that did anything but advance prospects for reconciliation.

Worthy columns and editorials notwithstanding, you see, it's not what the US president isn't saying directly to us that's most worrying for Israelis. It's what the Palestinian leadership is saying, to its own people and to anyone else who's listening: far too much that is deeply troubling, and far too little that engenders good faith.

There's no point in Abu Mazen addressing Israelis. If he addressed us in English, he would tell his 'people' something different in Arabic anyway. And he's certainly not going to say in Arabic that Israel didn't poison Arafat and that he's going to dismantle the al-Aksa Martyrs Brigades (let alone actually do it). As to the prospect of President Obama coming to Israel, I've already discussed here why he has nothing to say to us either.

On the other hand, if Sarah Palin wants to come here, we're all ears.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:00 PM