Israel Matzav

Abu Bluff throws Obama under the bus

Frustrated with the realities of American politics, 'moderate' 'Palestinian' President Mahmoud Abbas Abu Mazen vented his frustrations with President Obama in a Newsweek interview (Hat Tip: Memeorandum).

A week earlier, he told me bluntly that Obama had led him on, and then let him down by failing to keep pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for a moratorium on settlement building in the West Bank last year. “It was Obama who suggested a full settlement freeze,” Abbas explained. “I said OK, I accept. We both went up the tree. After that, he came down with a ladder and he removed the ladder and said to me, jump. Three times he did it.” Abbas also criticized the mediation efforts of Obama’s special envoy, George Mitchell, who has shuttled between Israelis and Palestinians for more than two years. “Every visit by Mitchell, we talked to him and gave him some ideas. At the end we discovered that he didn’t convey any of these ideas to the Israelis. What does it mean?”

What it means is that Abu Mazen is a fool. He was a fool to go along with Obama demanding something Israel could never give, he was a fool for letting Obama take that ladder away, he was a fool for not accepting a far-too-generous offer that was made to him by that other fool, Ehud Olmert. And Abu Mazen is a fool if he thinks he's going to get anywhere with Israel without sitting down at a table and talking directly without preconditions.

If Abbas leaves the stage without a deal, it would add another layer of uncertainty to the regional turbulence. Among political figures in the West Bank and Gaza, Abbas is the most popular, followed by the leader of Hamas. Even if Abbas’s Fatah party can retain power, his successor would lack Abbas’s founding-generation stature. He would likely be less able to push through the required compromises for peace with Israel. “It would really be a tragedy of missed opportunities,” says Yossi Beilin, a former peace negotiator who knows Abbas well.

But 'Abbas' has passed on every chance to compromise, on every chance to reach a deal. And the way in which Palileaks was treated by the 'Palestinians' shows that Abbas is no more capable of pushing through compromises than anyone else. In fact, it seems that no 'Palestinian' is capable of pushing through compromises, which is why we Israeli Jews believe that we have no peace partner. So do we really lose anything if Abbas leaves the stage without a deal? Unlikely.

In fact, 'Abbas' (we know him here as Abu Mazen) is a fount of miscalculation....

After Abbas informed Obama he wouldn’t withdraw the resolution, Clinton followed up with a 30-minute exhortation of her own. Then more pressure. Lower-level officials phoned several Palestinian influentials in Ramallah and asked them to use their sway over the Palestinian leader. Still, Abbas was unprepared for what was coming. Only when he watched the Security Council vote on television did the reality sink in. “I had an idea that they will abstain,” he tells me. “But when they said, ‘Who will be against?’ my friend Susan [America’s ambassador to the U.N., Susan Rice] raises her hand.” Abbas shakes his arm and lets out a long hoot. The council’s 14 other members, including France and Germany, all supported the resolution.

What did he think would happen? Did he really believe that Obama was going to allow that resolution to pass a year and a half before an election? Eventually, the self-preservation instinct was going to have to kick in (By the way, we should not delude ourselves - if God forbid there is a second Obama term, those types of resolutions will routinely pass).

Is the unilateral declaration of statehood that Abu Mazen is pushing for September another miscalculation? Bet on it.

Labels: Abu Mazen, Barack Obama, Palestinian state RIGHT NOW syndrome, unilateral declaration of statehood, United Nations

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:37 AM