Israel Matzav

Abu Mazen threatens to kidnap more IDF soldiers

At the World Economic Forum on Monday, 'moderate' 'Palestinian' President Mahmoud Abbas Abu Mazen issued a thinly-veiled threat to kidnap Israeli soldiers.

Do you want us to abduct other Shalits? This is not part of our culture.

Frimet Roth points out that Abu Mazen's threat is part of a pattern.

Six weeks ago, the Palestinian Ma’an News Agency laid out Abbas’s preconditions to getting into negotiations with the Israelis. In “Abbas tells Kerry: We are committed to peace“, they are listed as:

* “Settlements could not be tolerated, particularly Israel’s planned E1 settlement project which would divide the West Bank and isolate Jerusalem.”
* “There would be no return to negotiations without a settlement freeze… The PLO would only return to negotiations with Israel if it stopped building illegal settlements…”
* “…And released all prisoners, particularly those detained before the Oslo Accords were signed.”
* “Abbas also wants Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to present a map of the borders of a future Palestinian state before talks can resume… [He] wants to know, through a map to be presented by Benjamin Netanyahu to [US Secretary of State John] Kerry, what the prime minister’s view of a two-state solution would be, especially the borders…”
* “Any return to negotiations requires Netanyahu to agree on 1967 borders,” his political adviser Nimr Hammad said, referring in fact not to borders but to the 1949 ceasefire lines.

In that same week, a Jerusalem Post article “Kerry in another bid to get Israel, P.A. to talk” quoted two additional demands that Abbas has placed as preconditions to re-starting negotiations with Israel:

* “That Israel hand control over parts of Area C in the West Bank” to the P.A. “Under the terms of the Oslo Accords, Area C of the West Bank is under Israel’s exclusive control.”
* Israel must “promise to refrain from withholding Palestinians’ tax revenues in the future.”

None of these are put forward as the goals of peace negotiation. They are all pre-starting points, conditions to walking into the room.

And Kerry thinks he can get Abu Mazen - who openly threatens to abduct Israeli soldiers as a 'negotiating tactic' in an international forum - to make peace? Or perhaps he's just hoping Israel will commit suicide....

Labels: Abu Mazen, John Kerry, kidnapping, negotiations without preconditions

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 1:43 PM