Reports are out that Mahmoud Abbas is telling people he won’t run for re-election as head of the Palestinian Authority: “The aides said Abbas received calls earlier today from Israel’s president and defense minister, the president of Egypt and the king of Jordan, all asking him to reconsider.”
People want Abbas to reconsider, because him declining to run could be a disaster for the peace process which, in turn, would be a disaster for the remaining credibility of the four figures in question. But note that among those begging Abbas to reconsider is not Israel’s prime minister, Bibi Netanyahu, who loves the idea of isolating and discrediting Palestinian moderates in order to bring Palestinian radicals to power and thus have the pretext he wants to avoid peace negotiations. The question is why the United States has been helping Netanyahu do this. The Obama administration’s decision to back-track on its initial demand of a settlement freeze, followed by the catastrophically counterproductive pressure that was brought to bear on Abbas to disavow the Goldstone report have massively undermined his political position. The upshot has been another set of victories for the Hamas-Likud partnership that’s been ruining things in Israel/Palestine since the wave of suicide bombings that brought Netanyahu to power in the first place in the 1990s.
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