Abbas the trickster
Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert treated Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas with kid gloves in his New York Times's op-ed piece Wednesday. When he was prime minister, Olmert presented Mahmoud Abbas with a generous proposal. By calling the Palestinians' demand to a right of return a "family unification" rather than a return of refugees to their former homes in Israel, Olmert went a long way in attempting to resolve this bone of contention. This wording obscured the term so much that even Olmert's own foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, refused to adopt it.
Olmert has written in his memoirs that he waited in vain for a response to the proposal but Abbas chose to hunker down in Ramallah instead.
U.N. protocol does not allow for interjections to a General Assembly address but there is no doubt that if they were, Israel's ambassador to the U.N. Ron Prosor would rise and say loud and clear: "When are you going to honor your pledge to respond to Olmert's proposal that has been on standby for almost three years-"
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Mahmoud Abbas is a trickster. He disavowed Palestinian terrorism and instead launched a diplomatic initiative. Pursuing this initiative and then going to the U.N. was an unwise, albeit legitimate, decision. However, one must recall Abbas' record of having cold feet anytime a peace proposal actually comes close to materializing into the real thing. This has happened at least three times. In 2000, he urged Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat to ditch the Camp David summit because then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak put the division of Jerusalem on the table; a few years ago he buried his head in the sand after seeing Olmert's plan; and then he refused to rise up to the occasion and enter negotiations when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced a settlement construction freeze in 2009. The only plausible explanation for this behavior is that he fears a peace agreement. If I may quote U.S. President Barack Obama during his address to the General Assembly on Wednesday, "Peace is hard."
Some Israelis who support a partition of the land claim that the same accusations can be justifiably leveled against Netanyahu. Even so, Abbas has been reluctant to test Netanyahu's mettle. He knows full well that he failed to enter negotiations despite Netanyahu's pledge to support a two-state solution and a nine-month settlement building moratorium. He was served with a golden opportunity to embarrass Israel. He got cold feet because in his dictionary, the term "Jewish people" does not exist. That entry has been supplanted by a figment of his imagination called the "Israeli nation." According to this rationale, I am not part of the Jewish nation as an Israeli citizen. The corollary is that Dr. Ahmed Tibi, an Arab-Israeli MK close to the Palestinian Authority, is not part of the Palestinian people and that both of us only have one nationality, Israeli. I suggest you confront Ahmed Tibi with this and see if he concurs. He will not, of course. But the so-called Israeli Nation, a brainchild of Mahmoud Abbas and chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat, was to be music to those with an untrained ear on this topic.
Even without being privy to the language of Abbas' address on Friday at the U.N. I am willing to risk predicting that it will make no mention of a "Jewish people" or "the Jews' right for self determination."
Nor will it include even the smallest of concessions on the right of return. But rest assured, the Western media will continue to call him a man of peace.
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