Abbas Is Ready to Reject Peace Plan, But Not for the Consequences: David May, Real Clear World, May 16, 2019 — Palestinians will reject the deal of the century if it does not meet their demands, Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki warned last week.
Why Palestinians Oppose Economic Prosperity: Bassam Tawil, Gatestone, May 17, 2019 — In most normal societies, a businessman who seeks to improve the living conditions of his people by boosting the economy and creating job opportunities for the unemployed — including a host of jobless university graduates — is treated with respect.
Is the Palestinian Authority Faking Its Financial Crisis?: Maurice Hirsch and N.J. Zilberdik, Arutz Sheva, May 21, 2019 — The Palestinian Authority (PA) is currently facing a financial crisis, the World Bank reported.
The Failure of Palestinian Nationalism: Alexander H. Joffe, BESA, Mar. 10, 2019 — The February 2019 Warsaw Summit, which saw the Israeli PM take his seat beside Arab leaders, was a turning point that signaled the ebbing fortunes of the Palestinian cause.
ON TOPIC LINKS:
‘This is Not a Peace Plan’: Palestinians Shun Bahrain Conference: Al Jazeera, May 20, 2019 — The Palestinian leadership has not been consulted about a US-led conference in Bahrain next month in support of Washington’s Middle East peace plan, Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh said.
Greenblatt: PA Can Pay For Health Care But Prefers to Pay Terrorists: Erez Linn, Israel Hayom, May 19, 2019 — President Trump’s Special Representative for International Negotiations Jason Greenblatt lambasted the Palestinian Authority over the weekend, blaming it for prioritizing the welfare of terrorists and its high-ranking officials over the well-being of its people.
Ex-Fatah Prince, East Jerusalem Lawyer Indicted For Attempted Terror Attacks: Yonah Jeremy Bob and Anna Ahronheim, Jerusalem Post, May 20, 2019 — Former Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade commander Zakariya Zubeidi and east Jerusalem lawyer Tareq Barghut have been indicted in the IDF West Bank Courts for multiple recent attempted terrorist attacks in which they allegedly fired on Jews in the vicinity of Ramallah in the West Bank.
Analysts: Palestinians’ Court Appeal On Us Embassy Relocation Will Not Hold: Charles Bybelezer and Mohammad Al-Kassim, Jerusalem Post, May 18, 2019 — The Palestinian Authority filed an “indictment” with the International Court of Justice in The Hague against the United States this week on the one-year anniversary of the relocation of the US Embassy to Jerusalem, yet many analysts are skeptical that the action will bear fruit.
ABBAS IS READY TO REJECT PEACE PLAN, BUT NOT FOR THE CONSEQUENCES
David May
Real Clear World, May 16, 2019
Palestinians will reject the deal of the century if it does not meet their demands, Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki warned last week. To prepare for the rejection, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has been consolidating power for more than a year at the expense of his rivals. Though centralizing power may look like an effective strategy from within, it will not likely shield the Palestinian Authority from the consequences of rejecting the White House’s forthcoming peace plan.
Abbas met U.S. President Donald Trump four times between March and September 2017, while U.S. and Palestinian delegates met more than 30 times. After Trump’s decision to move the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem last year, Abbas severed political ties with the White House. Abbas then set in motion a series of moves designed to consolidate his political power and prepare his political allies to face the aftermath of dismissing the American peace proposal.
The Fatah party that Abbas leads is the dominant grouping under the Palestine Liberation Organization umbrella, which is the Palestinians’ official international negotiating body. The PLO established the Palestinian Authority as an interim government pursuant to the Oslo Accords. Abbas sits at the helm of all three bodies.
In May 2018, just as the United States moved its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv, Abbas convened the 787-strong Palestinian National Council, the PLO’s legislative body, for the first time in 22 years. The National Council elected a new 124-member Palestinian Central Council and reportedly transferred significant power to it. The smaller body is easier to manage in a political crisis.
Abbas convened the newly inducted Palestinian Central Council in October 2018. The Council released a statement that began with a declaration of its opposition to the Trump administration’s “deal of the century,” even though specifics of the plan have yet to be released. By holding both of these meetings in Ramallah, a city inaccessible to Palestinian expatriates and to many supporters of his PLO rivals, Abbas helped further solidify his base.
In December 2018, Abbas then moved to dissolve the Palestinian Legislative Council, the Palestinian Authority’s representative body. The Legislative Council had not met since being convened shortly after Hamas won the 2006 legislative elections. As part of its dissolution, Abbas promised to hold elections within six months — the first Palestinian elections in 13 years. That deadline is fast approaching. With a new Legislative Council reshaped in Abbas’ image, the Palestinian leader will have additional political backing to resist American or even Gulf Arab pressure to accept the peace plan.
In January of this year, Abbas chaired a meeting of Fatah’s Central Committee, during which he recommended the dissolution of the government led by Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah. Hamdallah, a low-profile technocrat who had served for six years, promptly resigned. In March, Abbas appointed Mohammad Shtayyeh as the new prime minister. Shtayyeh is known within Palestinian circles as a much more capable figure, closely aligned with President Abbas.
While consolidating power and eliminating rivals is nothing new for Abbas, undertaking all of these moves, especially with institutions that had been dormant or unchanged for years, indicates that the Palestinian president is preparing for something major.
With a consolidated Palestinian bureaucracy in place, Abbas is now bracing for the Trump peace plan, which Palestinians believe will not go far enough in recognizing their national aspirations. Nobody knows when the plan will be unveiled. There were suggestions it would be revealed in early June, after Israel’s coalition is formed and Ramadan is over. From all indications, Abbas is preparing to reject it. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
WHY PALESTINIANS OPPOSE ECONOMIC PROSPERITY
Bassam Tawil
Gatestone, May 17, 2019
In most normal societies, a businessman who seeks to improve the living conditions of his people by boosting the economy and creating job opportunities for the unemployed — including a host of jobless university graduates — is treated with respect. The Palestinians, however, do not seem to belong to those societies.
Ashraf Jabari is a 45-year-old businessman from the West Bank city of Hebron. A member of a large Palestinian clan in the city, Jabari believes in economic cooperation and peaceful coexistence with his Jewish neighbors, including settlers living in the West Bank.
Earlier this year, Jabari and some of his Jewish friends launched a new economic initiative to advance joint entrepreneurship between Israelis and Palestinians there.
“We are working on taking down borders, and both Israelis and Palestinians need to take part in this,” Jabari explained. “We need to breach this wall. We must first create good links and good relationships not just in the West Bank, but all over Israel so we can achieve our desired goal.”
To advance his goal, Jabari recently announced the establishment of a new party that calls for focusing on economic prosperity for Palestinians:
The Reform and Development Party, he said, seeks to solve the economic problems of the Palestinians, including high unemployment. “We have an army of university graduates who are unemployed,” he said. “We’ve reached a situation where a young [Palestinian] man holding a master’s degree in law has to work as a street vendor because he can’t find work.”
One would expect a message like that to be welcomed by Palestinians. Here is a man who is talking about helping his people put food on their tables. Here is a man who is saying: “Let’s put aside our political differences and focus on ways of achieving economic stability for our people.”
Instead of giving Jabari a chance to carry out his initiative, Palestinians have waged a massive smear campaign against him, with many denouncing him as a “traitor” and “collaborator” with Israel and Jews. Some Palestinians have even gone as far as calling for his arrest or execution.
The campaign against the Palestinian businessman reached its peak on May 13, after he hosted at his home several Jews for the Ramadan break-the-fast meal, Iftar. It is not unusual for Muslims to host non-Muslims for the Iftar meal. In this instance, however, Jabari seems to have invited the “wrong” guests: Jews.
As soon as photos of the Ramadan meal appeared in various media outlets, many angry Palestinians took to social media to voice their strong condemnation of Jabari.
In the face of the widespread protests and resentment, Jabari’s clan was forced publicly to denounce and disown him. “Ashraf Jabari is a criminal, and he doesn’t enter the Palestinian Authority-controlled territories,” said Arif Rubin Jabari, a leader of the clan. “Our family already disowned this fraud back in 2002. He doesn’t represent anyone from our clan or Hebron.” … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
IS THE PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY FAKING ITS FINANCIAL CRISIS?
Maurice Hirsch and N.J. Zilberdik
Arutz Sheva, May 21, 2019
The Palestinian Authority (PA) is currently facing a financial crisis, the World Bank reported. The crisis, however, is self-induced and caused as a direct result of a decision by PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas to drag the Palestinian economy into an abyss, in order to preserve the PA’s policy of encouraging terror and rewarding terrorists with generous salaries.
The sole reason for the economic crisis is the refusal of the PA to accept the tax revenues that Israel collects and transfers to the PA. These tax revenues – over 8 billion shekels in 2018 – account for, on average over the last five years, 50% of the PA’s annual operating budget.
The PA is refusing to accept the taxes due to the decision of the Israeli Security Cabinet, taken in February this year after the rape and murder of Ori Ansbacher, to deduct 502 million shekels (in twelve equal deductions each in the sum of approximately 42 million shekels) from them. The amount the government decided to deduct is the amount that the PA publicly admitted that it paid in salaries and various benefits to imprisoned terrorists and released terrorists in 2018.
The refusal of the PA to receive the remaining amount of tax money was made clear immediately after Israel’s decision to deduct the funds, as explained by Riad al-Maliki, Palestinian Authority (PA) official in charge of foreign affairs:
In the video, al-Maliki can be heard saying, “It was agreed yesterday in a meeting with His Honor the President [Abbas] to send an official message to the Israeli side, according to which we will not agree to accept any partial amount of the tax money that is to be officially transferred to the Palestinian side. This message has been conveyed to the Israeli side in a clear manner.” [Official PA TV, Feb. 21, 2019]
Even if it were possible to argue that specifically the deducted funds caused the economic crisis, figures obtained by Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) following a request to the Ministry of Finance under the Freedom of Information Law prove that even after Israel deducted from tax transfers the amount the PA spends on salaries to terrorist prisoners, the PA would have still received more money in the first two months of 2019 than it received on average per month in 2018. Tax revenues in the first two months of 2019 increased by a total of 109 million shekels, while the amount of the deduction was only 42 million shekels – a positive difference in favor of the PA of 67 million shekels.
In January 2019, before the Cabinet’s decision to make the deduction, the taxes collected for the PA amounted to more than 743 million shekels, and in February, the taxes collected amounted to more than 728 million shekels. In 2018, the tax revenues amounted to an average of 670 million shekels per month. In other words, even after deducting the 42 million shekels, the tax revenues in February totaled more than 686 million shekels, 16 million shekels more than the monthly average in 2018.
Abbas’ decision to refuse the tax revenues from Israel is based on the PA’s basic principle that the terrorists – all of them, without distinction between stone throwers and murderers, between members of Fatah or Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad or the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, etc. – did not carry out acts of terror but only did what the PA “ordered them to do”:
PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas: “I demand [the release of] prisoners because they are human beings, who did what we, we, ordered them to do. We – the [Palestinian] Authority. They should not be punished while we sit at one table negotiating. Besides, they spent many years in prison. How much longer? Do they have to spend all their life in prison and even die there?” [Official PA TV, Feb. 14, 2005]
The PA goes even further when it sees the terrorists – all of them – as their “soldiers.” Nabil Abu Rudeina, Deputy Chairman and the PA official in charge of information, recently reiterated this position in a meeting with Israeli journalists. Referring to the financial crisis and the demand that the PA stop paying the salaries of the terrorists Abu Rudeina said: “This is a red line and Israel needs to understand this. It is impossible to send a soldier to war and then not take care of his family. We are talking about someone who acts on our behalf and receives orders from us.” [Kan (Israeli TV), April 16, 2019] … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
THE FAILURE OF PALESTINIAN NATIONALISM
Alexander H. Joffe
BESA, Mar. 10, 2019
The February 2019 Warsaw Summit, which saw the Israeli PM take his seat beside Arab leaders, was a turning point that signaled the ebbing fortunes of the Palestinian cause. The continuing inability of the Palestinian Authority (PA) to build a functioning state has generated frustration among once-reliable supporters, as has the ever-looming presidential succession crisis. The steady cutoff of American aid, including to UNRWA, has not prompted a fundamental rethinking of Palestinian goals, methods, or premises, but rather a retrenchment.
Why has Palestinian nationalism failed? Answering this question requires examination of foundational issues. Are Palestinians a “people” with a unified sense of culture? Yes, they are, albeit of recent vintage. Are they a “nation,” a territorialized people with a sense of rootedness? Here, too, the answer is yes. So why have they failed to construct a nation-state?
Part of the answer is the contradictory inner logic of Palestinian nationalism, which is founded on both positive and negative principles. On the one hand, it relies on romantic visions of an imaginary past, the myth of ancestors sitting beneath their lemon trees. These and other supposedly timeless essences are at odds with the hardscrabble reality of pre-modern Palestine, which was controlled by the Ottoman Empire, dominated by its leading families, and beset by endemic poverty and disease. As in all national visions, these unhappy memories are mostly edited out.
On the other hand, Palestinian nationalism is resolutely negative, in that it relies on the existential evils of “settler-colonialist” Zionism and ever-perfidious Jews. Consider the essential symbols of Palestine: a fighter holding a rifle and a map that erases Israel completely. It is a nationalism – and thus an identity – based in large part on negation of the Other, preferably through violence. It also implies that Palestinian identity exists only through struggle, a kind of ethno-religious dialectic.
That negativity points to key limitations of Palestinian nationalism: its lateness as a reaction to Zionism, and its historical failure to thwart that allegedly existential evil. At the outbreak of WWI, the immediate loyalties of the country’s population were parochial – to clan, tribe, village, town, or religious sect. As late as June 1918, less than three months before the end of hostilities in the Middle East, the chief political officer of the British forces that expelled the Ottomans from the Levant noted the absence of “real patriotism amongst the population of Palestine.” A separate Palestinian identity began to evolve after that war in response to the rapid expansion of the Jewish national home, and arguably the masses were not fully nationalized until after 1948.
The hysterical overreaction of Palestinian leaders who date their people’s ancestry to the Upper Paleolithic period suggests deep insecurity on this issue. The centrality of resistance and steadfastness, the evil of the Zionist enemy, the denial of Jewish national identity and connections to the land, and the necessity for Palestinians to remain refugees until a magical return to the mythical antebellum world suspend Palestinian nationalism in a liminal state of being, at once reactionary and revolutionary.
To these contradictions must be added further inevitable tensions, felt throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds, between nationalism and larger identities (namely Arabism and Islam) and lesser identities (tribes and clans).
Such tensions are played out in the Hamas-Fatah conflict. Hamas challenges the Fatah movement, the PA and the PLO with a semi-universalized “religious nationalist” narrative. As a result, ever since the days of Yasser Arafat, the dominant Palestinian narrative has been compelled to Islamize itself if it is to compete with Hamas. The adoption of the Palestinian cause by Islamists globally also pulls Palestinian identity toward continued conflict.
From below, episodes such as gun battles between Hamas and the Dughmush clan, which masqueraded as the Jaysh al-Islam (the Army of Islam), or the recent expulsion of the Abu Malash clan from Yatta in the southern West Bank after tribal clashes, point to the destabilizing influence of smaller components of society. Local loyalties, not national ones, are primary.
The case study par excellence of this pattern in traditional societies is the near complete deconstruction of Iraqi society into tribes and clans after 2003. Putting Iraq back together has proved exceedingly challenging. That country remains split along at least three fundamental lines: Sunni, Shiite, and Kurd.
Pulled in these ways from both above and below, Palestinian identity and society, and hence nationalism, are ill-equipped to establish a unified, forward-looking narrative to guide the construction of a modern nation-state. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]