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Mahmoud Abbas’s Failed Attempt to Revive the PLO

Sept. 17 2015

Last month, Mahmoud Abbas resigned from his position as chairman of the PLO while keeping his position as president of the Palestinian Authority. He then tried to convene a meeting of the Palestinian National Council (PNC) in hopes of winning a vote of confidence, but was blocked when a rival PLO faction refused to attend. Pinhas Inbari explains these machinations and what’s behind them:

The Palestinian leadership has kept clinging to its old agenda and to outmoded institutions as if the struggle for a Palestinian state is the cardinal issue for the Arab world, and not the very survival of the Arab peoples themselves—including the Palestinians—as they suffer assaults from Shiite and Sunni radical armies as well as stream into Europe for refuge. . . .

The immediate reason for the postponement of the PNC conference was the refusal of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) to attend. . . . At present the PFLP, together with Fatah of Lebanon, is fighting a war of survival against al-Qaeda, and the political calculations of Ramallah are hardly its overriding concern. . . .

Abbas . . . is [now] threatening to retire from politics and to announce the cancellation of the Oslo Accords as part of his upcoming speech to the UN General Assembly. . . . The planned PNC conference this month and the forthcoming seventh convention of Fatah are aimed, in line with Abbas’s plans, at creating a sense of revivifying the Palestinian leadership. At the same time, Abbas is unable to offer a new diplomatic horizon to the Palestinians or even a temporary solution for their state of affairs.

Read more at Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs

More about: Al Qaeda, Israel & Zionism, Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian Authority, PFLP, PLO

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic