(AP Photo/Richard Drew)
The tone was almost bureaucratic: a tired man in a suit reading from a prepared text. The man was Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas; the bureaucratic ritual he performed was that of a national leader addressing the United Nations General Assembly. The words, though, expressed an undiplomatic-a quite un-Abbas-like-fury.
In his opening sentence, referring to the conflict in Gaza this summer, Abbas charged Israel with perpetrating "a new war of genocide… against the Palestinian people." After that, when he described Israel's actions as "a series of absolute war crimes," it almost seemed like a softening of the rhetoric. Abbas not only referred to Israel as the "occupying power"-a neutral term-but sprinkled in the words "colonial" and "racist." In the operative part of his address, Abbas declared that "it is impossible to return" to negotiations with Israel under the auspices of the United States-of the sort that collapsed earlier this year-and instead pledged to submit a resolution to the U.N. Security Council that would set a deadline for ending the Israeli occupation.
Read in isolation, Abbas's speech proclaimed a return to an earlier and higher level of enmity with Israel, an end to dialogue, and a confident diplomatic offensive aimed at an imposed peace. Read in the context of Palestinian, Israeli and international politics, the implications of the speech are quite different. It is, most of all, a declaration of Abbas's despair.
Aimed in large part at bolstering his weak position at home, it provided a short-term public relations victory for the Israeli right
, one that will prove dangerously illusory in the long run. The speech places a challenge before President Barack Obama-but one reason for Abbas's gloom may well be that he has no reason to believe that Obama will make the right choice.
First, a note about the rhetoric: Abbas's use of the word "genocide," which set the tone for everything he said afterward, was indeed over the top. There is a case to be made that in Gaza this summer, Israel caused civilian casualties beyond anything proportional to the goals of stopping Hamas's attacks against its own citizens. (The case that Hamas targeted civilians, of course, is open and shut). But "genocide" has a meaning that must not be diluted. The Israeli operation was not aimed at wiping out the Palestinian people. Or, to be more technical and cite the definition of "genocide" in international law, they were not "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such." Leveling the charge in a heated debate with a national group-Jews-who survived actual genocide is a certain means of ending sympathy and discussion.
Yet Abbas was speaking to Israelis on Friday even less than Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was speaking to Palestinians from the U.N. podium yesterday [Monday], when he declared that "Hamas is ISIS and ISIS is Hamas," and then held Abbas responsible for Hamas's actions. Netanyahu's intended audience was his domestic constituency and, as usual, the American public. Abbas's use of "genocide" made his work easier.
Abbas's primary audience presumably was the Palestinian public. The war, combined with Abbas's failure to achieve Palestinian independence, deeply undermined his already shaky legitimacy as leader. Before the summer, according to the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR), in a theoretical presidential election Abbas would have received 53 percent, compared to 41 percent for Ismail Haniyeh, head of the Hamas government in Gaza. PSR's most recent poll shows a reversal: 38 percent for Abbas, 55 percent for Haniyeh. Speaking in New York, Abbas sought to shore up his nationalist credentials in Gaza and the West Bank.
Abbas spoke during Rosh Hashana, and right-wing Israeli politicians and pundits responded as if he'd given them a holiday gift. On Sunday, the first day that newspapers were published after the Jewish holiday, the oversized front-page headline in Yisrael Hayom-Netanyahu's unofficial house paper-was "Speech of Lies." Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said that Abbas "was not a partner for anything"-meaning that he had proved that there had never been a Palestinian partner for peace talks, a point that sundry columnists made more explicit.
There were calmer voices: In an Israeli Radio interview with a doubtful-sounding anchor, dovish Knesset member and ex-general Amram Mitzna said he "suggested judging on the basis of actions and not words. I remind you that there is very close security cooperation" between the Palestinian Authority security forces-who answer to Abbas-and their Israeli counterparts. But the cooperation takes place quietly. Abbas's scathing words were very public, and confirmed the picture that Netanyahu has assiduously drawn. The immediate result is to boost the prime minister's standing. The danger is that whoever succeeds the 79-year-old Abbas-if the Palestinian Authority survives him-will not share his commitment to achieving Palestinian independence via diplomacy rather than violence, or his willingness to prevent terror attacks.
In reality, Abbas's rejection of further talks with Israel is the clear result of the failure of the last round of negotiations, the project of Secretary of State John Kerry. Netanyahu appears to have taken his negotiating strategy for Yitzhak Shamir, the Likud prime minister who agreed to participate in talks on Palestinian autonomy that began with the 1991 Madrid conference. After he lost the 1992 election to Yitzhak Rabin, Shamir said, "I would have conducted the autonomy negotiations for ten years," meanwhile rapidly building settlements to block Palestinian statehood.
According to Ben Birnbaum and Amir Tibon's interview-based chronicle of the Kerry talks, Netanyahu was willing to accept a framework for an agreement based on the pre-1967 borders in order to keep the talks going. If so, Kerry would have been well advised to judge Netanyahu's intent "on the basis of actions and not words," as Abbas did: The prime minister's wrote his real, unambiguous border proposals through constant settlement construction, and had no intention of agreeing to a viable Palestinian state.
At the General Assembly, Abbas said he was indeed unwilling to be a partner-to the Shamir-Netanyahu approach backed up by American gullibility. That was a statement of despair. It leaves almost nothing of his strategy for negotiated independence, which depends on an Israeli government that recognizes the need for a two-state outcome, or an American administration ready to make muscular demands, or both. His declared alternative of seeking a Security Council resolution is bravado, given the virtual certainty of an American veto.
Herein lies the challenge to Obama. Domestic electoral considerations require the promise of a veto. Later, he or his successor will say that U.S. intelligence agencies "underestimated" the risk of another Middle East crisis, or words to the same effect. The alternative is to use the opportunity of Abbas's Security Council move: to inform Netanyahu that the United States may abstain, but would prefer to put forward its own resolution, which would be a public and binding blueprint for a peace agreement. Negotiations on the exact wording would necessarily take place under a very tight deadline.
Taking the second alternative would require statesmanship of Obama-a strong will, and an unusual commitment to long-term American interests over short-term politics. A lack of evidence of such may be yet another reason for the despair beneath Abbas's fury.
