Has US Clumsiness Finished Off Mahmoud Abbas?

by Dominic Waghorn – Sky News, UK

‘Halas’, says Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. ‘Enough. It’s over’.

Last night he told his people he has ‘no desire’ to stand in the elections he has called for early next year.

He has made similar threats before, about resigning and not wanting to go on. Whether he means it this time remains an open question. If he does, Palestinian politics is entering extremely choppy waters, and with it the hopes for peace.

But how did we get here, and what happened to the now rapidly unravelling US push for peace?

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was sent to the region to try and restart Israeli Palestinian peace talks. Her hamfisted diplomatic efforts have only made matters worse.

She had hoped to force the Palestinians back to the negotiating table. She tried to do so by standing next to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and publicly praising his policy on settlements, which is to carry on building them albeit on a reduced scale. The US had until that point been demanding a complete freeze in construction. It was seen as an astonishing u-turn in the Arab world, where she was heading next.

For the rest of the trip, in Morocco and Egypt she was backpedalling furiously. In an attempt at damage control she insisted the US still regarded continued Israeli settlement expansion as not legitimate, including East Jerusalem.

But the damage has been done. To both sides, the trip has made America look weak and inconsistent.

The apparent attempt to bully the Palestinians back to peace talks has now backfired spectacularly. Mahmoud Abbas had pinned his hopes on the US call for a settlement freeze, refusing to rejoin talks without one. The wisdom of doing so can be debated, but Hillary Clinton’s public desertion of that position has left Abbas high and dry.

It has weakened him even further. In those circumstances giving up on his own demand for a settlement freeze and going back to talks was unthinkable his officials have said.

It was not meant to be this way. With a team of Middle East veterans including envoy George Mitchell laying the ground work, President Obama had hoped to have re-started peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians more than a month ago.

Instead peace efforts are in deadlock and one of the key partners in the process is threatening to quit.

Read more at Sky News

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