by Barry Rubin

June 4, 2009

Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas squandered a great opportunity and United States President Barack Obama received a terrific lesson from their meeting last week. Abbas showed that he, like his predecessors, would never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Here is a new American president, potentially the most pro-Palestinian chief executive in history, straining at the bit to move forward a peace process, quite open to the possibility of pressuring Israel.

And Abbas gave him nothing.

“I am confident that we can move this process forward,” Obama said after meeting Abbas. One would expect he’s less confident now than he was before the meeting.

On one point, Abbas can expect U.S. support: pressing Israel to stop any building whatsoever in Jewish settlements. Reportedly, Abbas’ plan said nothing about what the Palestinian Authority would do to promote peace — it reportedly called only for an immediate freeze on any settlement activity and a timetable for Israeli withdrawal. In other words, Israel gives him everything and he gives nothing. One can only wonder whether, during the meeting, it occurred to Obama and his advisers that Abbas was acting precisely the way Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had predicted he would.

Abbas could have tried to portray himself (falsely) as flexible and eager for peace. After all, the president used such phrases as, “We can’t continue with the drift…. We need to get this thing back on track…. We don’t have a moment to lose.” But now, Abbas has played his hand: Netanyahu is ready to talk and the Palestinian Authority isn’t.

As for Abbas’ pet project, unity with Hamas, Obama was not supportive of the PA’s strategy. It would be nice to have unity, said Obama — a mistake, but leave that aside for the present — but any coalition would have to accept all previous agreements and the Quartet’s conditions. And that is something Hamas will never do.

Obama did mention to Abbas Israeli requirements — and Quartet demands — that the PA reduce anti-Israel incitement to violence. But there could be no more indicative, almost humorously so, response than what Abbas told reporters: “I believe that if the Israelis would withdraw from all occupied Palestinian, Syrian, and Lebanese land, the Arab world will be ready to have normal relationships with the State of Israel.”

Israel gives up all the territory and then maybe it gets something in return.

Abbas was quoted as saying: “The Americans are the leaders of the world,” adding, “They can use their weight with anyone around the world. Two years ago they used their weight on us. Now they should tell the Israelis, ‘You have to comply with the conditions.’”

And that’s the Palestinian strategy: America tells Israel to make all the concessions; the PA accepts them. In a real slap in the face to Obama, Abbas said he wouldn’t even help presidential envoy George Mitchell by delivering any confidence-building measures. Nobody could have put this better than Washington Post deputy editorial page editor Jackson Diehl: “[Abbas] has revived a…Palestinian fantasy: that the United States will simply force Israel to make critical concessions, whether or not its democratic government agrees, while the Arabs passively watch and applaud.”

I would only suggest that no revival is involved since this fantasy never dissipated in the first place.

A PA official has been quoted as saying that after a couple of years, U.S. pressure will force Netanyahu to resign or presumably comply with whatever the United States, or rather whatever the PA, wants. Note that this “patience” not only clashes with Obama’s impatience but also with supposed Palestinian suffering. After all, the idea was that Palestinians are so miserable under “occupation,” so eager to escape bloodshed, and so passionately yearning for a state they just cannot wait.

What Abbas’ behavior shows, however, is that the PA is more interested in making peace with a radical Islamist Hamas than with Israel, more hopeful of eventually destroying Israel than of making peace with Israel. The meetings must have been quite a learning experience for President Obama, the first lesson in his education that making peace is not so easy and that the main obstacle to achieving it is the Palestinian leadership.

Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs Journal. This essay first appeared at bitterlemons.org.

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