by Ruthie Blum
Abbas has nothing to gain and everything to lose in any peace deal with Israel. He knows better than anyone that his status as a leader on the world stage depends precisely on the absence of Palestinian statehood.
Palestinian Authority
President Mahmoud Abbas lies about Israel not only as a matter of course
but as one of policy. It was no surprise, then, when he stood up at the
European Parliament on Thursday and regurgitated a claim made this week
that rabbinical figures in the Jewish state had urged the government to
poison Palestinian wells.
Abbas knew that this
classically anti-Semitic blood libel was as false as a similar one,
spread last week, that claimed Israel forced Palestinians from a certain
village to flee by drying up their water supply during Ramadan. In
fact, a pipe had burst, and it was immediately repaired. But not -- as
media watchdog HonestReporting pointed out -- before the "water
apartheid" lie, first "reported" by Al Jazeera, was picked up by The
Independent, the International Business Times, Radio New Zealand and The
Times of London.
In keeping with the
tradition of his predecessor, the late PLO chairman Yasser Arafat, Abbas
encourages the invention of all kinds of blood libels, which he then
states as fact, both to his own people and to the international
community. Each libel is more ludicrous than the previous one, and they
would be funny if they weren't reminiscent of Nazi propaganda and didn't
serve the same purpose: to foster the kind of Jew-loathing that enables
genocide.
But annihilating Israel
and the Jews is not the real reason that Abbas perpetuates utterly
insane accusations against the only democracy in the Middle East. More
immediate personal concerns preoccupy the PA leader, who knows his days
are numbered, literally and figuratively, if he does not remain relevant
at home and abroad.
Indeed, Abbas
constantly faces the possibility of being ousted by members of his own
faction, Fatah, and by Hamas, the terrorist organization that rules
Gaza. He manages to survive by enlisting financial and political support
from the United States, Europe and the United Nations.
Viewed -- baselessly --
as a moderate who constitutes the best hope for reaching a peace deal
with Israel, he continues to be received by world leaders and to keep
the cash flowing into his coffers. That hardly any of it goes to
building institutions in the PA or to rehabilitating Gaza appears to be
of little concern to those holding the position that Abbas is more of a
victim than a perpetrator.
What his apologists
fail to see, however, is that if, by some miracle, the two-state
solution were to be realized by its fantasists, Abbas would instantly be
thrown into the dumpster of history in every respect.The only thing
unclear about "the day after" is whether his corpse or his irrelevance
will come first.
In other words, Abbas
has nothing to gain and everything to lose in any peace deal with
Israel. He knows better than anyone that his status as a leader on the
world stage depends precisely on the absence of Palestinian statehood.
Yes, it is this that drives his every move and all his lies. Key among
these lies are the two fictions he reiterates from every podium,
including the one he occupied in Brussels on Thursday. One is that
Middle East stability rests on resolving the conflict between Israel and
the Palestinians. The other is that Israel, being responsible for the
predicament in the first place, bears the burden of repairing the
damage.
It therefore infuriates
him every time the Israeli government urges him to come to the
negotiating table, leading him to spin any overture from Jerusalem to
his own advantage. His latest such act was to snub Israeli President
Reuven Rivlin's invitation to meet in the European capital.
None of this is the
least bit new. In fact, at this point, it is so obvious as to be boring.
In any case, most Israelis are too busy trying to avoid being stabbed,
shot or hit with Molotov cocktails to listen to Abbas' blather. Our
blood is actually being spilled. We don't need libels or lip-service to
highlight that reality.
But why does anyone
else still treat Abbas as a man of integrity and stature? How could
hundreds of EU Parliament members applaud his vile speech, when faced
with the truth about Islamist terrorism? Where do they come off
believing a single word he says?
By now, what any sane
representative of a free country should grasp is that it is not
Palestinian wells being poisoned but rather the hearts and minds of the
Palestinian people.
Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=16493
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