“I do not have weapons, but I will not end my life as a traitor,” Abbas told reporters on Friday, stressing his rejection of any US peace plan.
During a recent visit to Egypt, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas reiterated that he does not intend to end his life as “a traitor” and threatened to cancel all agreements with Israel.
“I do not have weapons, but I will not end my life as a traitor. I can say ‘no,’ and I have a people that can say ‘no’ beside me,” he told reporters in Cairo on Friday.
He also rejected any warming of relations with the US due to the American recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s de facto capital.
“The doors of the Palestinian people are locked to America…. Until it takes back its decisions against the Palestinian people, no Palestinian is to meet with the US leadership no matter what his role is,” the PA leader said.
While it is tempting to dismiss Abbas’s statements as those of a bitter, ailing old man, they are in reality part and parcel of a deeply ingrained and destructive mindset embraced by the Fatah leadership in Ramallah.
Led by the European Union, much of the international community mainly blames Israel for the lack of peace between the Jewish state and her immediate Arab neighbors in Ramallah and Gaza. Over the years, progress in the Arab-Israeli “peace process” has largely been measured in terms of Israeli territorial withdrawals.
However, contrary to supposedly conventional wisdom, unilateral Israeli concessions did not advance Arab-Israeli peace. In fact, international demands for unilateral Israeli territorial withdrawal has only emboldened the Jewish state’s enemies to reject peace. Israeli withdrawals from Gaza and parts of Judea and Samaria rapidly transformed those territories into radical hubs of terrorism and incitement against Israel and the Jewish people.
Israeli and international liberals have long hailed Mahmoud Abbas as a “moderate” and a “peace partner.” Yet while differing from his predecessor Yasser Arafat in terms of style, Abbas has a long history of extremism against Israel and the Jewish people.
Abbas has repeatedly denied or belittled the Holocaust. He has also demonized Zionism, the Jewish national liberation movement, as “racism.” In fact, Abbas and his ilk embrace revisionist history that links Zionism to Nazism and deny the Jewish People’s ties to Israel and Jerusalem going back more than 3,000 years. As far as “moderate” Abbas is concerned, Jews are “colonizers,” whether they reside in Judea or in downtown Tel Aviv.
Abbas also challenges established historical facts by insisting that that a fictitious Arab state – “Palestine” – existed prior to the reestablishment of the modern State of Israel.
As far as Abbas and his “moderate” Fatah is concerned, making genuine peace with Israel and recognizing it as the homeland of the Jewish people is treason. This also explains Ramallah’s vocal attacks on Washington for moving the US embassy to Israel’s capital, Jerusalem. While Israeli and Western liberals insist that the conflict is about borders, Ramallah makes it abundantly clear that it is about the very existence of a Jewish state within any borders.
As long as genuine peace with Israel and the Jewish people is equated with treason, peace between Israel and Ramallah will remain a pipedream. Turning the dream of a genuine Israeli-Palestinian peace deal into reality requires robust international efforts to force Fatah and Hamas to come to terms with the permanency of a reborn Jewish state in the Land of Israel.
For any Palestinian-Israeli peace deal to succeed, Ramallah must be forced to admit defeat and give up its fantasy of wiping the Jewish state off the map.
