Which Abbas Will Condi Be Talking To?

Will Condi and the other US Diplomats be talking to the Abbas who desperately wants peace and security for Israel, the face he shows to the US and our promised land friends, or the Abbas who finds negotiation a means to some unmentioned end that might not be as wonderful as we think it will, as he tells the Arab world.

Abbas agreed  to start talks again, even though Israel reserves the right to bomb and even enter Gaza, but does he have cards hidden up his sleeves? 

An article "Mahmoud Abbas, verbatim " in the New Jersey Jewish Standard reports that the Palestinian president gave ominous signs that he wasn't such a good friend to Israel after all in an interview in Jordan just after agreeing to return to the table,. 

Abbas has been called, by some, a man of peace who genuinely believes negotiations are the way forward for the Palestinians. But in an interview with the Jordanian daily al-Dustur last week, Abbas was scarcely circumspect.

"At this present juncture, I am opposed to armed struggle because we cannot succeed in it, but maybe in the future things will be different," he told the paper.

Later in the interview, he expressed pride in being among the first Palestinians to attack Israel in 1965.

Even Wednesday, as Rice lauded his decision to return to the negotiating table, Abbas called the peace process "a strategic choice."

The writer notes that Abbas statements to the newspaper were superior to Arafat's Arabic pronouncements that promoted war, but still he suspects that Abbas's ultimate goal is

the end of Israel, whether by military, political, or demographic means.

 I'm not so sure, myself.  Unless the writer has other evidence that he isn't showing then I'd tend to go with his other idea, that Abbas is just trying not to get killed for negotiating with the Isrealis and Americans.

My question is why this same understanding of a need to present a tough facade doesn't extend to the Hamas leaders too?  Are they really that much worse, or is the truth that it cheaper to co-opt one set of leaders rather than two.

In any case, choosing one leader that was just half a democratically elected government, trying to force a coup to put him in charge of it all so we can work with him, and trying this trick in Palestine, where people are used to stabs in the back and have friends who can and will attack back (like the recent shooting at a Jewish seminary in Jerusalem) is a dangerous game.  

Since we have so much money and national security invested in creating real peace in the region, our government should play the game with more intelligence, conviction, and integrity than we have so far in this latest administration.  And Americans need to know that the "heroes" our government and the news media pick for us aren't exactly what they seem to be, leading to questions about whether they are actually that much worse than the 'bad guys' we are presented with.

tags: abbas  israel  palestine  jordan  palestinians  hamas  gaza  condoleeza rice  

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