RSSWho Lost Fatah?
My latest in the National
‘Who lost China?” was the battle cry of a witch-hunt conducted in the US State Department following the 1949 victory of Mao Zedong’s communists. The department’s “China hands”, critics charged, had been woefully ignorant of the dynamics at work on the ground in China after the Second World War, and undermined the US ally Chiang Kai-shek. While the purge that followed is unlikely to be repeated, Washington may soon be asking itself, albeit quietly, “Who lost Fatah?”
Last week’s announcement by the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas that he would not seek re-election next January was a warning to the Obama administration, which had put Mr Abbas in an untenable position. Having retreated from its own demand that Israel halt all construction in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, Washington expected Mr Abbas to open talks with the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu without conditions.
For the Palestinians, however, the settlement-freeze demand was a test of Mr Obama’s willingness to pressure the Israelis into taking steps they won’t take by choice. Mr Abbas knows that Mr Netanyahu, if it were up to him, would not yield to a viable, independent Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders. If the US is not prepared to pressure Israel, negotiations would not only be fruitless, they would actually help sustain a reality that is relatively comfortable for the Israelis but intolerable for the Palestinians…
…The sad truth dawning on Ramallah, now, is that there will be no salvation from Washington. Not now, possibly not ever. A sad truth, perhaps, but the kind that can set free those who recognise it. In the shocked aftermath of the 1967 war, Fatah took the lead in breaking the Palestine Liberation Organisation free of the tutelage of the Arab League, in a declaration of independence that put their fate in their own hands rather than relying on Arab armies to defeat Israel. Today, they face a similar challenge – declaring independence from Washington and once again taking their fate into their own hands.
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Who Lost Fatah?
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3 Responses to “Who Lost Fatah?”
[...] See the rest here: Rootless Cosmopolitan - By Tony Karon » Blog Archive » Who Lost Fatah? [...]
It’s a truism that you should never make a promise that you can’t or won’t keep. And if you’re the president of the world’s most powerful country speaking to a watchful international audience, the same is true - only much more so. Obama’s public ‘demand’ that Israel stop settlement expansion was quite mind-bogglingly stupid. He must have known perfectly well that the Israelis would never voluntarily do such a thing, so in saying those words, he was in effect promising to put genuine, meaningful pressure on Israel. Either he was astonishingly naive or something went wrong along the way. Hard to know. The decision ot make this ‘demand’ is all the more inexplicable because it didn’t really gain anything for Obama to make it. After all, for some time it’s been the official policy of the US that the settlements are ‘an obstacle to peace’. So it’s not like he was really saying something new in essence. It was just the supposed pledge to ‘get tough’ with Israel that was in any way new. What’s not new is that he has not backed his words with action, even helping to cover u for Israeli war crimes over the Goldstone fiasco.
Obama has just made himself look like a smooth-talking hypocrite to the palestinians, and like a weak-willed pushover to the Israelis. Good work.
[...] As South African/American journalist Tony Karon put it, “In the shocked aftermath of the 1967 war, Fatah took the lead in breaking the Palestine Liberation Organisation free of the tutelage of the Arab League, in a declaration of independence that put their fate in their own hands rather than relying on Arab armies to defeat Israel. Today, they face a similar challenge—declaring independence from Washington and once again taking their fate into their own hands.” [...]
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