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Worrying Signs from Mahmoud Abbas

[BESA Center-Bar-Ilan University] Hillel Frisch - Mahmoud Abbas and his state-building aide, Salam Fayyad, initiated a level of security cooperation with Israel never realized with Arafat, characterized by a clear division of labor in which the PA destroys Hamas' social infrastructure by day, while the IDF and the Israel Security Agency destroy the terrorist infrastructure, including Fatah cells, by night. But there are worrying signs. To begin with, at the Fatah general conference in summer 2009, Abbas adopted a policy plank which declares that armed conflict remains an option. Most recently, Abbas and the PA have been behind the violence around the Temple Mount, which is evident in the way the two semi-official PA newspapers, Al-Ayyam and al-Hayat al-Jadida, promoted tensions. Fatah websites, financed by Abbas and Fayyad, publish countless pictures of the terrorist Fatah Tanzim and the Al-Aqsa Brigades against the backdrop of the Temple Mount. Although armed groups are banned, the communiques of the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades appear on the official Fatah site. The most offensive item on a Fatah website forum is a poster showing Hitler purportedly quoting Mein Kampf: "I could have destroyed all the Jews in the world but left some of them so that everyone would know...why I wiped them out." Abbas may not be the address for negotiation of a stable, two-state for two peoples solution. The writer is associate professor in political studies at Bar-Ilan University and a senior research associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.
2009-11-13 06:00:00
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