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Why Abbas Rejects the U.S. Peace Deal (and Any Other Deal with Israel)
(Ha'aretz) Benny Begin - Immediately following President Trump's presentation of the American "Peace to Prosperity" plan on Jan. 28, Mahmoud Abbas stated: "We say a thousand times: 'No, no, no, to the 'Deal of the Century.'...Our people will send [it] to the garbage bin of history, where all the conspiratorial plans to eliminate our cause have gone." The American move represents a concrete withdrawal from some major components of proposals made by the U.S. and Israel over the last 20 years in attempts to attain a peace agreement between the parties. But the fact is that none of these proposals brought about the hoped-for accord. As a reality check, it is worth revisiting the PLO's reaction to the last Israeli proposal, presented by then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to Mahmoud Abbas on September 16, 2008, a proposal that went even further than the compromise proposed by U.S. President Bill Clinton in 2000. Abbas rejected this proposal, as Ehud Olmert wrote a year later in a Washington Post op-ed: "To this day, I cannot understand why the Palestinian leadership did not accept the far-reaching and unprecedented proposal I offered them." Before a February 11, 2020, joint press conference in New York, Olmert once again urged Abbas to agree to his plan, in order to thwart Trump's peace plan, an official close to Abbas divulged. But Abbas refused, signaling the PLO leadership's unwillingness to accept even Olmert's far-reaching proposal, and thus, realistically, any conceivable proposal for a permanent agreement with Israel. We must not close our eyes to the simple fact that, for the PLO, the core issue is the hundred-year-old "injustice" embedded in the very existence of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine. This gap cannot be bridged, and no plan that any Israeli government can accept can also satisfy the PLO. The writer was elected to the Knesset five times and served as Minister of Science. He is the son of former Prime Minister Menachem Begin.