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The Abraham Accords: "Palestinian Leaders Don't Realize that the Region Is Changing"
(France 24) Ghaith al-Omari interviewed by Marc Daou - Ghaith al-Omari was a Palestinian negotiator at the 2000 Camp David Summit and is a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He was recently in Paris to unveil the "Whispered in Gaza" project - a series of animated films based on testimonies of Palestinians living in Gaza - at the French National Assembly. He said in an interview: "The Palestinian leaders don't realize that the region is changing, they still live in the past. They still think that the days of Gamal Abdel Nasser [the former Egyptian president who championed pan-Arabism] will come back. They will not." "Palestinians need to ask themselves if they can benefit from the new order when everyone else is focused on maximizing their own interests, or are they going to remain on the sidelines and watch as history passes them by? I believe that there is a way for Palestinians to profit from the situation....The Palestinians...need to make the choice of joining....The Abraham Accords are here to stay. And we can see that despite the current tension between the Israeli government and its Arab counterparts, they continue to develop economic and security ties." "Nowadays, the international community considers certain issues to be much more important, such as the war in Ukraine, China's expanding power, Iran's nuclear threats, not to mention the various crises in Yemen, Syria and Libya. In terms of immediate risks, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has thus been eclipsed by much more risky conflicts....The Western world and regional players have understood that Palestinians are too weak to sign a deal....So the world has moved on."