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Why Doesn't Abbas Want Peace Talks?

(Washington Post) Jackson Diehl - Eighteen months ago, when the then-new Obama administration tried to jump-start Middle East peace negotiations, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas balked. He said he would not agree even to meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unless Netanyahu made several big concessions in advance - including recognition of a Palestinian state on the basis of Israel's 1967 borders and a freeze on all Jewish settlement construction in the West Bank. Convinced that Netanyahu was the problem, the Obama administration spent the next year in a crude and clumsy effort to extract those concessions. Netanyahu stoutly resisted; the administration belatedly discovered that it could not compel a democratic ally to comply with its demands. Eventually a rough compromise emerged: Netanyahu publicly accepted the idea, but not the pre-defined borders, of a Palestinian state; and he imposed a partial and temporary freeze on the settlements, which is due to expire in September. The administration agreed that should be good enough to start formal peace talks. But Abbas is still refusing to meet Netanyahu unless the Israeli leader - or Obama - guarantees those big concessions on borders and settlements in advance. This is not, as Abbas' spokesmen contend, a matter of either principle or domestic politics. The Palestinian president has negotiated with numerous Israeli leaders and did so without a settlement freeze or other preconditions. Here we come to the real mystery about Abbas: Does he really want peace? Or would he, like Yasser Arafat before him, prefer the messy status quo to going down in history as the Palestinian who once and for all accepted a Jewish state? Abbas received a far-reaching offer from Netanyahu's predecessor, Ehud Olmert, that met the territorial conditions he now sets. He refused to accept it even as a basis for negotiations.
2010-08-13 09:43:48
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