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Abbas' Palestinian Referendum Offers False Hope

(Financial Times-UK) Robin Shepherd - Opinion formers across the Western world have fallen over themselves to embrace the recent call of Mahmoud Abbas for a referendum, widely billed as the latest great hope for re-starting the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. While references to the "implicit recognition" of Israel which the so-called National Accord document supposedly carries have been practically ubiquitous, it is difficult to believe that many people making such claims have actually read the document, let alone faced up to the fact that its support by Palestinian prisoners means it is directly associated with some of the most violent and radicalized activists in the Middle East. The fine print includes a demand for all refugees and their descendants from the Israeli war of independence in the late 1940s to have the option of relocating to Israel proper. What is at work here is simply the same old coded message for the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state that has blown all previous peace efforts out of the water. Nearly six decades since the Jewish leadership accepted the UN's decision to establish two states, we are still dealing with a Palestinian leadership that will not offer its people a document for popular ratification that explicitly recognizes Israel's legitimate right to exist as a Jewish state. The writer is a senior trans-Atlantic fellow of the German Marshall Fund.
2006-06-20 00:00:00
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