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Mahmoud Abbas Is Playing a Dangerous Double Game

(New York Daily News) Jonathan Spyer - The wave of shootings, automobile attacks and stabbings that hit Jerusalem this month has had a profound effect. The faces of the innocents murdered are all over the news. Talk of a third intifada is everywhere. Yet in a number of substantive ways the current reality differs sharply from the time of the two intifadas (1987-92 and 2000-04). The West Bank has so far stayed largely quiet because the Palestinian Authority leadership appears to be playing a double game. On the one hand, PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas is engaging in incitement, spreading fear and anger about supposed Israeli plans to upset the delicate rules for Jewish worship on the Temple Mount/Al-Aqsa Mosque area. Meantime, his security forces are continuing to cooperate with the Israelis in ensuring relative quiet on the West Bank. This reflects the general lack of Palestinian enthusiasm to provoke another mass confrontation with Israel. While the attacks on Israeli civilians have been presented in some news reports as spontaneous acts of rage, all of them were by committed members of Hamas or Islamic Jihad. The writer is a senior research fellow at the Global Research in International Affairs Center, Herzliya, Israel, and a fellow at the Middle East Forum.
2014-11-14 00:00:00
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