Abbas Woos Home Crowd, Alienates Israel And 'Fires' The U.S.
Abbas, striding through the UN’s corridors Wednesday, reached the doors to the plenary together with his sizable security detail to attend the General Assembly’s opening speeches. The guards at the doors to the room told him that he could go in — but that those guys he came with needed to go around to the other door.
Abbas entered. Behind him, a brief scuffle broke out between his entourage and the UN guards. Safely inside the room, such minor unpleasantnesses literally behind him, Abbas was somehow above the fray, an elder statesman representing his people to a largely sympathetic audience.
This is the Abbas who makes speeches at New York universities, and is a trendy figure for student crowds interested in the Palestinian cause. He’s a statesman, one of the good guys. Those pushy, aggressive guys he comes with? They’re not really part of the picture at all….
But the more accurate narrative actually began two days earlier, with a long run-up of officials dropping hints that the Abbas who would take the podium at the annual meeting of world leaders would be Abbas the activist, and that he would “drop a bomb.” The Abbas of 2014, they made clear, was here to shake up the UN, to demand strident action to achieve what decades of terror, negotiations, and incrementalism have failed to achieve.
On Friday in New York, we got a little of Abbas the statesman, calling for an immediate resumption of diplomacy with Israel, but this was overwhelmed by Abbas the bruiser, dismissing diplomacy with Israel as unworkable. “It is impossible, and I repeat – it is impossible – to return to the cycle of negotiations that failed to deal with the substance of the matter and the fundamental question,” Abbas warned. “There is neither credibility nor seriousness in negotiations in which Israel predetermines the results via its settlement activities and the occupation’s brutality.”
And the preconditions that Abbas set in his speech for useful talks — ones in which the “agreed objective” is “ending the Israeli occupation and achieving the independence of the State of Palestine with East Jerusalem as its capital on the entire Palestinian Territory occupied in the 1967 war” — all but eliminate the possibility of getting Israel to sit down at the table at all.
Abbas was strident in his rhetoric, accusing Israel of having “chosen to make it a year of a new war of genocide perpetrated against the Palestinian people.” And with similar calculation, he referred later to Israel, in terms harking back to pre-Oslo Accords terminology, as “the occupying Power,” “the colonial occupying Power,” and “the racist occupying State.”
So who was the intended recipient of Abbas’s speech? Was it a message to President Barack Obama that Abbas would no longer follow Washington’s expectations, reinforcing his refusal in March to endorse Secretary Kerry’s framework for a permanent accord, presaging the collapse of the negotiations just weeks later? The dismissal of the utility of previous negotiations — together with Abbas’s implied message that Washington had failed to secure Israeli good behavior, notably on settlements, during the talks — certainly sounded like a “you’re fired” order to the US negotiators.
And
the angry US response, issued by State Department Spokeswoman Jen Psaki, demonstrated that the message had reached its desired recipient.
But Abbas’s barbs were aimed further afield than Washington, too. His Iran-style turning of Israel from a legitimate state into the entity-that-must-not-be-named — as well as the references to Palestinian revolution and, of course, fedayeen — was focused on two other audiences.
The genocide, war crimes, resource theft and colonialism accusations against Israel were red meat for Palestinian domestic consumption. Abbas was plainly intent on not coming off as too moderate and thus helping Hamas — with its summer war victory claims — into a stronger position on the Palestinian street.
However, that slanderous content also spoke loudly to Israelis and to attuned pro-Israel audiences. The American Jewish Committee issued a rare statement on Rosh Hashanah to complain that “it made a speech with tough content come off as even more pugnacious, a rejection of some forms of negotiation sound like a rejection of all, and touched upon sensitive ears as reflecting a particular kind of anti-Israel rhetoric that moderates hoped had been relegated to the pre-Oslo past.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday before leaving Israel for the United Nations in New York that he would refute "all of the lies directed at us" with regard to Israel's recently concluded war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Netanyahu is scheduled to address the United Nations General Assembly on Monday. His comments come after Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas in his own UN address Friday charged that Israel had conducted "a war of genocide" in Gaza.
With memories of the Nazi holocaust still fresh in Israel, use of the word "genocide" is regarded as particularly provocative.
The 50-day war between Israel and Hamas-led Islamic militants ended Aug. 26. It killed more than 2,100 Palestinians, mostly civilians, and 72 on the Israeli side, almost all soldiers.
Netanyahu said Saturday that his speech at the General Assembly would focus on responding to Iranian President Hassan Rohani and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, accusing both of them of deception and incitement.
"After a deceptive speech by the Iranian president and an inciting speech by Abu-Mazen (Abbas) I will tell the truth of the Israeli citizens to the whole world," Netanyahu said in a statement issued on Saturday.
"In my speech in front of the UNGA and in all of my meetings, I will represent Israel's citizens, and repel, in their name, the lies and slander thrown at our country," he said.
“In my address to the UN General Assembly, I will refute all the lies being directed against us, and I will tell the truth about our country and the heroic soldiers of the IDF, the most moral army in the world,” he told reporters on the tarmac at Ben-Gurion Airport shortly before boarding a plane to New York.
The prime minister is set to address the General Assembly on Monday, and to meet with US President Barack Obama on Wednesday.
While in New York, Netanyahu will meet with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the first tete-a-tete in a decade between Indian and Israeli heads of state.
He’ll also meet with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Tuesday.
Netanyahu’s remarks came two days after Abbas, speaking at the UN General Assembly, demanded an end to the occupation, accused Israel of waging a “war of genocide” in Gaza, and asserted that Palestinians faced a future in a “most abhorrent form of apartheid” under Israeli rule.
Abbas called 2014 “a year of a new war of genocide perpetrated against the Palestinian people,” and said that Israel was not interested in living in peace with its Palestinian neighbors.
On Saturday night, Netanyahu and other Israeli politicians hit back at Abbas and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani over their addresses.
“After the deceitful speech of the Iranian president and Abbas’s inciting words, I will tell the truth of the citizens of Israel to the whole world,” Netanyahu said in a statement.
But his aggressive and overly-accusatory rhetoric likely set the peace process even further back in the eyes of Western power brokers that today see less common ground than ever between the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships.
That was the assessment of leading Israeli politicians.
“This is not how a peace partner talks,” insisted Communications Minister Gilad Erdan. “Now it is clear why he (Abbas) insists on partnering with the Hamas terrorist organization, with whom he shares the ‘struggle against Israel.’”
Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon added that “though his speech at the UN, Mahmoud Abbas proves for the umpteenth time he is not a leader who wants peace…and is not really interested in an agreement with Israel based on recognition of the Jewish national homeland.”
Even Abbas’ supporters in the Knesset were taken aback by his fiery UN speech.
“While Israel has acted harshly in Gaza and made things difficult [for the Palestinians], you cannot call it ‘genocide,’” said far-left Meretz Party leader Zahava Gal-On.
Leading Labor Party MK Eitan Cabal said Abbas’ speech was full of “false and outrageous statements,” adding that “these words are worthy of condemnation from all who truly love peace.”
Opposition and Labor Party leader Isaac Herzog agreed that Abbas’ address was riddled with lies and falsehoods, but nevertheless insisted that Israel “prefers Abbas to Hamas.” Speaking to Israel’s Ynet news portal, Herzog spent as much time lambasting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as he did criticizing Abbas’ inflammatory speech.
US-led warplanes kept up strikes on oil sites funding the Islamic State group on Sunday, as Al-Qaeda’s Syria affiliate threatened reprisals after a key operative was reported killed.
The coalition raids destroyed three makeshift oil refineries in jihadist-controlled territory in Syria, intensifying efforts to deny IS funding after a wave of strikes on its oil infrastructure on Thursday night.
IS controls a swath of territory straddling northwestern Iraq and eastern Syria, that includes most of Syria’s main oil fields and which the jihadists have sought to exploit through improvised refining and smuggling.
The coalition strikes hit close by the Turkish frontier, near the town of Tal Abyad just across the border from the Turkish town of Akcakale, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
“At least three makeshift refineries under IS control in the Tal Abyad region were destroyed,” the Observatory said.
“IS had been refining crude and selling it to Turkish buyers,” said the Britain-based watchdog, which has a broad network of sources inside Syria.
Before the launch of US-led airstrikes on IS in Syria last Tuesday, analysts say, the jihadists were earning as much as $3 million a day from oil revenues.
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