On April 22, the chairman of the Palestinian Authority (PA), Mahmoud Abbas, spent over an hour and a half talking to senior Israeli journalists. They had been invited to the Muqata headquarters during one of the most crucial weeks of the peace talks to serve as a direct conduit for his messages to the Israeli public.
Correspondents who took part in the meeting said that the PA head went out of his way to convey openness and transparency. He answered all their questions at length, including the most difficult ones, and presented his terms for continued negotiations. He ended his talk with a direct appeal to the Israeli public, saying, ''We want peace, we’re interested in peace, but if you humiliate us, the situation might get out of hand … we’re a partner and we want to achieve a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders.” But this peaceful message was overridden by his threats to dismantle the PA, as extensively reported by the Israeli media.
Even if this was more than just a public relations stunt on Abbas' part, while conducting accelerated negotiations with Hamas on a reconciliation agreement, he doesn’t have any real chance of cracking the walls of suspicion erected in recent years around the Israeli public, with its leader reiterating again and again that “There’s no partner.” Since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power in 2009, Abbas has become the preferred punching bag of politicians on the Israeli right, chief among them Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman. Before deciding to change his style and moderate his tone, Liberman used to bash the PA chairman on a regular basis, claiming he was a lame duck devoid of any political power and that there was no point in talking to him.
Statements by former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert also helped nurture the narrative of Palestinian recalcitrance and Abbas' weakness. Olmert recounted that he had conveyed a far-reaching proposal to Abbas “that had never before been proposed by any prime minister in Israeli history,” and which included the division of Jerusalem. Olmert claimed at the time that Abbas disappeared and never got back to him. Olmert did not mention the fact that at the time he presented the Palestinians with this proposal, he himself was already a lame duck. A few months later, he resigned from office in the face of a multitude of criminal charges.
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