Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas met Aug. 12 at his headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah with two members of the Democratic Camp party — Knesset member Issawi Freij and the granddaughter of slain Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Noa Rothman. The two, who were personally instrumental in the merger of the left-wing Meretz party with the Democratic Israel party of former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, asked for the meeting to highlight their new party’s unique ideological foundations, eschewed by all other Jewish Israeli parties, striving for an agreement with the Palestinians.
Other center-left and centrist parties, such as Labor and Blue and White, had pushed aside issues of peace and the diplomatic horizon ahead of the April 9 elections, and are doing so in the run-up to the Sept. 17 voting as well. Were it not for Freij and Rothman, the hope for peace, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and two-state solution probably would not have made it onto the campaign agenda at all. The only plans that exhausted Israeli voters are hearing about day in, day out are for Israel’s annexation of the West Bank.
“We came to the Muqata [Palestinian Authority’s headquarters] to remind Israelis that there is hope and there is a partner for peace,” Freij told Al-Monitor. Abbas told his Israeli guests that he had tried to schedule a meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu four times over the past two years, but Netanyahu avoided him at every turn. Abbas also told Freij and Rothman that in December 2018, he was supposed to meet with Netanyahu in Moscow, but the prime minister canceled the meeting two hours ahead of time, claiming he was stuck in Brussels.
According to Freij, Abbas had a message for Netanyahu and for the Israeli public, saying they should “put aside the Trump plan and other plans; let us talk directly and make peace as courageous leaders.” Netanyahu seized on another comment by the Palestinian leader to lash out at him. “I hope that after the elections in Israel, the new government that is formed will agree to speak with us,” Abbas told members of the Democratic Camp. Israeli media reports made it sound as though Abbas said he hoped Netanyahu would lose the elections. Citing the erroneous headline, Netanyahu tweeted, “If anyone needed another reason to vote Likud …”
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