What Abbas Wants From Obama
Yesterday a bunch of Mideast peace experts in Washington expressed confusion over what Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas really wants out of this
Jul 31, 2020229.3K Shares3M Views
Yesterday a bunch of Mideast peace experts in Washington expressed confusionover what Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas really wants out of this morning’s scheduled meeting at the White House with President Obama. “Partly everyone is hoping the other side is going to come in and provide the solution,” a U.S. Institute of Peace analyst, Lucy Kurtzer-Ellenbogen, said. But when Obama, Abbas and their advisers begin an 11:30 meeting, the Palestinians are looking for a few deliverables from the first presidential meeting since Israeli commandos intercepted a boat of activists attempting to break the Israeli siege of Gaza.
Abbas needs to bring home “a means of easing the siege on Gaza that helps the ordinary people but does not help Hamas politically or in terms of PR,” said Hussein Ibish, a senior fellow with the American Task Force on Palestine. But Abbas isn’t wedded to any specific mechanism for lifting the siege. “ATFP has been saying since the borders were closed in 2007 that the best way to open them is to have PA forces with international monitoring, supervision and participation on the Palestinian side, combined with a major effort to shut down the smuggling tunnels,” Ibish continued. Carnegie’s Henri Berkey thinks that such a plan is in both the Israeli and Palestinian Authority interest.
But Gaza is an inflection point for the fragile peacemaking efforts of the administration. It’ll be up to Obama to expand the Gaza crisis into a full-fledged strategy for negotiations. That’s what Abbas needs Obama to say today. “He needs [Obama] to reassure the Palestinians that even use all his leverage, especially his new leverage after his partial defense of Israel from international pressure over the flotilla attack, to move them into a more serious engagement on the real issues in the negotiations,” Ibish said. “He needs deeper understandings with the United States on the need to pressure Israel to really engage with permanent status issues and not just procedural matters or minor matters like water in the proximity talks.”
To some degree, the real test of Abbas’ visit won’t come today. It’ll come when his Israeli counterpart, Benjamin Netanyahu, arrives in Washington. Abbas doesn’t have the power to ease the siege of Gaza. And he doesn’t have the power to expand the aperture of the proximity talks. The past year-plus of Netanyahu’s tenure as premier has seen Netanyahu resist Obama’spower to press Israel on peacemaking. So what will Netanyahu say to Obama?
Rhyley Carney
Reviewer
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