By Jerusalem Newswire Editorial Staff
Jan 09, 2005
As PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas rolled to his unsurprising landslide victory Sunday, Jerusalem began to focus on the day after the PA’s election for Yasser Arafat’s successor.
Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom said Israel would look for Abbas to immediately fulfill the PA’s long-violated commitment to curb anti-Jewish terrorism, as well as implement political and financial reforms in the corruption-riddled “Palestinian” regime.
In his venomous campaign speeches, Abbas indicated he had no intention of disarming the terrorists. Instead, he labeled them heroes and pledged to protect them from Israeli military action.
Abbas also highlighted his intention to “kick [the Israelis] out” of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, while simultaneously flooding the Jewish state with millions of Arab “refugees.”
Washington expressed concern over his militant tone, but continued to back the PLO chief, insisting he was a “moderate.”
One respected commentator blasted the West for repeating the same mistakes it had made in ignoring Yasser Arafat’s virulent rhetoric during the Oslo peace process.
Landslide victory
As expected, exit polls Sunday night showed Abbas with some 66 percent of the vote in the PA leadership election.
His closest competitor — Mustafa Barghouti — had only garnered 19 percent of the vote as the polls closed.
Abbas was the only serious candidate to run in an election boycotted by the popular Hamas terrorist organization.
"The election for the presidency of the Palestinian Authority has been tailored to suit Mahmoud Abbas," senior Hamas leader Mohammed Nazzal said at the weekend. "They [Israel and the West] won't allow anyone else but him to win the election.”
Hamas officials said they had no doubt Abbas’s ruling Fatah faction would falsify the election results if necessary.
The day after
Seemingly unconcerned about the lack of choice in the PA election, the Israeli government Sunday was focused on Abbas’s performance the day after his victory.
Israel expects Abbas and the PA to immediately fulfill the decade-old obligation to disarm and dismantle the terrorist organizations engaged in the murder of Jewish men, women and children, Shalom said from the Foreign Ministry’s situation room.
The Jerusalem Post quoted him as saying the residents of Jewish Gaza and the Negev town of Sderot would be the first to know if Abbas’s election had brought real change.
Sderot and the Jewish communities in Gaza are the targets of frequent “Palestinian” mortar and rocket attacks.
When Abbas, as PA prime minister in 2003, accepted the US-backed Road Map “peace” plan, he rededicated the “Palestinian” regime to ending anti-Jewish terror.
Shalom said that were the PA to honor its Road Map commitments, Israel would respond in kind by redeploying the IDF to positions held prior to September 2000, when the violence known as the Oslo War began.
Intent on non-compliance
Abbas, however, spent the past two months telling mobs of Palestinian Arabs that he had no intention of complying with the Oslo Accords or any other agreement signed with Israel.
The PLO chief stated emphatically throughout his campaign that he would under no circumstances force the terror groups operating out of territories under his control to disarm.
Speaking to supporters near Ramallah Friday, Abbas suggested the terrorist murder of Israel’s Jews should continue “as long as there are settlements and occupation.”
The “Palestinians” consider all of Israel to be occupied Arab territory, and all Israeli towns, including Tel Aviv, to be settlements.
Demographic annihilation
A mainstay of Abbas’s campaign speeches was his insistence on the “right” of so-called “Palestinian refugees” to immigrate to sovereign Israel.
There are some four million Arabs worldwide that claim to be “Palestinians.” Their introduction into Israel en masse would effectively destroy the Jewish state.
During his life, Arafat repeatedly referred to his desire for such a demographically annihilation.
A senior Fatah official admitted in 1998 that the refugee issue was the PLO’s “winning card” in its efforts to eliminate Israel.
The “right of return” is a red line for Israel, and Washington had hoped Abbas would take a more moderate line on the issue.
Concerned but not really concerned
But the Bush administration’s concern over Abbas’s hard line rhetoric was insufficient to blunt its support for the PLO chief.
Even after he referred to Israel as “the Zionist enemy” last week, most US officials brushed off Abbas’s statements as mere politicking.
"We don't think it is useful to focus on every statement by every official; what's important is the process,” said a spokesman at the US Embassy in Tel Aviv.
Lessons not learned
Writing in the Washington Post on January 6, columnist Charles Krauthammer blasts the West, and in particular Israel and the US, for making the same mistake made in ignoring Arafat’s words in the 1990s.
“I…watched the intellectual collapse of the entire Middle East intelligentsia...as they refused, [in 1993] and for years to come, to recognize what was obvious:that Arafat was embarking not on peace but on the next stage of his perpetual war against Israel,” writes Krauthammer.
“Now Arafat is dead, Mahmoud Abbas is poised to succeed him and the world is swooning again. Abbas, we are told, is the great hope, the moderate, the opponent of violence, the man who has said the intifada was counterproductive. The peacemaker cometh. Once again, euphoria is in the air. Once again, no one wants to listen to what is being said.”
Krauthammer goes on to list some of the more venomous excerpts from the new PA leader’s campaign speeches.
“Have we learned nothing?” the respected commentator asks. “In the Middle East, words are actions. Never more so than in an election campaign in which your words define your platform and establish your mandate.”
“Abbas is running practically unopposed, and yet, on the question of both ends and means, he chooses to run as Yasser Arafat,” Krauthammer concludes.
Despite being the self-declared successor of Arafat’s legacy, the Bush administration insists Israel trust Abbas as its new peace partner.