The One Demand Mahmoud Abbas Makes That Is Impossible to Fulfill

Mahmoud Abbas recently met with Nancy Pelosi in Ramallah. No new ground was broken; instead, Abbas made the same demands he has made innumerable times before, in front of a wide variety of American and European politicians. Chief among his demands, not unexpectedly, was that Israeli “settlement activity” must cease immediately if there is to be any hope of peace.

What “settlement activity” by Israel does Abbas want to end? Israel hasn’t built a new settlement in the West Bank in the last 20 years. What the Israeli government has recently approved are 3,000 housing units to be built to accommodate the natural growth of the population in two dozen existing settlements. As to “settler violence,” the Israeli government has shown no quarter to the settlers – fewer than 100 — who have been attacking Palestinians and uprooting their olive trees. The Israeli police have been determinedly rounding up and arresting them. Abbas chose not to recognize Israeli efforts in this regard; he could, of course, have thanked the Israeli police “for their swift roundup of violent settlers,” but instead, he misleadingly called on Israel to “put an end to settler violence,” as if it were not already doing precisely that.

“Israeli-Palestinian talks will foster Arab ties, Saudi Prince Faisal says,” by Tovah Lazaroff, Jerusalem Post, February 18, 2022:

Abbas also called for an Israeli withdrawal to the ‘pre-1967 lines.’

That is Abbas’ impossible demand. He wants pressure put on Israel by the Bide so that the Jewish state will again be squeezed back within the 1949 armistice lines (that is the real meaning of “pre-1967 lines”), which will give Israel a nine-mile-wide waist at Qalqilya, and that would allow an invader from the east to slice the country in two within an hour.

The PA President “Stressed the need to stop unilateral Israeli practices that undermine the two-state solution, in order to start a real political process in accordance with international legitimacy resolutions,” Wafa stated.

It is Abbas who refused a generous offer from Ehud Olmert in 2000, according to which Israel would give the Palestinians not only roughly 94% of the West Bank, but also a compensatory amount — 5.8% of Israeli land — and the internationalization of the Old City. Abbas walked away, and he has refused to enter into negotiations with Israel ever since. Now he talks about “a real political process” — that is, negotiations – to start up again, but he has set as a condition that they be conducted under the auspices of the Quartet, that is the United Nations, the European Union, Russia, and the United States. That stacks the deck against Israel: the United Nations is obsessively anti-Israel, the E.U. and Russia are staunchly anti-Israel; only the United States can be considered favorable to Israel.

When the PA, or Abbas, talks about a “political process in accordance with international legitimacy resolutions,” this is a reference to the UN’s many “resolutions” – that is, denunciation of Israel for supposedly violating international law in its settlements policy, and in its treatment of the Palestinians. The UN has long been a kangaroo court with Israel perennially in the dock; Israel has patiently and convincingly rebutted these “international legitimacy resolutions” but neither facts nor logic can sway the U.N.

To sum up:

Pelosi no doubt felt that “to be fair,” she and her fellow Congressmen had to visit the rais in Ramallah, to hear him out as he listed his preposterous demands. Some were completely unnecessary. There will be no change in the “status quo” on the Temple Mount. The Israeli police will continue to prohibit Jews from saying prayers, or even silently mouthing prayers, on the Temple Mount. No one will suffer “expulsion” from Sheikh Jarrah; they will, once the courts determine that they have ben squatters on Jewish-owned properties, be subject to “eviction” – though even that might not happen If the owners offer to give them “protected tenant” status in return for agreeing to pay rent from now on.

When Abbas again brought up his demand that Israel agree in advance of negotiations to be squeezed back within the 1949 armistice lines, it was at that point that Speaker Pelosi and the rest of her delegation ought to have gotten up, declared the meeting over, and walked out. But she didn’t. Which is why, at the beginning this piece, and despite her, and her father’s, support for Israel, I wrote that “Nancy Pelosi has many faults.”

The Truth Must be Told

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