I couldn't help but think of the sordid history of Guy Fawkes
this week during the back-and-forth over Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's
comments over whether Palestinians are going to insist on the right of return
to their former homes in any peace deal with Israel. The right of return is
perhaps the thorniest issue in the impasse
between the Israelis and Palestinians. The designation of Palestinians as
refugees implies that they will one day return to where they came from, while
Israel quite understandably does not see why Palestinians should be able to
return to Israel once a distinct Palestinian state is formed.
In an interview with Israeli Channel 2 this weekend, Abbas
declared that he had no intention of
returning to Tzfat (Safed), the northern Israeli town where he was born, as a
resident, which many interpreted to mean that Abbas was ceding the right of
return. This naturally caused an uproar among
Palestinians. Hamas rushed to brand Abbas as a traitor, leading him to
backtrack, claiming that he
was only speaking for himself and that nobody has the ability to give up the Palestinian
people's right of return.
So in the span of a day, Abbas managed to give the Israeli left
a cudgel with which to hammer the Israeli right, only to then place the same
cudgel in the hands of the right in order to bludgeon the left. Undoubtedly
this was not some intentional strategy, but the blunderings of a man who is
being pushed and pulled from all sides and has no idea what he really wants,
what he can tangibly accomplish, or how to accomplish it.
Abbas is the Palestinian Guy Fawkes, viewed by the Israeli right
as the double-talking heir to Yasser Arafat and by the Israeli left as a
Palestinian leader genuinely interested in peace, but fated to go down in
history as the face of failure irrespective of what his true views are. There
certainly seems to be an element of truth to both of these views of Abbas. It
is difficult to laud as a peacemaker a man who wrote his doctoral thesis on the
"secret relationship" between Zionism and the Nazis, who never
formally responded to Ehud Olmert's peace offer, and who has downplayed the
Jewish connection to the land of Israel. On the other hand, Abbas has -- unlike
Hamas -- recognized Israel inside the 1967 borders, repeatedly engaged in
negotiations (albeit fruitless ones), and just this weekend denounced Hamas
rocket attacks against Israeli civilians in no uncertain terms as being
completely unjustified.
It seems that Abbas is not quite sure which direction he wants
to go, and is constantly being influenced by larger forces beyond his
control. He needs to appear moderate in order to secure any concessions from
Israel and to keep the flow of donor money coming from the United States and Europe; one
of his constant refrains is that the Palestinian Authority is different from
Hamas precisely because it officially foreswears violence and negotiates with
Israel as conditions of the Oslo Accords. At the same time, he also
needs to maintain credibility among Palestinians and cannot be seen as a mere
stooge of the United States and Israel -- not to mention that he is fighting a rearguard
action against Hamas, which is far more radical and forces him into positions
and statements about resisting Israel. No matter what he does, Abbas is
destined in some way to lose.