Palestinian leaders to extend President Mahmoud Abbas's term indefinitely

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Little hope for deal with Hamas that would allow elections

By Howard Schneider
Wednesday, December 16, 2009; A08

RAMALLAH, WEST BANK -- The Palestine Liberation Organization's ruling Central Council gathered here this week to extend the soon-to-expire term of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, a session that promised to say as much about the drift and division in Palestinian politics as about the 74-year-old leader's standing.

Delegates to the roughly 120-member body, representing a collection of political parties, labor unions and other organizations, said that with little hope of elections soon, they will authorize Abbas to stay in office indefinitely. The Hamas movement's control of the Gaza Strip has forced the cancellation of an election set for January, when Abbas's term ends, and little progress has been made toward a reconciliation agreement that would allow the vote to be rescheduled.

Delegates said they also plan to endorse Abbas's policy of refusing to start new peace negotiations with Israel without a comprehensive freeze on the expansion of its settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem -- areas that the Palestinians expect to be part of their future state.

"The Israelis are supporting something we cannot accept, and Abbas cannot retreat," said Nabil Amr, a council member and former Palestinian Authority ambassador to Egypt.

The Central Council meeting will resolve the immediate problem of continuing Palestinian governance -- at least in the West Bank, where the Abbas-led Palestinian Authority holds power. But Hamas, a militant Islamist group, is not part of the PLO, an umbrella organization formed in the 1960s that still serves as an important arbiter of Palestinian interests.

Abbas has said he will not run for reelection, but in an opening address Tuesday he gave no indication that he plans to resign or leave the stage anytime soon. To the contrary, he spelled out again what he feels is needed for negotiations to resume: a halt to Israeli settlement construction and a recognition by Israel that the territory it captured in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war forms the basis for talks about setting a final border.

"When Israel stops settlement activity for a specific period, and when it recognizes the borders we are calling for, there would be nothing to prevent us from going to negotiations," Abbas said.

There was little new substance in Abbas's remarks, and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has said he worries that the Palestinian leader has made the refusal of new negotiations a "strategic choice."

"There is a real concern now that saying no is a deliberate strategy," said Netanyahu spokesman Mark Regev. "They have become rejectionists out of a desire to not be forced to make concessions."

The Israelis have said they are ready to start negotiations without preconditions.

Abbas, who negotiated with previous Israeli governments as settlement construction continued, hardened his stance after the Obama administration pushed for a settlement freeze but was rebuffed by Netanyahu, who would agree only to a partial moratorium.

PLO delegates said the experience of the past few months -- the hopes raised by Barack Obama's election and the frustration over the lack of subsequent progress -- has left them groping for a new strategy.

"Negotiate? What for? For the sake of negotiations?" asked Adnan Garib, one of a handful of Central Council members allowed by Israel to travel to Ramallah from Gaza for the meeting. "We have to have a clear frame of reference" before restarting talks.

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Palestinian President Says He Won’t Seek Re-election - NYTimes.com

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By ETHAN BRONNER and MARK LANDLER

RAMALLAH, West Bank — The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, warned Thursday that he would not seek re-election in the January elections he called, the latest sign that the Obama administration’s drive to broker Middle East peace talks has fallen into disarray.

There is no immediate prospect of Mr. Abbas’ stepping aside, but his announcement, coming immediately after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s visit to revive talks between Israel and the Palestinians, illustrated the rising tensions over the Obama administration’s failure to produce an Israeli settlement freeze or any concessions from Arab leaders.

Mrs. Clinton’s visit to the region, which she characterized as a success, sowed anger and confusion among Palestinians and other Arabs after she praised as “unprecedented” Israel’s compromise offer to slow down, but not stop, construction of settlements.

In a televised speech from his headquarters in Ramallah, Mr. Abbas, who replaced Yasir Arafat five years ago as president of the Palestinian Authority, said, “I have told my brethren in the P.L.O. that I have no desire to run in the forthcoming election.” He had spoken with the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization earlier in the day.

Mr. Abbas, considered a moderate, pro-Western leader, had called elections for January, but few expect them to take place then, if at all, because they require reconciliation between Mr. Abbas’s Fatah and Hamas, which rules in Gaza. Hamas said it would prohibit the voting from taking place in Gaza without reconciliation. Until such an election, Mr. Abbas remains in office.

It was nonetheless clear that Israeli-Palestinian talks would not resume any time soon despite intensive American diplomacy. A top aide to Mr. Abbas said a large part of the “despondency and frustration” felt by Mr. Abbas and the entire Palestinian leadership was due to President Obama’s unrealized promises to the region. He said he feared that without a stop to settlements, Islamist rivals in Hamas could triumph and violence could break out.

“There was high expectation when he arrived on the scene,” the aide, Nabil Shaath, who heads the Fatah party’s foreign affairs department, said of Mr. Obama at a briefing. “He said he would work to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that it would play a major role in improving the American and Western relationship with the Muslim world. Now there is a total retreat, which has destroyed trust instead of building trust.”

Mr. Shaath added that if the United States vetoed sending a United Nations report critical of Israel’s actions in Gaza to the Security Council, “It really is like telling the Palestinians to go back to violence.”

The United Nations General Assembly was debating that report on Thursday, and the administration, backed by a House resolution, does not want it sent to the Security Council. The result of a committee headed by the South African jurist Sir Richard Goldstone, the report accuses both Israel and Hamas of possible war crimes in their war last January, which killed some 1,200 people, nearly all of them Palestinians.

The less Mr. Abbas can show he has obtained from Israel and the United States, the likelier it is that Palestinian voters will turn to Hamas, which calls for the destruction of Israel and enjoys extensive support from Iran.

In his comments, Mr. Abbas said, “This is not to bargain or maneuver.” But some of his aides saw his announcement as a high-stakes gamble to persuade Mr. Obama to announce a full peace plan aimed at ending the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and creating a Palestinian state.

For all the frustration that the Palestinians and others have over the current Israeli government’s policies — continuing settlement building on land the Palestinians want for their state, refusal to discuss the status of Jerusalem or final borders, or the return of Palestinian refugees to their original homes — Israel is facing a deeply divided Palestinian leadership incapable of agreeing to any deal just now.

The Israelis say that the way forward is threefold and that the tracks should occur simultaneously: Palestinian institution building, economic development in the West Bank and political dialogue between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

The Palestinians say they will not start negotiations anew but want to renew them from where they left off with former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel. Mr. Olmert apparently offered more than 90 percent of the West Bank and some international or shared rule over Jerusalem. The current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has made it clear that Israel would wish to hold on to much more land for security purposes and that Jerusalem is off the table.

“I think he’s reached the conclusion that he’s reached a dead end,” said Qaddoura Fares, another Fatah leader, on Israel Radio, speaking of Mr. Abbas.

Saeb Erekat, chief Palestinian negotiator, said Wednesday at a news conference that perhaps Palestinians should abandon the two-state approach and work toward one shared state with the Jews, something a vast majority of Israelis oppose.

He said Mr. Abbas should maybe “tell his people the truth, that with the continuation of settlement activities the two-state solution is no longer an option.”

In his 30-minute speech on Thursday, Mr. Abbas, who has not groomed a successor or young guard, addressed Israelis directly, saying, “Peace is more important than any political achievement or any government party or coalition if the results push the region toward disaster or the unknown.”

He added, “We were surprised by the United States’ closing its eyes to the Israeli position.” He said achieving a peaceful, two-state solution remained possible but that Israel had to change its policies.

Mr. Abbas’s spokesman, Nabil Abu Rdeineh, said after the speech that the “American administration must force Israel to respect international legitimacy.”

Ethan Bronner reported from Ramallah, and Mark Landler from Washington.

Palestinian Leader Maps Plan for Separate State

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By ISABEL KERSHNER

JERUSALEM — The Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, unveiled a government program on Tuesday to build the apparatus of a Palestinian state within two years, regardless of progress in the stalled peace negotiations with Israel.

The plan, the first of its kind from the Palestinian Authority, sets out national goals and priorities and operational instructions for ministries and official bodies. Mr. Fayyad said it was meant to hasten the end of the Israeli occupation and pave the way to independent statehood, which he said “can and must happen within the next two years.”

There was no immediate official Israeli comment, with the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in Europe. But two Israeli officials reacted with consternation over what they saw as a unilateral action. The United States consul general in Jerusalem expressed approval for the plan.

Mr. Fayyad, an American-educated economist and a political independent who has gained the confidence of the West and is largely respected in Israel, made the announcement in the West Bank city of Ramallah. He said the goal of the plan was “to establish a de facto state apparatus within the next two years.”

His plan was not meant to be “in lieu of the political process, but to reinforce it,” Mr. Fayyad said in an interview with The New York Times. Negotiations and state-building, he said, need to be pursued in parallel.

The Western-backed Palestinian leadership has recently been accused of passivity in its approach to peacemaking and pursuit of independence. Mr. Fayyad said the new program represented a proactive effort to form the foundation of the state. His announcement came on a day when Mr. Netanyahu met with Prime Minister Gordon Brown in London. On Wednesday, he is to meet there with George J. Mitchell, the Obama administration’s Middle East envoy.

Jacob Walles, the American consul general, spoke of the plan in an interview here on Monday, before Mr. Fayyad’s announcement. He said that it was the first time he had seen such a “concrete plan” and that the Palestinians were working in a practical way toward their goal.

Mr. Walles added that under the premiership of Mr. Fayyad there had been “a lot of progress in the West Bank” in economic, security and other spheres.

Yuval Steinitz, the finance minister of the conservative Likud Party, called Mr. Fayyad’s ideas “disappointing.”

“This is contrary to all the agreements signed between the sides,” Mr. Steinitz told Israel Radio. “There is no place for unilateralism, no place for threats, and of course, there will be no Palestinian state at all, if any, without ensuring the state of Israel’s security.”

Daniel Ayalon, the deputy foreign minister of the nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu Party, said that “artificial dates and arbitrary deadlines never worked in the past, but caused only damage and would not work now.”

Mr. Fayyad’s plan lays out a broad outline for a democratic Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, with East Jerusalem as its capital. The plan states, for example, that “shelter, education and health insurance are basic rights which will be preserved and protected by the state,” which also has “an enduring obligation to care and provide for the martyrs, prisoners, orphans and all those harmed in the Palestinian struggle for independence.”

Aspirations for the economy include ridding it of outside hegemony and reversing its dependence on Israel. Goals for the Finance Ministry include reducing reliance on international aid by controlling spending and increasing domestic revenues. The government is to offer tax incentives to local and foreign investors.

The Palestinian Authority has instructed its Ministry of Transport to help develop legislation and plans for modern seaports, crossing points and airports, including an international airport in the Jordan Valley.

Mr. Fayyad acknowledges that the Palestinian national cause has been hampered by internal schism, which limits the authority of President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah and the Fayyad government to the West Bank and leaves Hamas, its Islamic rival, in control of Gaza.

The program could be adopted by any Palestinian government over the next two years, Mr. Fayyad said. “It is a rallying call for our people to unite behind our vision,” he said

Palestinians Elect Leader, Unopposed, as Party Chief

By ISABEL KERSHNER

JERUSALEM — Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, will retain control of his Fatah party after an election on Saturday in which he ran unopposed.

More than 2,000 delegates, a nearly unanimous majority, voted for him in a show of hands at a party conference in the West Bank city of Bethlehem, Fatah’s first such gathering in 20 years. Mr. Abbas succeeded Yasir Arafat as the leader of Fatah, a mainstream nationalist movement, after Mr. Arafat, the Palestinian leader who founded it, died in 2004.

Elections for Fatah’s main governing bodies, the Central Committee and the Revolutionary Council, were expected to take place in the coming days.

Only 65 delegates opposed the motion to elect Mr. Abbas as the party’s leader, according to the Bethlehem-based Palestinian news agency Maan.

Mr. Abbas has won staunch international backing as the leader of the Palestinian Authority. In a victory speech on Saturday, he said he wanted to tell the world that Fatah “adheres to the national project” and to “true positions” and that it would continue to work for an independent Palestinian state.

In a sweeping two-hour speech at the opening of the conference on Tuesday, Mr. Abbas charted Fatah’s course from its early years of armed struggle in the 1960s, which he called a “necessity,” to its current efforts to forge peace deals with Israel. The challenge, he said, is how to turn the limited autonomy the Palestinians have into a “normal state.”

He urged the Palestinians to hold fast and be patient “as long as there is a glimmer of hope” of negotiating a settlement.

Saeb Erekat, a senior Abbas aide who is a veteran Palestinian negotiator, said most of the delegates remained in favor of a two-state solution with Israel despite criticism over the way negotiations have been handled. Specifically, he said there was major criticism that negotiations continued while Israeli settlement activity progressed.

Delegates at the conference have been pushing Fatah leaders to take tougher positions against Israel, participants said, rejecting the idea of negotiations for their own sake and insisting on reserving the option of some kind of resistance should peace talks fail.