Mahmoud Abbas wants President Obama’s attention — and to get it, he’s apparently willing to risk setting the West Bank ablaze.
Obama is headed to the region March 20, but the White House says he’ll focus on bigger regional dangers, like Syria and Iran, rather than on Israeli-Palestinian issues.
Oh, sure, he’ll hop over to Ramallah for a few hours. But don’t expect him to try to force a new “peace plan” in his two days in Israel. And no, Obama won’t lean too hard on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Not for now, anyway.
But Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, wants action. And — surprise, surprise — just like clockwork, unrest in the Palestinian territories is nearing a boiling point.
The West Bank is filled with gasoline fumes, security officials say. The kind of destruction Israelis remember from the first intifada in 1987 and its (even worse) 2000 sequel may return at a moment’s notice.
The immediate cause is the weekend death of a Palestinian detainee, Arafat Jaradat, in an Israeli jail.
Fears that Palestinian anger during his funeral near Hebron yesterday would boil over didn’t materialize, but there was plenty of unrest across the West Bank. At least two teen boys were injured in Bethlehem during post-funeral clashes with Israeli forces.
Israeli authorities made sure to invite a Palestinian doctor to observe for the forensic examination on Jaradat’s body. According to initial reports, they found no conclusive signs that Jaradat had been tortured. The Israelis promised to issue a comprehensive analysis in a few days, pending several lab tests.
But Ramallah officials, from Abbas on down, claimed to know that Jaradat had died after suffering “war crime”-level suffering in the hands of his Israeli jailers.
As if that kind of rhetoric weren’t enough, Jaradat’s death came at an especially inopportune moment, in the wake of hunger strikes by some jailed Palestinians.
Israel freed 1,027 Palestinian prisoners in last winter’s deal for kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit. Several have since been rearrested after returning to terror activities, according to Israeli security sources — and they’ve been striving for world media attention by refusing to eat and other stunts. It’s worked — and not only on the West Bank. Last week, even UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon pleaded on their behalf.
Remember, the lopsided Shalit exchange cost Abbas political points, since the deal was swung by his blood rivals, the Islamists of Hamas. Worse, Palestinians cheered even more loudly for Hamas during its rocket war on Israel last summer, marginalizing Abbas and his Ramallah crew even further.
And Abbas’ only recent victory was a November UN vote that forced a change in the name plates used by his Turtle Bay diplomats, which now read “The State of Palestine.”
And this whoop-de-doo diplomatic coup turned costly when Israel punished Abbas by withholding funds from Ramallah. Salaries of West Bank state workers, a huge chunk of the Palestinian labor force, went unpaid for months as the local economy sank.
Israel foolishly contributed even further to the deterioration as extremist settlers increased their ugly rioting in Palestinian villages. (Jerusalem’s inability — or worse, unwillingness — to stop those few Jewish thugs sure doesn’t advance the cause of Israel’s security.)
But the bigger news across the region has been the bloody Syrian civil war, the turmoil of the Arab Spring and Iran’s march to nuclear-weapons capability. All that has marginalized the Palestinian cause in the eyes of Western and even Arab diplomats.
So Palestinians have reason to be frustrated. But that doesn’t make it wise for Ramallah officials to egg the rioters on — rather than calming the streets, as they have in the past.
Abbas apparently hopes to use his people’s discontent to drive his cause back to the top of the world’s agenda. Mostly, he wants to get America’s attention — after all, in 2009 he said he expected Obama to “deliver” Israel’s compliance to his agenda.
Will the Obama administration give him what he wants?
Secretary of State John Kerry decided to skip Jerusalem and Ramallah in his first overseas trip, launched yesterday. That’s good. But he’s reportedly itching to return America to the thicket of Israeli-Arab “peace processing,” and that’s bad.
Rewarding Abbas’ dangerous flirtation with violent West Bank factions would be a mistake. As Obama surely knows by now, “peace processing” carries much pain and few rewards. With even the Mideast’s most backward-oriented potentates focused on burning issues where America can make a difference, why invest heavily in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking?
Abbas may well find it was a mistake to think he could safely ride the intifada tiger.
Twitter: @bennyavni