From The New York Times
By Ehtan Bronner
Ramallah, West Bank — The collapse of the Palestinian Authority, Israel’s negotiating partner, was raised as a possibility on Monday, as several aides to its president, Mahmoud Abbas, said that he intended to resign and forecast that others would follow.
“I think he is realizing that he came all this way with the peace process in order to create a Palestinian state, but he sees no state coming,” Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian peace negotiator, said in an interview. “So he really doesn’t think there is a need to be president or to have an Authority. This is not about who is going to replace him. This is about our leaving our posts. You think anybody will stay after he leaves?”
Mr. Abbas warned last week that he would not participate in Palestinian elections he called for, to take place in January. But he has threatened several times before to resign, and many viewed this latest step as a ploy by a Hamlet-like leader upset over Israeli and American policy. Many also noted that the vote might not actually be held, given the Palestinian political fracture and the unwillingness of Hamas, which controls Gaza, to participate.
In the days since, however, his colleagues have come to believe that he is not bluffing. If that is the case, they say, the Palestinian Authority, which administers Palestinian affairs in the occupied West Bank and serves as a principal actor in peace negotiations with Israel, could be endangered.
Four top officials made the same point in separate interviews. Mr. Abbas, they say, feels at a total impasse in negotiations with the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has declined to commit to a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders, including East Jerusalem. Mr. Netanyahu favors negotiations without preconditions.
Azam al-Ahmad, head of the Fatah bloc in the Palestinian Legislative Council, said that he spoke with Mr. Abbas on Saturday and that the Palestinian president was likely to resign in the next month or so.
“Nobody will accept to be president under this situation,” Mr. Ahmad said. “We could witness the collapse of the Palestinian Authority.”
Ali Jarbawi, the minister of planning, spoke in similar terms in an interview, asking: “Why do we need anybody to take his place if the whole process is failing? If the authority is going to go on forever, who needs it?” But he suggested that the crisis was aimed at persuading the United States and Europe to become more actively involved in bringing about a two-state solution.
The Palestinian Authority was set up in 1994 as an interim governing body on the way to proper statehood, but that process stalled long ago with the second intifada in 2000 and Israel’s reoccupation of the West Bank.
The officials who spoke said they were no longer interested in being part of an artifice that effectively masked Israeli occupation. While others might come forward to take their places, the new leaders would lack legitimacy with the Palestinians.
Since the 2007 split between the West Bank, dominated by Fatah, and Gaza, run by Hamas, parallel authorities have been established that refuse to recognize one another, blurring the legal definitions in Palestinian politics.
What is clear is that Mr. Abbas and those who work closely with him were shocked when the United States backpedaled on a demand that Israel freeze settlement building in the West Bank.
Mr. Netanyahu met with President Obama in Washington on Monday night, and Mr. Abbas’s threat to leave office had been expected to be a part of their talks. When Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was in Jerusalem last week, she asked Mr. Netanyahu to include in negotiating guidelines specific references to the creation of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders and in Jerusalem. He declined. President Obama took his time before granting the prime minister’s request for a meeting.
Mr. Abbas, who is 74, is not only the president of the Palestinian Authority, but also the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the chairman of the Fatah political movement. Known as Abu Mazen, he took over from Yasir Arafat upon Mr. Arafat’s death five years ago and was hailed by Israeli and American leaders as a very different man.
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Finding Canaan is a website I developed for a month-long reporting project in Palestine. It includes original stories, blogs and multimedia, as well as articles from other news sources. I have also included general information about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to give context to readers. This site is an experiment in online news, seeking innovative approaches to complex subjects. I want to use words, images and sound to create stories that are both intriguing and informative.