[It sounds to me that this was the purpose in backing Abbas in Gaza ceasefire negotiations.]
The PA president won’t rebuild Gaza if Hamas stands in his way, and won’t work with Israel in the West Bank unless there is substantive progress toward Palestinian statehood
On Sunday, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas gathered his advisers at his Muqata’a headquarters in Ramallah ahead of a planned visit by his chief negotiator Saeb Erekat and intelligence chief Majed Faraj to the US. The negotiators are set to meet next week with US Secretary of State John Kerry and present him with Abbas’s new diplomatic proposal.
However, the meeting also reviewed the tense relations between the PA and Hamas, strains that have most certainly continued even after the cessation of the 50-day conflict in the Gaza Strip. It has become clear to the Palestinian leader and those close to him that, despite the pleasantries heard from Hamas leaders praising Palestinian unity and reconciliation, words and actions are two different things.
Even at the height of the Israel-Hamas conflict, Hamas security forces continued to crack down on Fatah activists in Gaza. There were arrests, knee-cappings of Fatah members, and even executions of “suspected collaborators” — at least some of whom were Fatah people who had been languishing in Hamas prisons for the past six years. In addition, over the weekend, Hamas members prevented the planned opening of offices for five Abbas “governors” who had been appointed on the eve of the conflict as part of an effort by the PA leader to show that he has some authority in the coastal enclave.
The PA hasn’t been idle either. In the past two days, the PA security services, the general intelligence service, and the preventative security force, have carried out a wave of arrests of Hamas operatives across the West Bank.
In other words, it’s business as usual between Fatah and Hamas: The Gaza conflict against Israel may have ended, but the conflict between the two Palestinian organizations rolls on.
And this rivalry now threatens to paralyze rehabilitation efforts in the Gaza Strip. Those close to Abbas say that he is not prepared to play along with Hamas’s duplicitous games. He’s not prepared to tolerate Hamas’s talk of unity on the one hand and its efforts to hinder the work of the PA unity government on the other.
The Palestinian leader has appointed a committee, composed of five Fatah leaders, that is supposed to negotiate with Hamas leaders on the next steps for Gaza. One of the principles that the committee will demand is freedom of activity for PA Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah’s ostensibly Fatah- and Hamas-backed government to operate in Gaza, and an end to the attacks on Fatah personnel there. The Abbas representatives will make it clear that if those conditions are not met there will be no wages paid to Hamas officials and responsibility for rehabilitation of Gaza will fall on Hamas’s shoulders alone.
But Hamas, it can assumed, will be in no hurry to give up its control of Gaza and clear the stage for Abbas’s people.
Abbas, the pussy cat that roars.
He really is in need of a good lesson.
His ineptitude is embarrassing even to his enemies.
Mickey