DEBKAfile Exclusive Report January 24, 2014,
Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) launched his “diplomatic intifada” against Israel and exit from the Kerry peace initiative Thursday, Jan. 23, from Moscow. His meetings with President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev marked his breakaway from the US-led peace process with Israel, four months before it was due to expire, and signaled his bid for Russian backing for a Palestinian state.
The Palestinian leader’s defection caught both Secretary of State John Kerry and Prime Minister Binyamin unprepared – and surprised their intelligence agencies. Putin and Abbas almost certainly planned in advance to drop their bombshell on the day both Kerry and Netanyahu were otherwise engaged at two international events in Switzerland, Geneva 2 on Syria and the World Economic Forum.
For the Russian leader it was a chance to show the international community and the Obama administration that he was several steps ahead of the game on the three hottest Middle East issues – Iran’s nuclear program, the Syrian civil conflict and the Palestinian bid for statehood.
The first intimation that something big was up came from an ITAR-TASS agency report Thursday that Abbas and Medvedev were due to sign an intergovernmental agreement for a $1 billion natural gas project in the Gaza section of the Mediterranean Sea. Russia’s natural gas giant Gazprom hoped to produce 30 billion cubic metres of natural gas at the site.
The report added that Russia’s Technopromexport engineering firm was also considering a small oil development project near the West Bank city of Ramallah, hub of the Palestinian Authority government headed by Abbas.
The Palestinian leader began his conversation with Putin by calling Russia a “great power” that deserved to play a more prominent role in the volatile Middle East region.
Clearly taken aback by the news coming in fast from Moscow, Israeli official sources said Thursday night they could not understand how the Russians and Palestinians came to an agreement on Mediterranean waters off the shores of Gaza, when the rights were already owned by British Gas.
It did not occur to them that the deal Russia proposed to sign with the Palestinians was designed to be an extension of the Russian-Syrian oil exploration contract signed on Dec. 27 in Moscow.
This move confronts Israel with two troubling concerns:
1. Russian interests could potentially encircle Israel’s offshore Mediterranean gas and oil sites and Russian pipelines may block Israel’s export facilities.
2. Under international law, the Palestinian Authority is not recognized as an independent state and is therefore not empowered to establish Special Economic Zones in the Mediterranean as closed areas for prospecting for oil or gas. This was one of the topics placed on the agenda of the peace talks led by John Kerry.
However, Moscow has high-handedly circumvented this obstruction by taking charge of the offshore exploration opposite Gaza, thereby proffering its Palestinian partner to the deal implicitl Russian recognition of its status as an independent national entity authorized to sign international contracts. This could be the precedent for a process of creeping Palestinian statehood without engaging Israel in negotiation.
Moscow has already proved it can get away with busting international sanctions by concluding a $1.5 bn contract with Tehran for the purchase of half a million barrels of Iranian oil a day, without incurring a word of complaint from Washington.
Two weeks later, Putin and Abbas have acted together to wreck a painstaking US diplomatic initiative actively partnered by Israel for a negotiated peace accord with the Palestinians. They have left John Kerry and Binyamin Netanyahu holding an empty shell.
Nabil Shaath, a Palestinian Fatah veteran, could not have put the situation more bluntly when he said Thursday night that it was time to “end the American monopoly on peacemaking, after Washington had proved incapable of imposing agreements on Israel.”
Russian tactics for Syria and Iran had proved effective, he said, and there was no reason why Moscow could not perform the same function on the Israeli-Palestinian track.
The Palestinians have clearly opted to follow the examples of other Middle East leaders, ranging from Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to Syria’s Bashar Assad, Saudi King Abdullah and Egyptian strongman Abdel-Fatteh El-Sisi, in making tracks, overtly or covertly, to Moscow. They are opening the door for Russia to fill the void left by American disengagement from region under the Obama administration.
In my opinion an alliance between Putin and Abbas will be Russia’s undoing.He can’t even handle the Muslims on his own border.I do worry about the forthcoming Games – this is Russia’s weakness.I wonder how long Putin will put up with a lier?Also I am not so sure that Israel has been caught unawares – I suspect that we are in a way quite happy about it – it takes pressure off us and gives us time to prepare for the next conflict
Netanyahu has egg on his face because of this, and deservedly so. Did it ever occur to him that the USA under Obama was becoming a second rate power and creating a vacuum in the Mid East that Russia would step into? The insanity of his two state policy in cooperation with the Palestinians and this country is now obvious. Too bad that Israel didn’t realize that a long time ago.
This guy really hates the Jews and is apparently bent on killing them. I can’t believe he is still alive when all it takes is one bullet.
Russia is not a minor state which can be toyed with by powers great and small. In addition to their vast thermonuclear arsenal and their means of delivering these on target anywhere on the surface of this planet, they have a relatively ruthless government which sees all issues through the clear-cut lenses of what they perceive to be Russia’s national interests — irrespective of what anyone else in the world may think of that.
Putin’s government intends to rebuild the empire held together by the raw power of the Soviet armed forces and the KGB civilian and GRU military security services. They will never give any independence to the Chechins, and they have made a move against the independence of Ukraine. The eastern half of that country is Russian in language and sentinment, and not at all Ukrainian and of western European sentiment. They can and will enforce all that, simply because they not only have the power to do so, but because they know full well that the USA no longer has either the power or the will to oppose them. If they cannot control Ukraine through a government friendly to Russia, then they will arrange a civil war which will result in the Russian army occupying the Russian-oriented half of Ukraine. Then will follow the inevitable plebiscite which will split Ukraine down the middle, with the eastern half and the Crimea rejoining the Russian Federation. No government in the West will be willing to engage in a nuclear war with Russia. Therefore, nobody can stop them from doing whatever they want and have the power to accomplish inside their borders, as in the case of the Chechens, or in any former part of the Soviet Union. And Putin knows all this, because he handles national power the same way that Stalin, Peter the Great, Alexander Nevski or any other leader of the Russian state ever did.
I am truly sorry the Jewish nation did not ally themselves with Russia rather than the USA and Western Europe. Because I know winners and losers when I watch them in action.
But I do not think that all of the above necessarily means the Russians will allow a pack of Arab or Muslim gangsters such as Fatah, Hamas, Hizbollah may try to get them to do. For one thing, the internal threat implied by the Chechens cannot be ignored by them. If they use the time-honored Russian response to the Chechens, they will end up pulverizing the Chechen homeland, planting Ossetins and other Orthodox Christian Caucasus peoples on what had been Chechen lands. Many other Chechens will wind up their days freezing and/or being worked to death in Siberian camps which will be a 21st century continuation of the Gulag Archepelago. In response to anything that comes even close to that, the Islamic peoples will treat Russia as their most important enemy.
But just because the USA has become a second-rate power on the international scene does not mean that China has followed the same route. Now would be a good time for the Israeli government to widen and solidify their ties to Beijing. Israel’s growing
commercial, industrial and scientific ties to China have been well-publicized. The time will come what China shall regard Israel as an asset too valuable to through to the international wolves. China too has an irridentist Muslim problem in one of their far western provinces, and the likelihood grows that China will join India in an East and South Asian military, political and economic stance against the Muslim world.
Remember that nothing else should matter for Jews other than protecting the permanent interests of the Jewish nation and Jewish state. In that, we should act exactly as one of the British Empire leaders proclaimed in the 19th centuries, when he said that “England has no permanent friends, only permanent interests.”
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Russia has built only a small amount of credibility in dealing with Syria and Egypt. It is not helping the situation in Iran and if it invests in the fakery of Palestinian Nationalism, it will lose everything it gained.
And yes, the Chechens have more legitimate claims to independence than the Palestinians. That isn’t saying much and those claims should be respected as little as Palestinian claims.
Russia is only occupying a vacuum left by the US, but it acts like it carved out a space for itself.
It hasn’t.
How about a “palestinian” state come into existence right after Russia gives up Chechnya. I told you this piece of shit putin was bad news for Israel. Anyone who thought Israel should align with Russia as a replacement for America needs their head examined.
With Abbas now turning to Russia to intervene in Arab-Israeli affairs, that will more or less kill Kerry’s and Obama’s Middle East peace plans.
Now, more than ever, is the time to annex Area C, including the entire Jordan River valley and west coast of the Dead Sea; and to keep up the recent 6% annual Jewish population growth in the two-thirds of Shomron and Yehuda which Area C comprises. That will double the Jewish population in Shomron and Yehuda from 380,000 to about 750,000 in about 12 years, and double it again to 1.5 million in less than 25 years.
Such annexation will leave the lands now under control of the Palestine Authority (actually, noth9ng more than the el Fatah gang as nothng more than a pocket of land surrounded by Jewish national control, a growing Jewish national population, and a Jewish national armed force that has no other equivalent in the Middle East.
The next actions would be four-fold.
First, chop up that Arab inland balloon into about seven separate — and geographically separated pockets — by putting Area B under the same kind of Israeli controls that they have exercized over Area C since the Oslo Accords were put in place.
Second, begin planting a significant number of settlements and other Jewish strong-points in Area B.
Third, depending on progress of adding a start-up Jewish population in Area B, and especially along the trans-Shomron transportation routes, place Area B under Jewish civil control as part of a process of annexation.
Fourth, begin making deals with the hamoulas — blood-kinship clans and militias that have traditionally dominated Palestinian cities going back to the centuries of Ottoman Turkish rule. The hamoula chiefs should be awarded autonomous control over Jenin, Tulkarem, Nablus, Kalkilya, Ramallah, Jericho and Hevron. Each such agreement would be separately negotiated, with the degree of local autonomy to be offered to be relative to the degree of cooperation each hamoula chief or mukhtar would offer to Israel. Few such clan chiefs would be like;ly to resist such local power offered them.
That process, step by step, would end the Palestine Authority, and almost certainly would quiet down most problems with the local Arabs, because the mukhtars would have enough autonomous police authority punish or just quietly kill anybody under their authority who starts trouble. Such Arab leaders have no particular interest in democracy, and neither do I.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI