Palestine Chronicle – June 10, 2020
The Palestinian Authority (PA) will continue fighting the Palestinian resistance movements and protecting Israelis despite halting ‘security coordination’ with Tel Aviv, a senior official has said.
Hussein Al-Sheikh, the Palestinian official in charge of relations with Israel and one of the two closest advisers to President Mahmoud Abbas, told the New York Times :
“We will prevent violence and chaos. We will not allow bloodshed. That is a strategic decision.”
Al-Sheikh added that the PA would arrest any Palestinian who intends to carry out an attack on the occupation from the occupied West Bank, the New York Times reported.
“We are not nihilists or fools, and we don’t want chaos. We are pragmatic. We don’t want things to reach a point of no return,” he explained.
Meanwhile, he said that the PA’s declaration of halting security coordination with Israel aimed to remind Tel Aviv of the burdens it would assume if the PA disbanded and to demonstrate that the PA could collapse if annexation goes ahead, the newspaper reported.
“If Abbas was, indeed, serious in his announcement, he would have included in his speech a clear articulation of a new Palestinian political agenda that is predicated on unity, but a true Palestinian strategy was never the PA leader’s ultimate goal,” Palestinian journalist and editor of The Palestine Chronicle Ramzy Baroud wrote in a recent article.
“What Mahmoud Abbas is hoping to achieve, with his latest theatrics, is the establishment of a new political game, one that is based on political ambiguity, so that he is not entirely abandoned by his Western backers, or finally shunned as a collaborator by his own people,” Baroud added.