Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman invited Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to Riyadh this week as part of plans to form a grand regional alliance including both Israel and Palestine to confront Iran, Palestinian officials and western diplomats told Middle East Eye on Wednesday.
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The oldest physical footprint left by the 100-year-old Balfour Declaration in what is today Israel is visible from my home in Nazareth. From my vantage point on a ridge above the Jezreel Valley, Balfouriya appears like a dark smudge below in the middle of the vast agricultural plain.
The small, exclusively Jewish farming community was established in 1922, five years after Britain’s foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, signed a letter pledging help to create “a national home for the Jewish people” in what was then Palestine.
The reconciliation agreement signed between rival Palestinian parties, Hamas and Fatah, in Cairo on October 12 was not a national unity accord – at least, not yet. For the latter to be achieved, the agreement would have to make the interests of the Palestinian people a priority, above factional agendas.
The leadership crisis in Palestine is not new. It precedes Fatah and Hamas by decades.
According to a report circulating unofficially in Arabic, the latest in a sixty-nine year history of proposals to resolve the western Zionist invasion of Palestine (AKA the Israeli-Palestinian “conflict”) is about to see the light of day. It claims Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu originated the proposal and that secret deliberations have been underway for more than five months.
The announcement of an Egypt-brokered reconciliation agreement between Fatah and Hamas on Thursday raised hopes that a decade of bitter feuding between the rival Palestinian factions may finally come to an end.
The early conclusion of the talks in Cairo hinted at how much pressure both sides were under to make progress.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas hailed what he called a “declaration of the end to division”. He is expected to visit Gaza within the next month, for the first time since Hamas ousted Fatah from the enclave in 2007.
US President Donald Trump described Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the harder side to convince in his efforts to mediate between the Israelis and Palestinians, according to well-placed sources.
A Western diplomat who was briefed on Trump’s comments, which came during a meeting with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in New York, told Haaretz that “Trump said both leaders are problematic.”
“But the general context was that from the two of them, Netanyahu is the bigger problem.”
Hamas’s offer to submit to a long-delayed reconciliation process with its Fatah rivals signals that the balance of regional forces may be tipping in its favour and against Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, analysts say.
Officials from the Palestinian Authority (PA), led by Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah, are due in Gaza on Monday, for the first time in three years, to test Hamas’s commitment to establishing a unity government.
The first weekly government meeting is scheduled to take place on Tuesday, with an Egyptian delegation overseeing the proceedings.
By Stuart Littlewood | American Herald Tribune | September 27, 2017 I’ve been writing about the plight of the amiable Palestinian people under Israel’s jackboot for the same length of time that Mahmoud Abbas has been Palestinian president. And that’s far too long. Abbas has also been chairman of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation, which […]
I’ve been writing about the plight of the amiable Palestinian people under Israel’s jackboot for the same length of time that Mahmoud Abbas has been Palestinian president. And that’s far too long. Abbas has also been chairman of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation, which describes itself as the sole representative of the Palestinian people) for even longer.
A recent poll by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research showed that the Palestinians have had enough. Two-thirds want Abbas out.
