“Saving Abu Mazen”

After announcing last Thursday that he would not run in January’s Palestinian election, which he himself called, Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) upped the ante this weekend by threatening to dissolve the entire PA. Both are moves in a well-known game that the Israeli media call “saving Abu Mazen.”

PA officials are open about its purpose: to extort additional concessions from Israel and, especially, the U.S. This time, they want America to publicly pledge East Jerusalem as the capital of the Palestinian state and support Abbas’s demand that negotiations be conditioned on a complete halt to settlement construction.

This game, which Abbas has successfully played many times before, rests on a simple premise: he is the most moderate Palestinian leader conceivable and therefore the best hope for Israeli-Palestinian peace. Hence, if he is weakening, he must be bolstered by new concessions.

The problem is that this premise is utterly false. He may indeed be the most moderate Palestinian leader conceivable, but that just shows how unready Palestinians are for peace — because Abbas has proved decisively over the past four years that he is no “peace partner.”

First, his negotiating positions preclude any deal. This is true on several counts but is particularly obvious in his demand for a “right of return” for 4.7 million descendants of Palestinian refugees. Combined with Israel’s 1.5 million Arab citizens, they would easily outnumber its 5.6 million Jews and could thus vote the Jewish state out of existence. Conditioning any deal on Israel’s self-destruction is hardly proof of peaceful intent.

Indeed, Abbas’s total lack of interest in a deal was evidenced by his handling of Ehud Olmert’s (overly) generous September 2008 offer, which included 94 percent of the territories, 1:1 territorial swaps to compensate for the remainder, international Muslim control over the Temple Mount, and absorption into Israel of several thousand refugees. Last week, Abbas said that he and Olmert “almost closed” a deal, implying that the current impasse stems from Olmert’s replacement by Benjamin Netanyahu. But in reality, Abbas never even bothered responding to Olmert’s offer until nine months later, long after Olmert had left office — and even then, he did so via a media interview rather than directly. And, most important, he rejected the offer, saying “the gaps were wide.”

Even Abbas’s vaunted opposition to terror has proved false. In 2005, his one year in sole control over the PA before Hamas’s electoral victory, Palestinians killed 54 Israelis and wounded 484, while 1,059 rockets and mortars were fired at Israel from Gaza. Yet not only did Abbas never order his forces to combat this terror; he explicitly and repeatedly refused to do so. He first cracked down on Hamas only in 2007, after its violent takeover of Gaza convinced him that Hamas threatened him, not just Israel. And he recently agreed to end this clampdown under a reconciliation agreement with Hamas.

In short, there is no point in “saving” Abbas. Instead, the world should finally admit the truth — and let him go.