Hasan Abu Nimah: An impossible reconciliation

Palestinians in Gaza wearing masks of Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh call for unity between the feuding groups. (Wissam Nassar/MaanImages)

One major stumbling block has been hundreds of Hamas political detainees held in Palestinian Authority and Fatah-controlled prisons in the West Bank. (The Palestinian Authority routinely denied such arrests, although Abbas announced that 200 Hamas prisoners would be freed on the occasion of the start of Ramadan.) Hamas also demands that Fatah security forces supplied, trained and supervised by US General Keith Dayton halt their crackdown on resistance fighters from Hamas as part of the American-backed plan for crushing any form of resistance to Israeli occupation.

This really is the heart of the matter. Hamas is in effect asking its Fatah/Palestinian Authority (PA) opponent to abandon its primary role undertaken as part of its “peace strategy” and its commitments to the so-called “international community,” the Quartet roadmap, as well as the Dayton plan. Fatah and the PA apparatus it controls adheres to this US-sponsored anti-resistance strategy as the primary condition for the continuation of international financing for the PA.

For full article, visit http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10742.shtml

What Actually Happened in Fatah’s Elections?

In his WINEP speech Dayton acknowledged this crackdown when he said, “I don’t know how many of you are aware, but over the last year-and-a-half, the Palestinians have engaged upon a series of what they call security offensives throughout the West Bank, surprisingly well coordinated with the Israeli army.” He further admitted that during the 22-day Gaza war last winter, U.S.-trained Palestinian security forces prevented Palestinians in the West Bank from organizing mass protests against the Israeli army, which ironically allowed for the reduction of the Israeli military presence in the West Bank in order to redeploy those troops to Gaza. Dayton added, “As a matter of fact, a good portion of the Israeli army went off to Gaza from the West Bank— think about that for a minute, and the (Israeli military) commander (of the West Bank) was absent for eight straight days.”

For full article, visit http://www.counterpunch.org/amin08142009.html

Netanyahu wants meeting with Abbas at UN

However, Netanyahu’s foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, told reporters Sunday that he sees no chance of peace. “In the 16 years since the Oslo Accords, we haven’t managed to bring peace to the region, and I’m willing to bet that there won’t be peace in another 16 years, either. Certainly not on the basis of the two-state solution,” Lieberman said.

For full article, visit http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1109616.html

Abbas orders the release of 200 political prisoners

Maan added that Abbas told Egyptian security officials who visited Ramallah recently that “Fateh movement agrees to all of the demands of Hamas under the condition that Hamas agrees to presidential and legislative elections in 2010”. 

The statements of Abbas surprised the Egyptian team who immediately headed to Damascus to hold talks with Hamas’ political bureau leader, Khalid Mashal, to listen to his response.

For full article, visit http://www.imemc.org/article/61460

True or False: Shin Bet guards top Palestinian leaders in parts of West Bank?

The security Israel provides for Abbas and Fayyad is meant to prevent either of two possible scenarios. One is an assassination attempt by Palestinian extremists, such as the Hamas cell that was recently arrested for allegedly planning an attack on Abbas. The other is an assassination attempt by right-wing Israeli extremists.

For full article, visit http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1108777.html

“This news is not true,” Ad-Dameri said over the phone, “the Israeli media says so to misrepresent and to harm the status of the Palestinian Authority.” He assured Israel has “nothing to do with the security of the Palestinian President.”

For full article, visit http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=220414

US urges quick return to Mid-East talks

“We all share an obligation to create the conditions for the prompt resumption and early conclusion of negotiations,” he said in Jerusalem.US relations with Israel are said to be tense since President Barack Obama’s speech to Muslims in Cairo last week.Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu is under pressure to back a two-state solution.

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For full article, visit http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8090761.stm

UN ready to work with “any Palestinian government” under Abbas

Serry was speaking at the university’s law school and international relations department on “The UN and the Middle East Peace Process,” the diplomat said “ending the occupation and seeing the creation of two states living side by side in peace and security is [the] only way forward and our international responsibility. We cannot give up because no Palestinian state has emerged so far.”

For full article, visit http://www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=37336

PA officials scandalized at disclosure by Abbas’s son of vast personal fortune

Yasser Abbas

Yasser Abbas, the son of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, revealed this week that he’s a self-made millionaire who started his own business shortly after the signing of the Oslo Accords.

In an interview with the Dubai-based Al-Aswak.net economic magazine, Abbas’s son, who was named after former PA leader Yasser Arafat, also declared that “a majority of Palestinians,” including himself, “collaborate with Israel.”

For full article, visit http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1239710711339&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

Ziyaad Lunat: The rhetoric of “peace”

Netanyahu’s “economic peace” proposal should not only be seen in this context but crucially too as the beginning of a new stage of colonization. Israel has been successful in dividing the Palestinians into different groups, separated politically and geographically. Israel has also been successful in creating a collaborating political class. Israel failed however to squash their desire for freedom and their right to resist aggression. In other words, Israel was successful in the physical colonization of the land, de facto controlling the whole of historic Palestine, but failed to colonize Palestinian minds, for the most part, at least. This new stage will target the latter.

A sample of what is to come can already be seen within the Palestinian Collaborationist Authority’s bureaucracy. Employing roughly 300,000, it is the biggest employer in the occupied territories. These employees and their families are dependent on the bureaucracy to sustain their livelihoods, raising incentives for compliance and creating costs for dissent, namely loss of income and political reprisals. Netanyahu’s “economic peace” will mean that further to the existing political stratification of the Palestinian society, a capitalist class will be co-opted to subordinate the Palestinian working class to the requirements of the market. It is expected that the Palestinians will become too comfortable with the newly bestowed economic freedoms and relegate political rights to a secondary concern. The plan strives for the creation of a homo economicus, an individualist, self-interested man, a slave to the capitalist structures of inequality. Dependence on this neo-liberal structure-in-formation is aimed at removing individual and collective agency. The resulting false consciousness — under the framework of hegemonic capitalism — betrays the true relation of forces between the occupier and the occupied.

For full article, visit http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10466.shtml

Abbas makes surprise visit to Iraq’s Kurdistan

Mahmoud Abbas and Mustafa Barzani

The president was welcomed at the Irbil airport by Mustafa Barzani, the president of the Autonomous Kurdish Government, as well as Nechervan Idris Barzani, its prime minister.

For full article, visit http://www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=37096