The new revelations (if one could call them that) from the so-called “Palestine Papers” have been claimed as proof that Mahmoud Abbas is a corrupt lackey of the Israeli Government. His negotiation team has certainly offered Israel almost unimaginably generous terms, in exchange for, well, nothing very much. It is unclear to me what the Palestinians were supposed to get in return for the now-famous “greatest Yerushalayim in Jewish history,” especially considering that the offer has, incredibly, been rejected. I would like to come to Abbas’ defense, though, because despite his serious failings—failings that without doubt disqualify him from legitimate leadership of the Palestinian people—I feel that his motives were not as sinister as some of his critics say, and he has undoubtedly rendered a great service to the Palestinian cause through these negotiations.I shall start with the second point: I think that there is no doubt that right now the single most important objective on the road to Palestinian liberation of any sort is not to achieve a negotiated solution with the Israeli regime, but to expose it for what it is: an unscrupulous, criminal, and fascist gang determined to perpetuate the conflict from which they draw their power and profit. Until that is understood, in Israel and around the world, the Palestinians have no chance at all at peace and self-determination. So long as Israel is able to propagandize the world and its own population to believe that “there is no partner” on the Palestinian side, that the Palestinians are unwilling to make the necessary compromises for coexistence with Israel, that they are determined to deny and cheat the Jewish people out of their hard-earned homeland, the Palestinians cannot have leverage either in the world of negotiations or in the world of street-driven change. So long as Israel is able to claim that it has offered the Palestinians excellent terms and been rebuffed, it can continue to occupy and oppress the Palestinians while claiming to be a peace-loving, democratic state.
Though the leak of the Palestine Papers, we can see that Israel’s claims are nothing but tripe and horseshit. They have been offered a great deal—such a great deal, in fact, that it is better than the deal that they claimed to have offered Abbas. This deal was so generous, that if the Israeli public had known about it, it would have supported it enthusiastically, something that could not be said of the likely Palestinian reaction to such an agreement. Therefore we must give Abbas this credit: whether intentially or not, it was he and his team who finally, undeniably, and irreversibly called the Israelis’ bluff.
Whether calling the Israelis’ bluff was Abbas’ team’s intention in these talks or not is impossible to tell. Personally, I think that their intention was at least partly born out of a desperation—clearly seen in the minutes of the Palestine Papers—to finally free his people of the misery and suffering to which they have been subjected for so long. Even though it can easily be argued that he was working for the Israelis, and working for a paycheck, I think that he really felt that time was running out, that he didn’t have the answers, and that the main thing was to figure out a way for his people to have at least a modicum of peace. Not Peace, which is inseparable from Justice, but peace with a lowercase p, which means nothing but the ability to go to work, to school, to raise children without being bombed every other day and held up at checkpoints. It is conceivable that he believed that he had no other choice but to try and give Israel as much as possible on the off-chance that they might just agree to leave the Palestinians alone.
One could claim that this is the reasoning of a coward and a sellout; but I caution my readers against condemning, from a comfortable place of safety, the hopes of a desparate man. Simple, lowercase peace may not seem like much when you have it, but when things get bad enough it can be worth more than all the Justice in the world, such as it is.
Beyond that, I am sure that Abbas was at least aware of the possibility that is now coming to pass. Maybe he was even bluffing himself—he must have known that an agreement such as he was offering would be unacceptable to many, perhaps most, of his constituents—and hoping, praying that the Israelis would reveal themselves by saying no, giving his people the greatest victory since the beginning of their struggle against Israel.
Abbas is finished; his reputation will not recover from the “greatest Yerushalayim.” But maybe it was, even for him, worthwhile.
