How Palestinians View the Collapse of the Talks and the Future

April 5 2014

When we visited early this week, no armed fighters could be seen in the streets of al-Am’ari — after all, this is the refugee camp nearest to the PA’s headquarters in Ramallah. But armed fighters can already be found in other camps, such as Qalandiya, just a few kilometers south of here, bordering Jerusalem. Most of them are youths reared on the stories and myths of the Second Intifada.

It’s hard to say if the gunmen are ready for a third. Most of the fighters also know the stories about the tremendous damage caused to the Palestinian public by Operation Defensive Shield — a large-scale IDF incursion into the West Bank to halt suicide bombings between March and May 2002 — and the bad years that followed. But even so, a deadlock in peace talks will hardly lead these young men to think thoughts of coexistence, or of putting an end to the conflict.

PA President Mahmoud Abbas is well aware of all this. He also understands that a violent conflagration, rousing those same youths to start shooting, will inevitably weaken his government dramatically, or even dissolve it entirely. He doesn’t want to go down in the annals of history as the man who not only led the Palestinians to split from Gaza, but also to a Third Intifada, bringing the Palestinian political entity to ruin.

In spite of all this, on Tuesday evening, he chose to walk to the brink and announce that, in light of Israel’s procrastination on releasing prisoners, he had decided to sign applications to join 15 international treaties and bodies. In the meantime, he said, peace talks will continue until April 29.

Why has Abbas taken this risk? Why has he caused a crisis — be it real or mere posturing — in the talks? It may have been a last-ditch effort to milk more concessions out of Jerusalem and Washington before discussing the extension of talks through the end of 2014. Or not. Abbas’s decision, as in the past, may have stemmed mostly from his lack of trust in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Palestinian version of events sheds some light on the decision-making process in Ramallah.

First of all, according to senior Palestinian officials, the explanation for Abbas’s unilateral move is a simple one: Israel didn’t fulfill its commitments and failed to abide by its agreement with the Palestinians, the repercussions of which it knew full well ahead of time and not just in the past few days. To parse that out: As long as Israel releases the 104 prisoners whose identities were decided upon in advance, there will be no Palestinian resort to the UN. If they are not released, UN approaches will proceed.

And Israel did indeed break an agreement. For the Palestinians, Israel’s awakening and understanding that Arab Israelis were going to be released as part of the deal came too late. The names were known in advance, but Netanyahu balked at the public price he would have had to pay. Furthermore, according to Palestinian officials, the events of the last few days illustrate to what extent Israel has tried to thwart the agreement.

In their opinion, the procrastination began last week, when US Secretary of State John Kerry met with Abbas in Amman. There, Abbas was promised that on Wednesday – last Wednesday, March 26 – the Israeli ministers in charge of the prisoner release would convene and the process of freeing them would begin. Similar promises were made to Abbas in a telephone conversation on that same Wednesday, and then again on Thursday, with the Americans promising to the Palestinians each time that the Israeli ministers would convene “tomorrow.”

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