By Abdel Bari Atwan.
Not for Gaza or the West Bank, but the money
Finally, nearly nine months into Israel’s war of extermination in Gaza, Palestinian ‘president’ Mahmoud Abbas remembered there was something called the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) — the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people – and hastened to convene it under his chairmanship to discuss latest developments.
The ‘president’ did not call this meeting to make decisions and adopt policies to confront the war of extermination. Nor to order the deployment of his well-armed and trained security forces to protect the people of the West Bank, at least, who live a stone’s throw away from his Palestinian Authority (PA)’s headquarters and its 60-000 strong forces’ military bases.
The reason is that when Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich blocked the release of its funds, Abbas remembered that the Israeli government wanted to undermine and uproot the PA. When the money was flowing into its coffers, covering the salaries and expenses of its employees and especially the high-ups, everything was perfectly fine and normal as far as he was concerned, and the Israeli government had no designs on the PA, as he now complains.
Listen up, your ‘excellency’. The response to the Israeli authorities should not be to complain about the withholding of the PA’s funds. There should be an armed response to the war of annihilation, assassinations, mass displacement, and ethnic cleansing they are perpetrating in the Gaza Strip.
Isn’t it time for the 60,000 Palestinian security personnel to assume the role of protecting their kin in the West Bank and Gaza? Haven’t they had enough of 30 years of protecting the settlers, and crushing and even killing resistors, in compliance with the treacherous Oslo Accords and to ensure continued access of the Palestinians’ tax revenues which Israel levies on the goods they consume or export?
We’d hoped Abbas would convene the PLO Executive Committee and Fateh central committee to respond to the secret plan adopted by Netanyahu’s government to tighten Israel’s control of the West Bank and adopt a counterplan to confront it. That ought to include ending security cooperation, withdrawing recognition, dissolving the PA, and assigning the security forces to protect Nablus, Jenin, Jerusalem, Hebron, and Tulkarem. But our hopes were misplaced. and it seems they will always be so long as this PA exists. Protecting the Palestinian people and liberating their land has never been among its priorities or even its concerns.
On Monday, Smotrich told a meeting of his Religious Zionism party that he was determined to make the West Bank an inseparable part of the State of Israel for all time, and his life’s mission was to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.
So what PA and what Oslo Accords are they talking about?
It is infuriating that there are still some among us Palestinians who see some kind of equivalence between those who are changing the history of the world with their resistance, steadfastness, and sacrifices, and those who provide protection and security to the murderers and whose struggle is aimed solely at preserving the Oslo Accords and resuming the flow of PA funds. Even more infuriating are their efforts to reconcile with the latter, once in Algeria, another time in Moscow, and then in China.
The PLO and PA need another al-Aqsa Flood without delay, as a step towards putting an end to this duplicity and deception, which the Palestinian people do not deserve.
Abdel Bari Atwan is the editor-in-chief of Rai al-Youm, an Arab world digital news and opinion website. He was the editor-in-chief of the London-based pan-Arab newspaper Al Quds Al Arabi from the founding of the paper in 1989 until July 2013.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Levant’s Agora.
Original source: https://www.raialyoum.com/abbas-stirs-at-last/
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