With the appalling death toll in Gaza, relentless assaults on the West Bank (in which negotiations chief Ahmed Qurei's own bodyguard was killed), and Israel's blatant settlement expansion, one must wonder what Israeli atrocity, if any, would make the Palestinian president change course. True, last week he raised with his colleagues the possibility of suspending peace talks with Israel if it persisted in its assaults, but he has not acted. Why not?
Surely Gaza's plight should have been enough to outrage him, as it has done legions of people across the globe. The crowning act in a catalogue of murders took place on 15 January when Israeli tanks and helicopters invaded the Zaytoun district of Gaza, killing 19 people and wounding 50 in just 24 hours. The following day, Israel's army killed another three Gazans, and the day after it bombed the Gaza Interior Ministry, killing one woman and wounding 46 others. Many more will die after this week's power shutdown across 80 per cent of the Strip.
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Nor has the West Bank, supposedly Abbas's domain, been spared. The Israeli army has repeatedly invaded towns and villages there, carrying off scores of Palestinians in the process and destroying acres of cultivated land. In one such operation in Nablus on 5 January, 23 people were seized, including several Fatah members. This elicited a rebuke from Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, which changed nothing. Meanwhile, Israel announced it would build 1,000 new homes to expand the Har Homa settlement currently choking Bethlehem, and swell the already bloated Maale Adumim settlement in East Jerusalem. Another settlement sprang up in the Ras district of Hebron, linking Kryat Arba and Tel Rumeida, the most intolerable settlements for Palestinians to bear. In addition, and despite Israeli undertakings to the contrary, outposts, illegal even under Israeli law, still proliferate across the West Bank.
Given such ample proof of Israeli ill intent, it is legitimate to ask why the Palestinian Authority (PA) does not halt this charade, call an end to a peace process conducted on such terms, refuse to lead an authority that has neither power nor resources, and whose main function, no matter what its members imagine, is to safeguard the Zionist project. A conviction is growing in some Palestinian circles that the PA should terminate negotiations with Israel and transform itself from the present failed organisation, supine before Israeli and Western diktat, into a leadership body of a people under occupation.
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2008/881/op133.htm
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