Feb 18, 2018

With the general commotion in Israel over the security flare-up in the north on the one hand and the possible indictment of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the other, one tends to forget a key player in the Middle Eastern region — the Palestinians.

Visiting Ramallah these days, one comes away with a sense of the deep despair the Palestinian leadership is feeling. Faced with the radicalization of the pro-Iranian axis and with a recent surge of violence in the West Bank, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas finds himself between a rock and a hard place. While he does not want to appear reluctant to join a possible regional cycle of uprising, violence is actually the last thing he is interested in.

A senior PLO source said that he was recently present at a policy meeting in reaction to the US positions. Together with two other confidants, he heard a long monologue from Abbas about the state of the struggle for Palestinian statehood and about his own destiny. The official did not give Al-Monitor a verbatim account of Abbas’ words, but rather a sense of what they constituted.

According to the source, although Abbas is in a grim mood, he is keeping his fighting spirit. The Palestinian president will not, under any circumstances, agree to any version of a US negotiation plan. He believes that US President Donald Trump and Netanyahu are coordinating together in order to weaken him.

Abbas is disappointed, although he will not admit so publicly, with the mellow reaction of his Arab partners on the new US policy, specifically Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.