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Is there more of a reason to trust Fatah?
General Israel/Palestine discussion thread
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Jonnyclueless
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Reasonable pre-condition. Sounds like an oxy-moron to me. Setting up pre-conditions of any kind is just a means of avoiding talking. What can lead to reducing settlements is talking, not pre conditions.
a_unique_person
Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning
I would rate Fatah better than Hamas, yes. Is there any reason to trust Netanyahu? He boasted he undermined Oslo.
Lets hope another round of negotiations can produce a reliable result.
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a_unique_person
Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning
If there is no halt to settlement building, then the talks can drag on for years, while settlements continue to expand. Israel then has no incentive to finish the talks.
Jonnyclueless
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As opposed to when they did halt the settlements? How well were the talks then? Oh right, there weren't any because the FA just used a different excuse then. It really doesn't matter what Israel does as they will always have an excuse. Until the FA decides to be reasonable and have talks, they have no excuse. Why should Israel wait when FA has made it clear they have no intention of talking. If they want to use building settlements as an excuse, then they should have talked when the settlements were halted. They chose not to. So don't rattle off this as an excuse.
trustbutverify
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I agree with halting settlement expansion to begin serious negotiations on a final settlement. However, I'd be concerned Hamas and the other militant groups will see this as a display of weakness, and proof that Israel can eventually be staged into virtual non-existence through continuous violent pressure.
As an Israeli negotiator, I'd also be mighty uncomfortable talking to a man and an organization that most Palestinians see as collaborators and not their true representatives.
Doctor Evil
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What looks to you like reasonable preconditions look to me like demands which made to ensure that talks do not start.
The issue of settlement building was introduced as a condition by Obama and taken up by Abbas more than three years ago. At first Bibi refused to condone this, but the he was pressured to halt construction for ten months. Abbas still refused to talk, until the ten months were almost over. After that Bibi refused to extend the period. He is unlikely to agree to a freeze again, because i) he has already done it to no avail, and ii) the subject was not a precondition to previous talks. Abass is well aware of that, and he uses the subject to avoid negotiations.
Why do I think that Abbas wishes to avoid negotiations. Apart of the fact that he did his best to do just that during the last three years, there is also the question of his other demand, namely, that the talks would resume from the offer that Olmert gave him. This condition is a laughable.
The offer Olmert gave Abbas was a final offer from Olmert's viewpoint. Abbas was asked to either accept it, or reject it. (Not literally, minor changes could be made. But the major outline of the proposed deal was final.). It was Olmert's offer, and it expired once he left office. Now Abbas want to START NEGOTIATIONS from this offer. This is a flawed mechanism for negotiations because Palestinians so far, during many rounds of final peace talks, are yet to make a counter offer to Israeli suggestions for a peace agreement. What will happen next time? Will Abbas try to get an improved plan from Bibi, break negotiations, and then demand that talks resume from that point? This is not a mechanism that encourages the compromises that would lead to an agreement.
In any case, the conditions are not going to lead to negotiations and Abbas knows this. Olmert's offer went beyond what any other political leader of a major party in Israel would offer as a final deal. (This include the leaders of Labor and the various center parties.) Abbas already rejected that offer. By demanding that the offer would be the starting point of negotiations Abbas is trying to ensure that there will be no negotiations. He will probably succeed.
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Mycroft
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No he didn't. IIRC, what he did do is to tell a small gathering of supporters that he agreed to go along with Oslo because he would be in the position to judge if the Palestinians were holding up their end of the bargain. What actually undermined Oslo was Arafat's increasing terrorist attacks where he promised to reign them in.
But then your revisionist history depends on putting the absolute best possible interpretation of Palestinian actions next to the worst possible interpretation of Israeli statements.
Then the Palestinians are best served getting into negotiations immediately, where they can begin to negotiate for a cessation of settlement in exchange for security issues.
But doing nothing only weakens their position at the negotiating table. And this only makes sense if they anticipate that they will get what they want some other way. Hamas appears to be banking on armed resistance. Fatah appears to be hoping for some sort of international force compelling Israel to withdraw.
Neither of those seem as likely to get results as actual negotiating, but that doesn't seem to be politically popular with either group.
a_unique_person
Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning
Do they? This is the problem both sides seem to have. If you do offer genuine compromise, do the people who offer it become accused of being collaborators. An Israeli PM was assassinated because he offered compromise. Yet from what I have read, the majority of people on both sides want peace, and are willing to compromise. Hamas won one election, which was inevitable, IMHO. The first election was always going to see the incumbent thrown out. I haven't seen any other elections since then. Does that mean Hamas would get voted out, because they have only made things worse. From what I can tell, Fatah is now more popular than Hamas again. They don't have any trouble holding power in the West Bank.
Fatah holds power because they have disenfranchised Hamas. In the 2010 elections, the Fatah-led government -- which claims to represent all of the West Bank and Gaza -- refused to hold any elections in Gaza, so Hamas refused to participate in the elections, because they would be underrepresented in any government.
So we cannot use the results of Fatah's elections as any sense of how popular Fatah is. Fatah is rigging the results in their favor.
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Locknar
Sum of all evils tm
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