Abbas at the abyss

Secretary Rice is apparently planning to celebrate the first anniversary of the Annapolis summit with – another summit. Shmuel Rosner describes this proposed summit as maintenance as opposed to a desperate, ill fated and misguided attempt (like Taba in 2001) to reach a final agreement.

A summit in November is unlikely to provide a definitive answer as to which of these assessments is closer to reality. Nevertheless, Secretary Rice can make a strong argument for such a summit. She’ll argue that this event should not be seen as a last-minute attempt at reaching an agreement in the mode of Clinton’s Taba talks (following the collapse of the Camp David summit in 2000), but rather as a maintenance measure.

Aside from the success the PA has had in enforcing the law and order in Jenin, David Hazony writes that perhaps what’s motivating Mahmoud Abbas, is a sense of mortality.

Why now? Probably because for the first time, his regime is under a direct threat from a Hamas overthrow. According to reports, Fatah is preparing a major anti-Hamas assault in the West Bank, which comes on the heels of Hamas’ own threatening to repeat its successes from Gaza in the rest of Palestinian territory. In other words, things have gotten so bad for him that he has realized how much he really needs Israel and the support of major powers.

Meryl points out that Hamas is using the law to help their takeover attempts.

Hamas, the terrorist group that took over the Gaza Strip in a wave of violent attacks that included throwing bound Fatah members off buildings, rocketing civilian homes, and resulted in over 100 dead Palestinians, including, of course, women and children—yeah, that Hamas is pretending to care about the legitimacy of a law that they never followed in the first place except to put their people in place to take over.

I wonder though, if there’s another factor that’s motivating Abbas.

Findings of the third quarter of 2008 indicate continued slow decline in Hamas’s popularity while Fateh’s popularity remains stable as it was during the second quarter. Similarly, findings show a slightly wider gap between the popularity of President Abbas compared to that of Ismail Haniyeh in favor of the former. Positive evaluation of the conditions of Palestinians in the West Bank remains higher than that of conditions in the Gaza Strip. This applies to overall conditions as well as those of democracy and human rights. Findings show also significant opposition to Hamas’s military entry into Shijaiah in the Gaza Strip in early August.

Surprisingly, the good government terrorists are alienating their constituents. Too bad we don’t hear more about this in the press.

I don’t trust Abbas. He continues to be a terrorist sympathizer and I suspect he was always was more involved in terrorism than his apologists allowed. I don’t know where this will lead, but it’s better if Israel has one less front that it has to defend. And despite the apparent improvement in his support, he remains a weak leader. Still a practical maintenance meeting probably will cause less harm than an all out effort to bridge the unbridgeable gaps.

So is Abbas motivated by fear or confidence? At this point I don’t know that it matters.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.