Adam Rubenstein: Mahmoud Abbas: Negotiator Turned Autocrat The Palestinian leader is nothing if not a shrewd politician. One does not enter the 12th year of a four-year term by being a political neophyte. see note please
Oh Puleez! The reviewer is as ignorant as the authors . Abbas is Arafat in a suit whose speeches in Arabic praise terrorists who murder Israeli civilians- babes in strollers, shoppers in malls, passengers in or waiting for buses. Terrorists operate freely, are given safe houses and payments and their weapons depots are guarded. In 1982 as a student in Patrice Lumumba University in Russia his thesis called the Holocaust a manufactured myth by Zionists and stated that the number of Jews murdered as agreed upon by mainstream historians, six millions, was a “fantastic lie.”It morphed into a book The Connection between the Nazis and the Leaders of the Zionist Movement. In later years, he has played the gullible media and consecutive administrations like the seasoned corrupt tyrant that he is….” rsk
On Sept. 30, 2016, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas attended the funeral of Shimon Peres, the last of Israel’s founding fathers and his counterpart in the peace negotiations of the 1990s. Some observers saw his presence there as purely political, a maneuver to ingratiate himself with the world leaders also attending. Others, including many of his fellow Palestinians, found it in bad taste, even incendiary. But political calculations aside, Mr. Abbas was there to mourn the passing of an old friend, who months before his death had called Mr. Abbas “an outstanding man who really does want to commit to peace.” Peres’s daughter had phoned him to say that she thought her father would have wanted him there. “He should be recognized for coming,” she told the Jerusalem Post. “He took a risk and made a very courageous decision. We are very appreciative of that.”
Grant Rumley and Amir Tibon, the authors of “The Last Palestinian: The Rise and Reign of Mahmoud Abbas,” say that Mr. Abbas’s attendance at Peres’s funeral made him “more popular in Washington than in Ramallah, Gaza, or Jerusalem.” This tension between support in the West (which Mr. Abbas has needed for negotiations to take place) and support at home (which he has needed for negotiations to succeed) turns out to be the central struggle of the 82-year-old’s now 12-year tenure as leader of the Palestinian Authority.
Mr. Rumley, of the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and Mr. Tibon, of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, open their book with a treatment of the first 58 years of Mr. Abbas’s life, from his birth through the beginning of the Oslo peace process in the early 1990s. Their assessment spares little detail in its account of his personal and political story. Mr. Abbas was born in Safed in 1935 and fled with his family during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. They went to Damascus, where he became a teacher and a husband and got his start in politics. In the 1950s, after Mr. Abbas had taught for a few years in Syria, he moved to Qatar, where he joined the country’s Ministry of Education. By the early 1960s, he began his rise within Fatah, Yasser Arafat’s newly created Palestinian nationalist movement.
The authors’ portrait of Mr. Abbas stands or falls by its assessment of his disposition toward nonviolence and by the seriousness of his support for the concept of a two-state solution. The authors contrast their view of him, that he is peacefully disposed, with that of his predecessor, Arafat, who openly embraced terror attacks against civilians. In the West, Mr. Abbas’s relative peacefulness made him a welcome alternative to the bellicose Arafat—if not necessarily at home.
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