Palestinian Authority

Bibi held secret talks with Palestinians

Zoe Winograd — Mon, 13 May 2013 10:06:28 +0100

The head of the PLO Executive Committee, Yasser Abed Rabbo, has revealed that secret discussions about peace talks took place between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the PLO two years ago.

According to the Times of Israel, Mr Netanyahu and Mr Abed Rabbo met several times in 2010 and 2011 at the house of Israel chief negotiator Yitzhak Molcho.

Mr Abed Rabbo told the Times of Israel that during these meetings, Mr Netanyahu talked about reverting back to pre-1967 borders.

Mr Abed Rabbo said: “We discussed all the issues. But I sat and demanded in those meetings that Israel present its map for a two-state solution concept, and publicly declare its willingness to speak about the 1967 lines as the framework for the meetings. Molcho was not prepared to present a map and the meetings were truly exhausting, a lot of chatter without agreements. They were kept secret until now, actually.”

He added: “This was classic Netanyahu. He spoke about 3000 years of Jewish history, about his father and what he saw with his own eyes. When he finished his preface, I turned to him and said, ‘Let me tell you something — we don’t trust you and we don’t believe you. This is the general feeling among Palestinians and this is my feeling also.’

“Netanyahu didn’t rule anything out. He mostly listened. He asked me about the idea of a joint committee to manage issues related to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem — as Mr Olmert had suggested.”

The Prime Minister’s Office has refused to comment.

Departure of PA PM Fayyad creates West Bank Limbo

Anshel Pfeffer — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 14:30:38 +0100

The resignation of Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has thrown the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank into uncertainty. Mr Fayyad, who clashed often with President Mahmoud Abbas and refused to participate in official peace talks with Israel, was respected by western governments as a responsible administrator and economist.

Mr Fayyad’s resignation was tendered nearly four weeks ago but President Abbas accepted it only last Saturday. The western-trained IMF economist held the affairs of the PA together for over a decade in five years as its finance minister and for the last six years as prime minister. His resignation was interpreted in Ramallah as a result of the breakdown in his relations with President Abbas, who nonetheless asked him to remain as head of a caretaker Palestinian cabinet.

While Mr Fayyad renounced violence as a means of advancing the Palestinians’ struggle for statehood and was openly sceptical over the attempts to gain unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state through the United Nations, he was also opposed to official talks with Israel. Though he often met senior Israelis, he refused to meet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The resignation has come at a particularly sensitive moment when the Obama administration is trying to find ways to renew talks between Israel and the PA, with State Secretary John Kerry shuttling between the two sides. With Mr Fayyad almost certainly out of the picture, it is unclear with whom the US will work.

While Mr Fayyad was credited with building the administrative and economic foundations of a Palestinian state in the West Bank after years of financial chaos and corruption that characterised the PA under Yasir Arafat, he was forced to deal over the past two years with a deepening crisis caused mainly by a shortfall in contributions from friendly governments and the withholding by Israel of tax revenues.

PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has resigned

Zoe Winograd — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 11:05:12 +0100

Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has resigned.

President Mahmoud Abbas accepted Mr Fayyad’s resignation after a brief meeting at the Muqata government compound in Ramallah on Saturday.

Rumours of Mr Fayyad’s resignation surfaced last week following his disagreement with Mr Abbas over the departure of finance minister Nabil Qassis.

He quit despite US government’s efforts to keep him in the post . US Secretary of State John Kerry met Mr Fayyad during his recent visit to Israel .

Mr Abbas announced that he will name a new prime minister within days.

US and Europe act to prevent resignation of Fayyad

Zoe Winograd — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 17:03:00 +0100

American and European officials have asked Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to postpone a meeting with Prime Minister Salam Fayyad which was meant to take place today.

It is believed that Mr Abbas wanted to discuss the possibility of Mr Fayyad leaving the government.

According to sources, Mr Fayyad may have resigned following a disagreement with Mr Abbas over the departure of finance minister Nabil Qassis.

It remains unclear whether Mr Fayyad officially handed in his letter of resignation: some sources have reported that Mr Abbas fired Mr Fayyad.

The historically unstable PA has a track record of resignations that never materialised.

The US and European Union are eager to keep Mr Fayyad in his role while US Secretary of State John Kerry tries to facilitate negotiations between the Palestinians and Israelis.

A senior diplomat in Jerusalem told Ha’aretz: "Fayyad's departure would have a serious impact on relations with the international community."

Mr Kerry met Mr Fayyad in Jerusalem during his shuttle diplomacy visit to Israel this week.

PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad to resign Reuters reported

Anna Sheinman — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 14:52:24 +0100

Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has offered his resignation to President Mahmoud Abbas, sources told Reuters.

Reuters stated that Mr Fayyad’s office refused to comment on the report.

The report comes after a difficult few weeks for the already fraught relationship between the two leaders. Rumours have emerged that Mr Abbas has wanted to sack Mr Fayyad, and last month Mr Fayyad accepted the resignation of the finance minister, against the wishes of Mr Abbas.

Hatred that needs no ‘context’

Geoffrey Alderman — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 12:50:00 +0100

For the past 14 years, there have been two debating chambers used by members of the House of Commons. The first is the one we are all accustomed to seeing on our television screens, with government and opposition members facing each other confrontationally, their exchanges moderated by the Speaker. The other is a much smaller room - the Grand Committee Room adjacent to the magnificent Westminster Hall.

Since 1999, this has been used by the Commons as an additional debating chamber, and the dialogues held there are known as Westminster Hall debates. MPs are seated in a U-shape around the chair, an arrangement that is supposed to signify that the proceedings are non-partisan in nature.

The subject-matters of Westminster Hall debates are generally more wide-ranging than those that take place in the Commons. On February 25, the Conservative MP Gordon Henderson used the opportunity of a Westminster Hall debate to raise "the issue of hate incitement against Israel and the west by the Palestinian authority". A number of MPs - Labour as well as Conservative - spoke in support of his contention that "a culture of hate has wormed its way into the very fibre of Palestinian society. Incitement to hate is pervasive in Palestinian school textbooks, on television programmes and at cultural and sporting events. Palestinians have been consistently and unremittingly taught to hate Jews, Israel and the west."

The evidence for this is so incontrovertible that I will not waste time in repeating it in any great detail. In any case, some of it was cited by Mr Henderson during the debate. He reminded MPs that "during the Palestinian application for statehood at the UN in September 2011, the PA's official TV channel broadcast a map that depicted all of modern Israel and the Palestinian territories wrapped in the Palestinian flag with a key through it… at a time when President Abbas was telling the UN that he sought two states living side-by-side, residents on the west bank were being shown a map carrying an unmistakable message of Palestinian sovereignty over the whole area…

"Last summer, a PA TV broadcast showed a painting depicting Israel as an ogre with a Star-of-David skull-cap that impales and eats Palestinian children in Gaza."

Of course, such anti-Jewish propaganda is pretty much routine throughout the Islamic world. I'm sorry to say that I found none of it, as described by Mr Henderson, at all shocking. But what I did find shocking was the speech made by the minister for the Middle East, Mr Alistair ("Friend of Israel") Burt, in reply to the debate.

Mr Burt sought neither to deny nor to minimise the nature or the extent of anti-Jewish propaganda in the Palestinian media. But, although he did not - at least not in so many words - justify such propaganda, he urged his audience, several times (seven by my reckoning) to be mindful of "the context" in which such hate-speech was aired.

This "context", he explained, was the continuing military conflict between Palestinians and Israelis. "To neglect any sense of any activity that may have been perpetrated by Israelis during the occupation as any part of popular anger against Israel misses an important part of the context. That is not to minimise the damage done by incitement, but not to mention that and not to feel that it is part of the context is, in my view, simply wrong."

Later in his speech, Mr Burt said: "To place it all in terms of the rhetoric and not to understand the wider context will not help us to get to where we need to be."

I had to scan these words several times in order to assure myself that I was reading them correctly. And if I was reading them correctly, here we had the spectacle of a British government minister saying publicly that Judeophobic propaganda of the crudest sort, while thoroughly deplorable, must be contextualised, and that such contextualisation can help us comprehend - at least to some extent – how it is justified in the eyes of those who spread it.

Let us be clear about this. Anyone who attempts (from whatever motive) to contextualise antisemitism is playing - however innocently - into the hands of antisemites. It's a dangerous game. I hope Mr Burt will never again play it.

Barak: Israel may take ‘unilateral’ steps to solve conflict

Sandy Rashty — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 12:09:30 +0000

Defence Minister Ehud Barak told the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) conference on Sunday that Israel would consider taking "unilateral steps" to solve ongoing tensions with the Palestinians in the absence of a "reasonable, fair, interim agreement".

In one of the conference’s opening speeches, Mr Barak also said that Iran's nuclear programme posed "the greatest challenge facing Israel".

Mr Barak is due to meet the recently appointed Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel after the Israeli minister delivers his second speech at the conference tomorrow.

They are expected to discuss the threat posed by Iran and ongoing diplomatic relations between the US and Israel, as well as possible cuts in US defence funding for Israel, which could amount to $300 million.

Mr Hagel has criticised Israel's policies in the past and has spoken against a strike on Iran.

Israeli ambassador to the US Michael Oren also spoke at the conference on Sunday and said US President Barack Obama's visit to Israel next month would be "a new beginning" and cement diplomatic relations between the two nations.

10,000 Palestinians attend Jaradat's funeral

Zoe Winograd — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 17:20:38 +0000

The funeral of Palestinian detainee Arafat Shalish Shahin Jaradat was attended by over 10,000 Palestinians today.

People in the crowd were waving flags and handing out leaflets urging a response to Jaradat’s death which, the Palestinian Authority has claimed, was a result of torture.

Meanwhile, reports say that 100 Palestinians clashed with IDF forces outside the Israeli prison where Jaradat died last Saturday. The IDF has announced that six Palestinians were wounded with injuries from rubber bullets. Protests of this kind have erupted in several spots around the West Bank.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas made a statement whilst attending another memorial service: “We won’t let them play with the lives of our sons.”

“They stand before our children and target them with live fire,” he said. Mr Abbas added that the Palestinian people want ed peace and the removal of settlements.

Israeli officials have maintained that Jaradat's death was a result of a heart attack. Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesperson Yigal Palmor said: “Israel’s treatment of detainees and prisoners is transparent and up to the best international standards of Western democracies.”

Unrest in West Bank fans fears of third intifada

Anna Sheinman — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 11:45:48 +0000

Another day of unrest is expected in the West Bank today after a weekend of riots and prison protests in response to the death of a Palestinian prisoner.

Israeli officials said that Arafat Shalish Shahin Jaradat’s death in jail on Saturday came after a heart attack, but Palestinian Authority officials claimed that it was the result of torture.

Hundreds of Palestinians clashed with Israeli security forces on Sunday in areas around the West Bank.

In Jaradat’s home village near Hebron, protesters threw rocks at Israeli soldiers who attempted to disperse the crowd. At other demonstrations, numbering up to 700-strong, protesters burned tyres and hurled rocks, while a crowd of 500 held a peaceful protest in the town of Halhul. One Israeli and two Palestinians have been injured in the clashes so far.

Also on Sunday, several thousand Palestinian prisoners went on a one-day hunger strike in response to the death.

Jaradat’s funeral is due to take place today and Israeli authorities fear that it will bring further unrest, with some Palestinians calling for a “day of rage”. Riots have already been reported in one village as residents gather for the funeral.

Former PA minister and the head of the Palestinian Prisoners’ Club, Kadoura Fares, told Maariv: “All of the incidents reveal a clear trend – we’re facing an intifada.”

The Israeli government have taken steps to quell tensions, releasing taxes for the PA that have been withheld for three weeks and several conversations have been held between the IDF and Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad in an attempt to douse the flames.

Hamas holds rallies in West Bank

Anna Sheinman — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 13:03:15 +0000

Terrorist organisation Hamas has held its first rally in the West Bank in five years.

Thousands of Palestinians took to the streets of Nablus in the north of the territory on Thursday to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the founding of Hamas.

Relations between Fatah and Hamas have been poor since antagonism erupted in 2007 and Hamas was elected in Gaza. However this rally, coupled with Fatah members attending rallies in Gaza last weekend suggested that relations are thawing.

Green banners were hung and models of rockets waved by the crowds to celebrate what Hamas perceive as a victory against Israel in Operation Pillar of Defence.

Muhammad Shtayyeh, a member of Fatah's central committee and an adviser to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said: "Because Hamas believes that they have won the battle of Gaza and we believe that we have won the U.N. vote, you have two winning parties, and when you have two winning parties, they have more ability to compromise.”