‘If Abbas embraces Hamas, he is walking away from peace’ By KHALED ABU TOAMEH AND HERB KEINON 12/22/2011 21:50 Prime Minister’s Office slams deal paving way for Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other radical groups to join PLO – which includes 10 members – the largest being Fatah; Palestinians hail agreement as “historic event.” Talkbacks (1) Israel slammed the Palestinian deal paving the way for Hamas to join the PLO on Thursday, with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s spokesman Mark Regev saying that if Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas “embraces Hamas, if he walks toward Hamas, he is walking away from peace.”
Leaders of several Palestinian groups, including Hamas and Fatah, agreed Thursday to “activate and reconstruct” the PLO so as to allow other non-member parties to join the organization. RELATED: ‘Abbas is Fatah’s only presidential candidate’ Analysis: Palestinian rivals united by drift Palestinians hailed the agreement as an “historic event” that would mark the beginning of a new era for the Palestinian issue. The move will pave the way for Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other radical groups to join the PLO, which includes 10 members – the largest being Fatah. Regev said that anyone who had any illusions about Hamas’s true character should have listened to the speeches last week in Gaza from Hamas’s leaders at an event marking the 25th anniversary of the founding of the organization. “What we heard was a stream of hateful, extremist rhetoric,” he said. Hamas, Regev said, is totally opposed to peace and reconciliation, believes that the Jewish state should be obliterated, and that terrorism against civilians is justified.
“Hamas is not a political organization that uses terrorism, Hamas is to its very core a genocidal terrorist organization,” he said. Other members of the PLO include the Popular Front for the liberation of Palestine, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Palestinian People’s Party, the Palestine Liberation Front and the Arab Liberation Front, as well as six other tiny groups aligned with Syria and Iraq’s now defunct Ba’ath Party. Ever since it was founded 24 years ago, Hamas has refused to join or recognize the PLO as the “sole legitimate representative” of the Palestinians. Thursday’s agreement paves the way for the establishment of a provisional leadership of the PLO that would include, for the first time ever, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other groups. These groups will later become incorporated into various PLO institutions, especially the Palestine National Council (PNC), the organization’s parliament-in-exile. The PNC is the legislative body of the PLO and elects its Executive Committee, the main decision-making body of the organization.
At Thursday’s discussions in Cairo, the Palestinian leaders agreed to form a committee headed by PNC Speaker Salim Zanoun to discuss ways of “activating and reconstructing” the PLO so that Hamas and other groups would be incorporated into the organization, Fatah and Hamas officials said. They said that the committee would include, for the first time, representatives of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other groups that are not members of the PLO. The committee will hold its first meeting in the Jordanian capital of Amman on January 15, 2012. Following the meeting of the Palestinian factions, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas issued a “presidential decree” for the establishment of a new Palestinian Elections Commission that would prepare for presidential and parliamentary elections in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. No date has been set for the vote, although PA officials have talked about the possibility of holding the elections on May 4, 2012.
The Palestinian factions are also hoping to hold new elections for the PNC, which has 669 members. The Cairo discussions were also attended by Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal. A Hamas official said that Mashaal and Abbas reached agreement on the release of detainees being held in Hamas and PA prisons in the Gaza Strip and West Bank by the end of next month. The two also agreed to form a committee comprising representatives of several Palestinian factions to discuss ending restrictions imposed by the PA and Hamas governments against activists belonging to the two sides, including travel bans.
Abbas told the leaders of the Palestinian factions that he was keen on resuming the peace process with Israel after Israel freezes construction in the settlements and accepts the pre-1967 lines as the basis for a two-state solution. He also said that he was determined to pursue his efforts to gain full Palestinian membership in the UN.
Article from The Jerusalem Post
Okay. To which notian did the land upon which Israel constructed suburbs of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv belong? If the answer is to none, then the reality is that Israel had the right both the claim the land and to build upon it. There is a false assumption that what was not recognized as being part of Israel pre-1967 was therefore taken away from a Palestinian State. There was no Palestinian state to take it from. Israel took the land from Jordan which later ceded it. That everyone else in the world, it seems, wants that land to be a part of Palestinian state today does not mean that it WAS part of a Palestinian state then. The ONLY legitimate place to begin negotiations on any topic is with the status quo. To have negotiations begin with the false assumption that there WAS a Palestinian state and that the Palestinians have the ability to negotiate AS IF that land belonged to a Palestinian state is ludicrous. The negotiations are truly between Israel and the Arab League for the creation of something that has never previously existed, well two things, a Palestinian state and peace between the Arab notians and a Jewish state. THAT is what negotiations should be about and the only assumption should be the status quo because everything else is but vanity.Meanwhile, the REALITY is that there are hundreds of thousands of Jewish Israelis on the other side of those lines. We can argue about the sanity of the decision to build isolated settlements, but some of the areas settled are legitimate suburbs of major population centers and other areas are legitimately security concerns. Negotiations have to deal with that reality.