Even Trump Not Likely to Get Deal With Palestinian Leader Abbas

This week, three Israelis were murdered by a Palestinian terrorist outside Jerusalem. Israelis are still waiting for the Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, to condemn the terrorist attack, as they have been waiting for his condemnations for hundreds of other Palestinian terrorist attacks.

For many years, U.S. government, the West, and the media have chosen to play a preposterous game of honoring and negotiating with Mahmoud Abbas as if he is a new, credible, and reasonable Palestinian leader with whom Israel and the West could trust to at last bring peace. It seems that President Trump has convinced himself to join this game by believing that he is the one who can broker an Israeli- Palestinian peace deal.

During a joint press conference with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, at the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, last week, President Trump said, “We are going to discuss peace between Israel and the Palestinians; it will be a fantastic achievement,” and “We are giving it absolute go – there is a good chance it could happen. Most people would say there is no chance whatsoever, but I think that with the ability of Bibi and the other side – I really think we have a chance.”

As an Israeli, who has been hoping for peace for the last 50 years, I want to restate with 100 percent certainty that there is zero chance for any peace deal with the Palestinians since their leader, President Mahmoud Abbas, has walked away from previous peace deals offered by different Israeli governments under the sponsorship of different American presidents.

Abbas was second in command to Arafat, when the Palestinian Authority (PA) rejected Israeli Prime Minister Barak’s offer of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as a capital in the year 2000 and through the subsequent 5 years of Arafat’s war of terror against Israel which killed over 1,000 Israelis from 2000 to 2005.

After the death of Arafat in 2004, Abbas became the chairman of the Fatah branch of the PLO and as President of the Palestinian Authority (PA), he again rejected another offer of peace made this time by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in 2008, which would have allowed the Palestinians to coexist with Israel as an independent state with Jerusalem as its capital. After many denials, in November 2015, Abbas admitted in a TV interview that he declined Olmert’s peace offer which included near total withdrawal from the West Bank and the relinquishing of Israeli control of Jerusalem’s Old City.

In the spring of 2014, after 9 months of negotiations and an Israeli settlement freeze, Abbas refused to respond to a proposed framework for a peace agreement offered by President Obama, which granted them a state based on the 1967 borders, and chose instead to form a unity government with the terrorist group Hamas, which 2 months later coordinated the kidnapping and murder of 3 Israeli teenagers and instigated another war in Gaza with Israel.

As a great negotiator, President Trump should be aware that appeasing and honoring Abbas will simply encourage him to further bad behavior. Last Wednesday Trump honored Abbas again by meeting him for the third time in the last 8 months on the side lines of the UN General Assembly while Abbas was telling him that that a peace deal can be reached this year, or in the coming months, adding that President Trump’s commitment to the issue would help create “the deal of the century.”

But a few hours after the meeting Mahmoud Abbas gave an angry anti- Israel speech full of hate, and historical lies, inciting for a boycott and sanctions against the Jewish state while again glorifying martyrdom on the podium of the General Assembly.

Abbas furiously attacked American and Israeli efforts to end discrimination against the Jewish State at the UN, calling on the Human Rights Council to retain its notorious permanent Agenda Item Seven, which focuses exclusively on alleged Israeli transgressions.

Continually accusing Israel of practicing apartheid, Abbas called for a boycott of the country and an international onslaught similar to the international community’s approach to the apartheid regime in South Africa.

Abbas restated his commitment to the Palestinian so called “right of return,” which would allow millions of Arab Palestinians to enter inside Israel, which is regarded by most Israelis as code words for the destruction of the Jewish State. He also glorified the convicted terrorists who killed Jews, Israelis, and Americans who along with their families get compensated by the PA with monthly payments by saying, “I salute our glorious martyrs and courageous prisoners in Israeli jails, and I tell them all that freedom is coming and that the occupation shall come to an end. “

If after listening to the Abbas speech, Trump still is buying the idea that there is still chance for peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis, maybe as the old saying goes, I can sell him the Brooklyn Bridge as well.