John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN SOUTH FRONT
“Life after Abbas”
Abbas unfortunately has been a pretty ineffective leader.
And he hasn't stood for election in years.
He simply hangs onto the title, president, with no legitimacy.
Israel actually secretly favors him, precisely because he is ineffective. Of course, Israel would rather see no Palestinian officials at all, and they are working towards that end, but for now they need someone to roll out every once in a while.
After all, the last effective president was Arafat, despite his extensive corruption, but, of course, Israel detested him and had him quietly assassinated with Polonium in his toothpaste.
Not long before that happened, Ariel Sharon met with George Bush, and the news leaked out that he actually asked Bush to relieve Israel of its pledge not to harm Arafat. George, of course, complied.
A recent book on Israel's assassinations says there have been about 2,700 of them.
Mighty hard to get good new leaders under such circumstances.
Hamas was an effective, democratic new party, but Israel managed to label it, falsely, as "terrorist," and it has killed and threatened some of its members.
Interestingly, and revealing of the duplicitous way Israel behaves so often, Hamas was originally secretly supported by Israel to provide an opposition to Arafat’s Fatah, but when they actually had some political success - winning a clean election, many Palestinians having grown tired of Fatah’s corruption - and gained some power, they suddenly became “terrorists.”
