PA President Mahmoud Abbas declared Tuesday that he was determined to lead the
“battle for recognition” of a Palestinian state at the UN General Assembly later
this month and said he was confident that most Palestinians supported his new
drive.
Abbas’s announcement came as PLO officials in Ramallah talked
about the need to either cancel or change certain articles of the Oslo
Accords.
In a message to Palestinians posted on his Facebook account,
Abbas said he was determined to pursue the statehood bid despite pressure from
the US and other countries.
Abbas said he would deliver a speech before
the General Assembly on September 27 in which he would ask for recognition of a
Palestinian state as a nonmember of the UN.
Dubbing it the “battle for
recognition,” Abbas said: “We are determined to achieve recognition of our state
despite all the pressure.”
Abbas said that achieving the status of
non-member state in the UN would enable the Palestinians to argue that they are
living in a state that is occupied by another country.
He added that last
year’s statehood bid failed because of US pressure on members of the UN Security
Council.
Meanwhile, Palestinian Authority sources in Ramallah revealed
that PLO leaders who met in the past few days discussed for the first time the
possibility of cancelling the Oslo Accords.
The sources said that the PLO
leaders failed to reach a unified position on the issue and decided to postpone
the matter until after next week’s UN General Assembly session in New
York.
According to the sources, some PLO Executive Committee members
criticized Abbas’s policies and called to cancel the Oslo Accords. The sources
described the two-day discussions as “very tense.”
A PLO official said
that “it was obvious that the Palestinian leadership could not take such a
drastic measure as cancelling the Oslo Accords before the General Assembly
session and the US presidential election.”
A senior Israeli official said
that if the Palestinians went through with their UN bid it would be a
“confidence destroying measure” that would “raise extremely serious questions
about their real commitment to a negotiated agreement.”
Israel, the
official said, reserved the right to respond to this type of
action.
Although he would not give details of a possible reaction, the
official said that numerous contingencies were discussed in the past.
If
the Palestinians asked for non-member statehood status in the UN, he said, it
would break the most fundamental commitment of the Oslo accords: that all
outstanding issues would be negotiated between the two sides.
Regarding
the Palestinian threat to abrogate the Oslo Accords, the official said this was
“unfortunately typical of Palestinian behavior – ‘hold me back, or else.’” The
official said this pattern of behavior has been reflected in the past in threats
to dissolve the PA, and in Abbas’s repeated threats to resign.
“We don’t
take this too seriously,” the official said. “It is a shallow negotiating
tactic, and we don’t think the international community should take it too
seriously either.”
The official said there was a fundamental
contradiction in the Palestinian position: They decide not to negotiate or
engage with Israel, and then as a result say there is no peace process and they
need to take radical, revolutionary steps.
“This is a first and foremost
a tragedy for the Palestinian people, and it is time the world calls them out on
it,” he said.