Psychological warfare

By DEBORAH DANAN
former Meretz MK Yossi Beilin (photo credit: Ben Spier)
former Meretz MK Yossi Beilin
(photo credit: Ben Spier)
In December 2010, following the end of the moratorium on settlement construction, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was featured on television threatening to dissolve the Palestinian Authority as a result of Israel’s failure to reach a peace deal.
Nearly a year later in October 2011, the Hebrew daily Ma’ariv quoted a senior Palestinian official as saying that the PA has worked out a plan to dissolve the PA within months if its efforts to obtain the UN membership fail – a report that was later denied by Fatah officials. At the time Abbas had told the Fatah Revolutionary Council that the “Palestinian Authority was not an authority and many people and institutions ask me about the futility of maintaining it.”
This past week the dissolution saga resumed with a call on Abbas by former MK and architect of Oslo, Yossi Beilin, to dismantle the PA. In an open letter published in Foreign Policy magazine, Beilin urged Abbas thus:
“Do not let Prime Minister [Binyamin] Netanyahu hide behind the fig leaf of the Palestinian Authority – impose upon him, once again, the responsibility for the fate of 4 million Palestinians.”
The official Palestinian response to Beilin’s call not only belies Abbas’ previous remarks about dismantling the PA, it makes it sound as if the pied piper of Oslo was suggesting that Abbas give up the personal wealth he amassed from UN and EU funds channeled to the PA. Hana Amireh, member of the PLO Executive Committee, said that carrying out Beilin’s suggestion would be tantamount to “political suicide.”
Amireh further stated that the PA had a transitional role to bring the Palestinians to an independent state and achieve their rights. The word "transitional" is a rather subjective term it seems.
Let’s examine the PA for a moment. The PA was formed in 1994 as an interim administrative body for security and civilian-related matters in Palestinian urban centers. It had an expiration date of 5 years during which final negotiations were to take place.
19 years later and the interim body of the PA is still in place despite the fact that the Oslo process has proved a dramatic failure. In his letter, Beilin further encouraged his former negotiations partner to declare the end of Oslo, a fate that is "justified by the fact that the path to a permanent-status agreement is blocked."
Blocked? I’ll say. Abu Mazen won’t come to the negotiating table without Israel agreeing to his demands for the cessation of settlements and a return to 1967 lines. Two issues which are not actually delineated in the Oslo Accords.
Another laughable point that Beilin elucidates in his letter is his fear that the status quo will generate “the loss of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.”
Ah, yes, democracy. Would that be the same democracy that Beilin himself subverted when he entered into illegal talks with the PLO in 1991 and then again during both Oslo and Geneva Accords? Or the democracy that allowed him to reach out to the opposition with no backing from the Israeli electorate? Yes, Mr Beilin, like so many before it, the idea of handing the fate of Israel’s democratic and Jewish nature over to Abbas is truly a stroke of genius.