Failed peacemaker

After many years as the so-called moderate head of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas is calling it a day. He says he won't be running for reelection. His reason? The fact that the United States didn't insist hard enough on an Israeli settlement freeze. Of course, never mind that Abbas himself never even brought up this freeze in his past negotiations with Israel. Here, David Horovitz of The Jerusalem Post does an accounting of the sad career of a man who couldn't deliver peace to his people.

But whether or not Abbas genuinely had the desire, it must now be definitively accepted that he has lacked the courage. He lacked the courage to tell his people the truth about Israel: that our historical legitimacy, precisely here between the river and the sea, is indisputable; that our presence is not an injustice wrought upon the Palestinians by a Holocaust-guilty Europe, but rather the belated correction of a historical injustice done to the exiled Jews; that both peoples need to find enlightened compromise and seek to live peacefully side by side.

Abbas lacked the courage to seize the opportunity of a deal with the desperate Olmert - an Israeli prime minister who, late in his political life, had become persuaded that a two-state solution was an urgent imperative for Israel, and who belied the claim that no Israeli prime minister would give more to the Palestinians than Barak offered in vain to Arafat.

The gaps were too wide, Abbas complained, even as he cited a purported Olmert offer of 97 percent of the West Bank and recognition in principle (denied by Olmert) of a Palestinian "right of return." He preferred, as he told The Washington Post this past May, to bide his time. "I will wait for Hamas to accept international commitments. I will wait for Israel to freeze settlements," he said, in an article headlined "Abbas's Waiting Game." "Until then, in the West Bank we have a good reality."