Comparing the White House proposal for ending the Israel-Palestinian conflict with that offered by the Obama administration, Gershon Hacohen sees it as a historic opportunity:

By way of imposing a solution on the Israeli government, President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry tasked General John Allen with crafting a security plan that would allay Israel’s security concerns about an almost total withdrawal from the West Bank, including the Jordan Valley. . . . With that plan the [Obama] administration sought to fulfill its commitment to Israel’s security while rejecting its demand for defensible borders that do not conform to the 1967 lines.

The greatness of the Trump plan lies in the fact that unlike preceding American peace initiatives, it recognizes Israel’s right to retain territories beyond the 1967 lines as a matter of historical right and not solely as a measure to be taken for security purposes. Though the plan does not grant Israel all it desires, it plainly repudiates the precedent established by the peace treaty with Egypt, which mandated a complete Israeli withdrawal to the last centimeter.

Israel has received a precious gift, and it must decide what to make of the potential it harbors. About such moments [the Talmud] said: “There are those who gain the world in a single moment and there are those who lose the world in a single moment.”

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.