On October 12 and 13, the Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas attended a Kremlin-sponsored international summit in Kazakhstan, where he met with Vladimir Putin and publicly thanked him for his support, while declaring his own lack of trust in the U.S. Michael Koplow observes that such rhetoric follows a “yearslong pattern . . . where Abbas expects a long list of things from the U.S. without being willing to accede to U.S. requests in return.” Koplow adds:
[Abbas’s] hopes when President Joe Biden was elected were that the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem and the PLO mission in Washington would be immediately reopened, that the Taylor Force Act would be swept away and past U.S. direct support to the Palestinian Authority (PA) would be resumed, and he may have even believed that there was a slight chance that the U.S. would move its embassy back to Tel Aviv. None of these things have occurred, and thus Abbas now speaks about Biden and the current administration as if they have done nothing for the Palestinians and are barely an improvement over the Trump era.
Despite Abbas’s grave disappointment, he blithely glosses over the hundreds of millions of dollars in economic assistance that Biden has restored to the West Bank, the hundreds of millions of dollars once again flowing to UNRWA, [the UN agency that supports Palestinian refugees from the Israeli War of Independence and their descendants], and the tens of millions of dollars to civil-society groups working with Palestinians. . . . More importantly, Abbas blithely glosses over the fact that this is about the upper limit of what Biden is able to do under U.S. law and in combination with what current politics in Congress will support.
The reason for that, of course, is that the PA continues to make prisoner and martyr payments in contravention of U.S. law, and despite its own repeated pledges to do so, has not yet taken any significant steps toward reforming this system. The lion’s share of Abbas’s disappointment lies in his own failure to live up to his commitments to the U.S. rather than the other way around.
The idea that Russia is the Palestinians’ great patron while the U.S. sits on its hands flies in the face of all evidence. Nevertheless, Abbas decided to sit down with Putin and thank him for scraps while treating tangible American help as if it does not exist.
Read more on Israel Policy Forum: https://israelpolicyforum.org/2022/10/20/abu-mazens-myopic-maneuvering/