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  • johnpi 6:48 am on November 13, 2009 | 1 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , Palestinian Authority,

    The next Palestinian Authority president could be a Hamas Legislator.

    If Abbas decides to forgo the chairmanship before the elections take place, his successor by default is speaker of the Parliament – Hamas lawmaker Aziz Dweik.

    Dweik, 59, is not slated to run in the elections as a Hamas candidate. The likely candidate would be Isma’il Haniyya, the current prime minister of the de facto Hamas government in the Gaza Strip. But the very notion of a Hamas leader heading the Palestinian Authority is in itself a symbolic victory for the Islamist movement, and a hair-raising option for Israel and Fatah.

    The Palestinian Central Elections Commission announced on Thursday that it did not have the capacity to hold elections on January 24, as originally planned, effectively postponing the elections indefinitely.

    How would Fatah respond:

    A Hamas figure in power is certainly not something that Fatah would take lightly.

    “You’re talking about a rival from a party which carried out a coup in Gaza, a party that is refusing to sign the Egyptian reconciliation paper that Fatah signed,” Dr Milhem said. “So you’re talking about conceding to Hamas. For Fatah this is not acceptable at all.”

    Actually, I think it was Fatah that held the coup, not Hamas.

     

  • johnpi 7:10 pm on October 7, 2009 | 4 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , , , , Palestinian Authority, , ,

    Richard Silverstein sheds light on some interesting facts about Libya’s status at the UN that makes the Goldstone report – which indicts Israel for war crimes – an issue that can’t be easily dispensed with a security council veto from the US.

    Libya not only sits on the Security Council, it also is president of the General Assembly. So that means that Qaddafi has the U.S. over a boulder twice over. If the U.S. vetoes Security Council consideration of the Report, Libya can introduce it before the General Assembly, where we don’t have veto. If Abbas hadn’t singed himself so badly in mishandling this affair, he might’ve been able to weasel out of this by telling Libya to take a hike. But Hamas already has his ass in a sling over his betrayal of the Gazans. He can’t very well dump Goldstone twice.

    So Obama may have the Goldstone nightmare return to haunt him in the Security Council. It might even be passed by the General Assembly. So much for our president’s supposed political adeptness.

     

  • johnpi 9:02 pm on October 5, 2009 | 3 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , Mamoud Abbas, Palestinian Authority,

    There are three dominant theories being floated as to why the West Bank government of Mahmoud Abbas scuttled a resolution “calling for the most incendiary international criticism of Israel’s actions during the Gaza War to date.”

    The first posits that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas made a clandestine deal with the U.S. to scuttle the Goldstone report in return for U.S. pressure to stop all Israeli construction in the Palestinian territories. Ibrahim Khraishi, the ambassador of the PLO to the U.N., was quoted as saying that the Palestinian negotiation had only agreed to postpone voting on the resolution so as to avoid creating “an obstacle” for the Americans.
    ….

    The second theory is that Israel threatened to cancel the licensing of Al-Wataniya, a second Palestinian mobile phone operator into which a number of Palestinian political leaders have personally invested [a $700 million investment].
    ….

    The final theory, and arguably the most conspiratorial among them, centers on the premise that Israel has recordings of senior Palestinian officials encouraging Israel to continue the January war with Hamas in Gaza, including a video of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas enthusiastically trying to convince Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak to continue the attack on Hamas. The theory is that an Israeli threat to release the tapes to the U.N. committee led to the Palestinian leadership pulling out of the resolution.

    “Aside from the threat regarding Al Wataniya, Avigdor Lieberman threatened the PA to expose evidence of their deep complicity in Israel’s massacre in Gaza,” Omar Barghouti, a Palestinian analyst and founding member of the Palestinian civil society campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, told The Media Line. “That would have caused several top heads to roll, so to speak.”

     

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