Leaving behind the flames he ignited with his militant speeches, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is flying to the United Nations General Assembly in New York, where he will do what he does better than anything else. He will speak before the representatives of the international community and ask for their support, the likes of which he has not received from the Palestinian street or the Arab world around him.
There's no good reason, therefore, to envy Abbas or his associates in the Palestinian leadership. They have no cards left to play and nothing else they can do. Turning to the international community won't help because of the Trump administration's unequivocal support for Israel. Truth be told, it's more than just Trump and his administration, as the majority of the world's countries have not rejected his Middle East peace plan and certainly don't view it as an alibi to scorch the earth, as Abbas is threatening to do.
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In Israel, some officials claim that Trump and Netanyahu have left the Palestinians with just one option, the path of violence. But Abbas knows this path is destined for failure. Indeed, it's hard to assume that what the Palestinians failed to achieve during the Second Intifada in the early 2000s, which left more than 1,000 Israelis dead, they can presently achieve against Israel's military superiority and robust intelligence capabilities.
Therefore, as always, Palestinian leaders are fixating on baseless hopes, which they are pinning on the international community but also on change occurring in Israel and the US in the wake of the looming elections in the two countries. As always, the Palestinians choose to exist, of their own volition, between speeches at the General Assembly and Security Council, from election to election, between discovery and dejection every time anew that none of their hopes materialized.
The only card Abbas essentially has left, aside from returning to the negotiation table, which he apparently doesn't consider an option, is threatening to dismantle the Palestinian Authority. Such a move, however, will drag the Palestinians light years backward. Conversely, he can threaten violence without truly intending to follow through, but the problem is that the Palestinian youths on the ground don't always understand the deeper meaning behind their president's threats. The result could be waves of terror which, although narrower in scope than a full-blown intifada perhaps, would still entail a steep price, first and foremost for the Palestinians.
Either way, even when no action is taken beyond speeches and statements, inaction itself also has its own dynamic. It is impossible to maintain the PA and the Palestinian national movement on the basis of speeches, dreams and election expectations alone. Ultimately, the PA is liable to fall apart. The result will be a stampede of Palestinians toward Israeli citizenship; hence Abbas will go down in history as the man who pushed the Palestinians to become Israelis.
