U.S. President Donald Trump's adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner and special Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt were Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas' real audience at the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday. Delegation heads from the other 15 member countries were merely the decoration, arranged for by the council's current president, from Kuwait.
The night before Abbas' speech, the Palestinians sought to build some international buzz around the event. They spread rumors of their intention, for the first time, to reveal a Palestinian peace plan – essentially an effort to nip the expected U.S. peace plan in the bud. What we saw instead was an old and weary PA president trying to compensate for his previous speeches in which he berated the American administration and Trump himself.
Abbas said nothing new, didn't propose any type of real plan and didn't even address what he could do irrespective of the U.N., the U.S. and Israel, such as dramatically declaring that he would shut down the Palestinian Authority on the 25th anniversary of the Oslo Accords if real diplomatic progress is still forthcoming. He did admit that the PA was bereft of any authority, but didn't dare extrapolate from that any practical conclusion.
The PA president spoke about his intention to request, for a second time, U.N. membership for a Palestinian state. He did this despite the fact that he and all his listeners know it is a hollow endeavor destined for an automatic American veto; precisely what happened under former President Barack Obama, who Prime Minister Netanyahu and many Israelis continue to view as an enemy of the state. Abbas spoke about a plan for an international peace summit, even though everyone knows that the U.S. is on the verge of presenting its own peace plan, will not alter course and will not accept such a summit being hosted by the Russians or Chinese. As for Israel, it didn't even attend the pathetic summit in Paris last year, despite the Americans' participation.
It was important for Abbas to emphasize his role in the fight against terror, which he did by hinting at security coordination with Israel. He wanted to highlight his commitment to a peace process with Israel that both sides find amenable, and his disinterest in having an army with planes and tanks. His goal was to say, indirectly, that in his view a state with a powerful security force but without a traditional army is still a full state, rather than a "state-minus" as suggested by Netanyahu. In his effort to atone for his aforementioned tirades, he went even further and recognized our bond to Jerusalem, which he had denied us in his most recent speech.
The historical aspect of his speech – beyond rather boringly repeating what he has been saying since the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration – did little to strengthen the hand he was purportedly extending toward dialogue. He reiterated his call for Britain to take responsibility for one of the most justifiable things it ever did, without attempting to explain exactly how the Palestinian people, in whose name he was speaking, would actually gain from it.
Now that his speech is over, we can only ask: Has Abbas' diplomatic team reached out to Trump's representatives who, despite the PA president's recent invectives, traveled to U.N. headquarters in New York to listen to him speak; and is Abbas ready to climb down from his tree and truly listen to the imminent American peace proposal?
