Word: arafats
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President Bush twice saluted Palestinian prime minister Mahmoud Abbas's "strong leadership" earlier this week, but by Friday there were reasons to doubt the extent of his following among Palestinians. First, Palestinian Authority president Yasser Arafat ripped into Wednesday's meeting at Aqaba, saying Abbas had gotten precious little by way of concrete undertakings from Ariel Sharon. Then on Friday the militant Islamist group Hamas announced that it would hold no further talks with Abbas on a proposed cease-fire, accusing him of having sold out the Palestinian cause by agreeing at Aqaba to end the intifadah without securing Palestinian...
...Abbas or Arafat...
...Israeli media reports that President Bush was recently surprised to learn that Palestinian prime minister Mahmoud Abbas was not, as he had imagined, the aggressive young leader of a new generation risen to challenge Arafat, but instead a 68-year-old PLO veteran who had spent most of his political career by Arafat's side, who still reports back to Arafat despite the U.S.-Israeli boycott of the Palestinian Authority president. The President may also have been somewhat frustrated to discover, in his meeting Tuesday with Arab leaders who back the "roadmap," that Arafat remains the leader of the Palestinians...
...Abbas, appointed prime minister by Arafat under pressure from the international community, certainly has important differences with the PA president, most importantly over the 30-month armed intifada which Abbas sees as having brought the Palestinians nothing but misery and international isolation. The new prime minister wants the violence stopped and negotiations resumed, believing that even if Sharon is unwilling to grant the Palestinians' bottom-line demands, stopping terror will swing international (and even Israeli) public opinion back behind the Palestinian pursuit of statehood in the 1967 territories...
...meeting the security requirements of the first phase of the "roadmap," he will depend on coaxing a cease-fire agreement out of the Palestinian radical groups waging the armed intifada. The combination of persuasion and enforcement necessary to halt terrorism will almost certainly require the support of Yasser Arafat, who remains more powerful than Abbas both inside the Palestinian Authority and on the street...