Word: intifadas
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...Arafat followed up quickly by naming Qureia to succeed Abbas, tossing a hot potato into President Bush's lap. Qureia, the popular speaker of the Palestinian legislature and key Oslo negotiator, is widely known as a moderate opposed to the armed intifada, who maintains close ties with many European, Arab and even some Israeli leaders (including Sharon's former foreign minister, Shimon Peres). He's not exactly a toady of Yasser Arafat, having clashed publicly with him on previous occasions - in many ways, Qureia's political pedigree is not dissimilar from that of Abbas, except that his personal relationship with...
...expel him. If the PA collapsed as a result, Israel would then have to resume the occupier's responsibilities in the Palestinian cities of the West Bank and Gaza. And whereas it has sent its troops on raids in many of those cities in the course of the current intifada, it has studiously avoided long-term deployments or resuming responsibility for civil administration. Even hawkish Israelis who have no intention of surrendering the hundreds of settlements Israel has built throughout the West Bank and Gaza were relieved by the Oslo Accords requirement that they turn over those cities...
...institutions (code, in U.S. and Israeli parlance, for sidelining Yasser Arafat). The requirements of Israel in the same first phase are limited to easing the humanitarian plight of the Palestinians, withdrawing from towns reoccupied by the Israeli Defense Force and dismantling settlements built in the course of the current intifada...
...Palestinian failure - or refusal - to shut down the militant groups is that organizations such as Hamas are now part of the fabric of mainstream Palestinian society. Attempting to shut them down would inevitably ignite a Palestinian civil war. Even moderates such as Abbas, who believes the armed intifada has been disastrous for the Palestinian cause, think that the only way to end it is by reestablishing a consensus among the fighters to return to a peace process...
...between the Israelis and Americans on the one hand, and those Palestinians with whom they refuse to talk directly - Hamas, JI, the various Fatah militias and terrorist groups and Palestinian president Yasser Arafat. Abbas has been more than simply a messenger, of course. He believes passionately that the armed intifada has brought catastrophe on the Palestinian national cause, and that all will be lost unless violence against Israel is ended unconditionally. But Abbas's only political weapon is the threat to resign - alternately directed at the White House, Israel or Arafat, its implication is that his departure will leave...