Word: yasser
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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...
...even in 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...
...prime minister remains politically weak inside the PA as well as on the streets. PA president Yasser Arafat remains a major obstacle, particularly to the extent that the success of the roadmap is equated with his own marginalization. Arafat remains more powerful than Abbas both on the streets and inside the PA, and fear that he could be tempted to sabotage the process may be one reason European diplomats have been holding talks with him despite the boycott of Arafat by Israel...
...those organizations are popular on the Palestinian street, and their elimination would require nothing short of a Palestinian civil war - an eventuality Mahmoud Abbas and his government are desperate to avoid. It's far from clear that Abbas could win such a war, with or without the support of Yasser Arafat. And if at the end the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza remained surrounded by Israeli settlements and soldiers, Abbas and his team risk being seen by ordinary Palestinians as nothing more than enforcers for Israel. So Abbas's approach to the security requirements of the roadmap...
...leader can wage a campaign against militants unless Palestinians can be shown that such a crackdown would lead inexorably to statehood and an end to Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. All of this, of course, is familiar ground. The Bush administration had hoped that twisting Yasser Arafat's arm to appoint Abbas would somehow break the logjam, but when Sharon met with Abbas and senior PA figures last Saturday, the change of faces on the Palestinian side of the table had not changed the basic stalled conversation...