A Man of Peace?

Aaron Mannes explains in The JPost Abu Mazen's history vis-a-vis negotiations.

Abu Mazen was an attractive alternative to Arafat because of his long commitment to pursuing negotiations with Israel. He was in contact with Israeli peace groups as early as the 1970s, and he was an architect of the Oslo process. During the "al-Aksa Intifada" he gained prominence for criticizing the "militarization" of the conflict via terror attacks on Israeli civilians.

So far so good, but there is a catch. Abu Mazen does not actually differ from Arafat on any major position. Abu Mazen insists on the right of millions of Palestinian refugees throughout the Middle East to return to Israel which would swamp Israel demographically and Israel's complete withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders.

He denies that there was ever a Jewish Temple at the Temple Mount, the holiest site of the Jewish people, although he states that he would guarantee the right of Jews to pray there. Most tellingly, Abu Mazen lauded Arafat's rejection of prime minister Ehud Barak's August 2000 offer at Camp David (considered by most Israelis to be the absolute limit of Israeli concessions), saying it "was a trap by all standards and we managed to get out of it." It would appear that despite his commitment to the peace process, Abu Mazen's idea of peace remains incompatible with conceivable Israeli compromises.

IN FACT, Abu Mazen outlined his vision of peace in a monograph he wrote in the late 1990s entitled Racial and Religious Polarization in Israel. In it, Abu Mazen asks, "What may better increase and escalate the conflicts and racial and religious contrasts in Israeli society: a state of war or a state of peace?"

Reviewing Abu Mazen's book in a July 1999 edition of the London-based Arabic daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, Salleh Qallab writes, " whoever follows [Abu Mazen's] thought and research and anyone who is familiar with the mosaic nature of Israeli society will come to the answer All the conflicts within Israeli society were so [sharply] exposed only after the beginning of the peace process

"We do not say that the [disintegration of Israeli society] is the Arab nuclear weapon All that is required from us is to bring the Israelis to the absolute conviction that we Arabs really want peace, because such conviction will deepen the disputes in Israeli society and bring the Israelis down from their tanks and out of their fortresses . [The Arabs] must convince the majority of Israelis that they want a just peace based on what can be referred to as a historic agreement, on the basis of UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338."

This is a man with whom we should negotiate?