Enough with the Abbas charade

Israel, America and Europe have taken a good first step by cutting off both aid to and contact with the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority.

Yet all three continue this ridiculous charade of dealing with Mahmoud Abbas, head of the PLO and “president” of the PA, as if he were some separate entity capable of making decisions and implementing policy on his own.

The PA is more democratic than most governments in this region because of Western pressure. The West can’t have its cake and eat it too by now expecting Abbas to exercise dictatorial powers.

In fact, it was the West that pushed for Abbas’ current post to either be eliminated or made purely ceremonial.

What they got was a PA equivalent in functionality to a US Congress that appoints all government secretaries and exercises full control over the military, while the president is still considered the chief executive. The result is chaos and instability.

Abbas’ utter impotence in this morass of power was again demonstrated in the aftermath of Monday’s Tel Aviv “suicide” bombing.

The PLO chief condemned the attack for the harm it had done to the “Palestinian cause” (he would take a different route to relieving the Jews of their homeland), while the Hamas government backed it as a legitimate act of “self defense.”

Guess who’s word matters more. In the current set-up, Abbas’ displeasure with Monday’s massacre will result in not even one arrest or any action to prevent additional atrocities.

The reason this untenable situation exists is because the West and the Israeli government in their misguided handling of the “peace” process believed they could side-step Yasser Arafat’s intransigence by forcing him to create and transfer his own powers to the position of prime minister - essentially transforming the PA from a presidential system of government to a parliamentary one.

The only problem was everyone assumed the blood-soaked demagogue Arafat would fully relinquish his lucrative absolute hold on government.

He didn’t, and the vast power he retained for himself then passed to Abbas with the blessing of the West, which had apparently forgotten that it previously wanted the position of PA “president” to be bestowed with no more real political power than the English Throne.

Well, that worked out OK so long as the majority parliament faction, and therefore the prime minister and his cabinet, were all of the same party as Abbas.

But democracy doesn’t work that way, and the people voted in Hamas.

And so the time has come for Israel and the West to recognize the mistake they made when Arafat was in power and either endorse Abbas as an absolute dictator, or acknowledge his irrelevance.

Obviously the latter option would be chosen in line with America’s democracy agenda, which would then necessitate recognizing that the vast majority of “Palestinians” knowingly and willingly chose a group of unrepentant terrorist killers as their leaders - something the West is trying feverishly to avoid doing, at least publicly.

It’s time for some tough decisions. Are Israel and her allies in Washington up to it? I doubt it. Though Hamas through its own actions may take the luxury of choice out of everyone’s hands.

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