Trump's Middle East policy has ripped the facade from Palestinian leadership

Eli Lake:

There are two ways to understand the two-and-a-half hour rant Sunday from the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, in which he called for discarding past agreements with Israel.

The first way is straightforward: He means it. As Maya Angelou famously said, "when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time." In the case of Abbas, he has been showing us who he is for a while now.

He defends Palestinian Authority payments for terrorists. He called murderers "heroic brothers" when they were released by Israel in 2013 as a condition for restarting peace talks. In December he urged the Organization of the Islamic Conference to reconsider its recognition of Israel.

So when Abbas gives a Castro-esque speech laced with fake history about Israel being a colonial project of Europeans, it fits a pattern.

The second way of understanding his rant requires some creative accounting. Abbas doesn't really mean it. Abbas has been a patient peace partner now for 15 years, but along comes President Donald Trump, who recognizes Jerusalem as Israel's capital and asks Saudi Arabia to pressure Abbas to take a deal. What do you expect?
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But foreign affairs are never so simple as one cause having one effect. And this brings us back to Abbas. The 82-year-old Palestinian leader certainly had reason to be disappointed with Trump's decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. He didn't like Trump's threats to cut off funding for the Palestinian Authority. But none of that quite explains a speech that wishes for the U.S. president's house to come to ruin, accuses Israel of importing drugs, and threatens to blacklist companies that do business in the occupied territory and report their names to Interpol for bribery.

To explain this vitriol as purely a reaction to despair or hopelessness is to ignore recent history. Abbas was elevated to his position after George W. Bush asked the Palestinian people to elect leaders not tainted by terror. Recall the Iranian shipment of arms coordinated by Abbas's predecessor Yasser Arafat in 2002, during the final months of the second intifadah. Abbas on the other hand had distinguished himself in this period by delivering a brave speech calling for nonviolent resistance to occupation, when Arafat was praising the suicide bombers.

The current Palestinian leader has been dining out on that speech now for 15 years, while consistently rejecting peace offers and later negotiations. In 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza and four settlements in the northern West Bank. This could have been the basis for new negotiations, but nothing happened.

Under Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Abbas was offered an independent state in 2008. Olmert recalled in a 2015 interview that he told Abbas: "Remember my words, it will be 50 years before there will be another Israeli prime minister that will offer you what I am offering you now. Don’t miss this opportunity." Abbas didn't take the offer. Instead he asked to study the maps.
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Trump has the unique ability to force people to expose who they really are and cast off the diplomatic niceties that some hide behind.  What he has exposed is that the Palestinian leadership has been running a scam for decades betting others to support their beggar entity while they pretend to want a peace deal.  Nothing could be further from the truth as was seen when they refused deals that were better than they deserved.  Trump has forced their hand and they can no longer hide who they are.