A Palestinian leader just gave Trump an unprecedented opening to pursue peace

Columnist
Dan Perry
April 23, 2025

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas just did something very unusual for an Arab leader: He took a risk with bold statements and moral clarity. “Sons of dogs, hand over the hostages,” he said in a televised speech on Wednesday, calling out Hamas for prolonging a war that has brought catastrophe to both Palestinians and Israelis, and demanding that Hamas relinquish control of Gaza and surrender its weapons.

This was not some vague diplomatic gesture — and it was the furthest-reaching statement I may have ever heard from a major Arab leader directed at Hamas. Whether one sees Abbas as weak, corrupt, or merely trying to seize a political opportunity, there is no mistaking the significance of a wartime Palestinian president essentially taking Israel’s side on core issues — the need for a release of the remaining 59 hostages and a Hamas disarmament.

If he were wise, Donald Trump, who has essentially given Israel carte blanche in continuing the war, might use Abbas’ words as a good excuse to pivot. Israel’s war is going nowhere, and if Trump really wants it over — as he frequently proclaimed during the 2023 campaign — he needs to urgently talk to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about bringing Abbas into plans for a post-war Gaza.

To understand how significant this is, it’s worth recalling Abbas’s own previous caution. Following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in southern Israel, Abbas was rightly criticized for responding too slowly and too vaguely. His early statements avoided naming Hamas directly, instead condemning the loss of civilian life on all sides. In that moment, he looked more like a figure of paralysis than leadership.

But now he’s placing the blame squarely on Hamas for the devastation that continues to engulf Gaza after a ceasefire broke down in March. Doing so took guts. Abbas is not popular, and Hamas, infuriatingly, still commands real popular support. To so forcefully reject Hamas’s leadership, in public, during war, is a welcome departure from past equivocations.

And it leaves Netanyahu’s government with no more excuses.

For years, Netanyahu has treated Abbas and the Palestinian Authority — the autonomy government created in the 1990s, back when Israel’s governments were pragmatic — as irrelevant at best, and malicious at worst.

He systematically undermined the PA while strengthening Hamas, which seized the Gaza Strip from Abbas in 2007. He eased the way for cash transfers from Qatar to Gaza to maintain disunity between the strip and the West Bank, and refused to engage in serious talks toward a long-term solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with Ramallah.

Those tactics blew up in his face, resulting in a catastrophe for Israel, and still he refuses to heed the lessons. The result has been a grotesque Catch-22: Israel is at war with Hamas but has no plan for an alternative, because it stupidly rejects the only plausible Palestinian alternative.

To be clear, the PA is far from perfect. Its school curriculum contains inexcusably inflammatory content toward Israel; its payments to families of terrorists must stop; and its indifference toward former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s generous 2008 peace offer remains a stain on its legacy. Its governance has been marred by corruption and inertia.

But none of that changes the underlying truth: the PA is the only entity with international legitimacy, institutional capacity, and a track record of cooperating with Israel on security that could plausibly take over Gaza. And it has managed to keep things relatively calm in the West Bank under extraordinarily difficult circumstances, suggesting it can function basically well enough to do the same for Gaza amid what is sure to be a long and extraordinarily difficult period of rebuilding.

With Wednesday’s speech, Abbas threw down a gauntlet, all but telling Netanyahu directly that it’s time to cooperate.

Trump should back him up. Even though he said this week that there is no daylight between him and Netanyahu, on any issue, it should be clear to him by now that the Israeli leader has absolutely no intention of ever concluding this war.

Netanyahu’s refusal to even consider the PA as part of a post-Hamas solution in Gaza has little to do with policy logic. It is entirely about politics. His far-right coalition partners, including cabinet ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, would rather see Gaza flattened or re-occupied permanently than handed over to Abbas. Accepting a role for the PA — even conditionally — risks collapsing Netanyahu’s fragile coalition.

Netanyahu wants to buy time: time to keep his coalition together, time to avoid the long-delayed Oct. 7 inquiry, and time to engineer ways to further weaken Israel’s democratic institutions, ensuring his ability to continue dominating the country.

If Trump wants to make good on a campaign promise that helped get him elected, winning the votes of Arab voters fed up with former President Joe Biden’s refusal to take a strong line with Israel, it’s time for him to step in — again — and push Netanyahu to do what no one else on earth could persuade him to. In a political environment where almost everyone is avoiding clarity, Abbas just offered some. Israel — and the international community — must stop treating the PA like the ghost of peace processes past, and start treating it as a building block of the future.

It’s high time for Israel’s allies, particularly Trump, to force an endgame in the form of a real plan: Disarm Hamas, empower the PA, rebuild Gaza with Arab and Western support, and offer a political horizon Palestinians can believe in.

It’s the only path forward that offers anything other than perpetual bloodshed.

La source de cet article se trouve sur ce site