The same day, Palestinian Authority prime minister Mahmoud Abbas, who assumed his post last spring with the stamp of approval of the White House, resigned.

This turn of events indicated that the U.S-brokered “road map for peace” in the Middle East is resulting in more violence and further blows against the Palestinians. Washington’s goals in pushing through this accord included pressuring Tel Aviv to make minor concessions to Palestinians and deflating the Palestinian liberation struggle in exchange for a promise of a Palestinian state in a patchwork of land in the occupied territories with a leadership that meets with the U.S. rulers’ approval.

Washington had portrayed Abbas as someone it could work with in implementing the “peace plan” agreed to by Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, U.S. president George Bush, and Abbas at a June 4-5 summit in Aqaba, Jordan.

Abbas announced his resignation at a September 6 meeting of the Palestinian Authority (PA). “The fundamental problem was Israel’s unwillingness to implement its commitments in the road map,” he said. Alluding to opposition to his policies among the Palestinian people and disagreements with PA president Yasir Arafat, Abbas also complained of “lack of support” and “harsh and dangerous domestic incitement against this government.” Abbas had sought full control of Palestinian security forces, but was rebuffed by other PA leaders.

Arafat nominated Ahmed Qurei, the speaker of the Palestinian parliament and a former banker, to replace Abbas.

Bush presented the “peace plan” to the Israeli government and Palestinian leaders May 1, the day after Arafat appointed Abbas as prime minister. The so-called road map calls for the formation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza by 2005, on the condition that the PA put together a leadership acceptable to the White House and crack down on groups Washington deems “terrorist.” Sharon and Bush have refused to negotiate with Arafat, whom Tel Aviv has kept under virtual house arrest in his compound in Ramallah for two years.

While the Israeli regime made some initial concessions before and after the Aqaba summit—lifting the closure of the occupied territories, releasing a fraction of the nearly 6,000 Palestinian prisoners it holds, and shutting a few “illegal outposts” of Zionist settlements in the West Bank—it did not miss a beat in its military onslaught against those it considers the most vulnerable obstacles to its forced dispossession of the Palestinian people. In the week after the Aqaba meeting, Tel Aviv carried out five assassination attempts against Hamas leaders, killing more than 20 Palestinians and injuring 100.

Abbas did no more than issue protests at these assaults. At the same time, he did not try to disarm or arrest Palestinian militants, as Washington and Tel Aviv insisted he do to implement the Aqaba accord. “We are not going backward,” Abbas stated. “A civil war—never.”

On June 29 Abbas reached agreement with Hamas and other Palestinian organizations for a suspension of military actions against Israeli forces. The cease-fire did not result in an end to Israeli attacks. Two weeks prior to the September 6 events a Palestinian official pointed to “the 22 Palestinians killed during the cease-fire, the [Palestinian] homes and businesses demolished, and the number of settlement outposts remaining.”

In the last three years nearly 800 Israelis and 2,600 Palestinians have been killed.

In addition, Tel Aviv has continued the construction of a 300-mile “security fence” to seal off Palestinian areas from Jerusalem. Some 70 miles of the enclosure have gone up so far, in some places as a cement wall, in others as an electrified razor-wire fence.

The White House blamed Arafat for Abbas’s resignation. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice told Fox News September 7 that Abbas had been “hamstrung by internal bickering inside the Palestinian Authority.” Secretary of State Colin Powell got more to the point, saying Washington “did everything we could to support” Abbas, but that Arafat “did not give Mr. Abbas the resources he needed to go after Hamas.”

Israeli forces—continuing their long-standing policy of assassinations against Palestinian leaders—dropped a 550-pound bomb the previous day on a building in the Gaza Strip in a failed effort to kill Sheik Ahmed Yassin, a central leader of Hamas. Yassin and an assistant, the BBC reports, were “alerted by the sound of approaching aircraft…and left the house just moments before an F-16 warplane dropped a bomb on it.” Israeli officials said their attack on the “head of the snake” had not achieved its objective because the air force had used a “relatively small bomb” in the residential neighborhood where the attack took place.

Tel Aviv promised a “relentless war against Hamas” in which its leaders, in Sharon’s words, are “marked for death.”
 
 
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