PA President Mahmoud Abbas on Thursday said that he does not rule out returning to the path of armed "resistance" against Israel and took pride in the fact that he had been the first to fire on Israel and that his organization had trained Hizbullah.
In an interview with the Jordanian daily al-Dustur, Abbas said that he was opposed to an armed struggle against Israel - for the time being. "At this present juncture, I am opposed to the armed struggle because we can't succeed in it, but maybe in the future things will be different," he said.
And there is this recent interview from the Lebanon Daily Star:
SIDON: Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was quoted Wednesday as rejecting the naturalization of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. "We would never accept any settlement that leads to naturalizing Palestinians in Lebanon," Abbas told pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat.
"We would not accept any settlements that would lead to a demographic change in Lebanon. This is totally unacceptable ... We won't accept a settlement that obliges Lebanon to naturalize even one Palestinian. We will find a settlement that satisfies Palestinians in Lebanon and satisfies Lebanon ... I'm sure of this and time will prove it," Abbas added.
Let me explain something to those totally unfamiliar with life as a Palestinian within a refugee camp in Lebanon. There are literally thousands of jobs one is legally prohibited from performing as well as clear restrictions on travel and property ownership. There were also stringent restrictions on education for Palestinians. I am too far out of the loop on all things Lebanese to know, if the law prohibiting Palestinians from even owning or driving taxis has been revoked, but stop and think for a minute about the devastion it would have caused to literally thousands of immigrants and refugee families, if an immigrant or refugee in Canada was legally proscribed from driving or owning a taxi.
Some of the most wretched people on the face of their earth live in the refugee camps in Lebanon. The conditions have often been horrendous beyond your imaging, and for the “elected’ leader and alleged moderate of the Palestinian Authority, to stridently reject the idea of citizenship for Palestinian Lebanese, is to condemn these people to a future without the hope that tomorrow can be better than today. It is to condemn them to life lived on the outer edges of possiblity and to spend ones days literally scavenging for only basic subsistence. Palestinians deserve better than that.
Can we all agree now that Abbas is still working off the blueprint of the PLO’s Phased Plan now? And if not, what evidence would you consider sufficient to believe neither Fatah nor Hamas are actively working for a peaceful resolution to this conflict that does not end in the destruction of the Jewish state?
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