However, The US envoy Martyn Indyk said on last January 31 that Kerry will be proposing the "framework agreement" to the Palestinian and Israeli negotiators "within a few weeks," but the State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki on the same day "clarified" in a statement that the "contents of the framework" are not "final" because "this is an ongoing process and these decisions have not yet been made."
Historic versus Political Decisions
Israeli President Shimon Peres on last January 30, during a joint press conference with the envoy of the Middle East Quartet, Tony Blair, said that there is "an opportunity" now to make "historic decisions, not political ones" for the "two-state solution" of the Arab -- Israeli conflict and that "we are facing the most crucial time since the establishment of the new Middle East in 1948," i.e. since what the Israeli historian Ilan Papp é called the "ethnic cleaning" of the Arabs of Palestine and the creation of Israel on their ancestral land.
Peres on the same occasion said that he was "convinced" that Abbas wants "seriously" to make peace with Israel, but what Peres failed to note was that "historic decisions" are made by historic leaders and that such a leader is still missing in Israel since the assassination of late former premier Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, but already available in the person of President Abbas, whom Peres had more than once confirmed as the Palestinian peace "partner," defying his country's official denial of the existence of such a partner on the Palestinian side.
Abbas' more than two -- decade unwavering commitment to peace, negotiations, renunciation of violence and the two --state solution has earned him a semi-consensus rejection and opposition to his fruitless efforts among his own people. He is defying his own Fatah-led Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) constituency, let alone his Hamas-led non-PLO political rivals, who have opposed his decision to resume bilateral negotiations with Israel and are overwhelmingly rejecting the leaked components of Kerry's "framework agreement."
"Abbas is perhaps the last Palestinian leader today with some measure of faith in the diplomatic process," Elhanan Miller, wrote in The Times of Israel this February 3. Palestinian "pressure" is mounting on him even from members of his own Fatah party and "his negotiating team crumbled" when negotiator Mohammed Shtayyeh resigned in November last year. In an interview recorded especially for the conference of Tel Aviv's Institute for National Security Studies in the previous week, Abbas "indicated he may not be able to withstand the pressure much longer," Miller wrote.
" Abbas is in an unenviable position these days. As negotiations with Israel enter the final third of their nine-month time frame," the Palestinian president stands "cornered" between a Palestinian rejection "and an Israeli leadership bent on depicting him as an uncompromising extremist," according to Miller, who quoted the Israeli Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz as describing Abbas in the previous week as "the foremost purveyor of anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli venom."
Similar Israeli "political" demonization of an historic figure like Abbas led Jamie Stern-Weiner, of the New Left Project, writing in GlobalResearch online on last January 11, to expect that, " It's possible that Abbas will get a bullet in his head!" Jamie was not taking things too far in view of Kerry's warning, reported by Palestinian Authority (PA) officials, that Abbas could face the fate of his predecessor Yasser Arafat.
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