Israel's chief negotiator, Tzipi Livni, stated on last January 25 that Abbas' positions are "unacceptable to us" and threatened the Palestinians "to pay the price" if he sticks to them.
"This is a clear threat to Abbas in person and it must be taken seriously," the PA Foreign Minister Riyad al-Malki told reporters soon after. "We will distribute Livni's statements to all foreign ministers and the international community. We can't remain silent towards these threats," he added.
Israeli demonization was not confined to Abbas; it hit also at Kerry as "hurtful," "unfair," "intolerable," "obsessive," "messianic" and expects Israel " to negotiate with a gun to its head." US National Security Adviser Susan Rice "tweeted" in response to convey, according to Haaretz on this February 5, that "Israeli insulters have crossed the red line of diplomatic etiquette!"
Minesweeping Concessions
Abbas' demonization was the Israeli reward for the minesweeping concessions he had already made to make the resumed negotiations a success, risking a growing semi-consensus opposition at home:
* Abbas had backtracked on his own previously proclaimed precondition for the resumption of bilateral negotiations with Israel, namely freezing the accelerating expansion of the illegal Israeli Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territories, which Israel militarily occupied in 1967, at least temporarily during the resumed negotiations.
* Thereafter, according to Tzvi Ben-Gedalyahu, writing in The Jewish Press on this February 3, Abbas "has essentially backtracked on all his redlines, except for" heeding Israel's insistence on recognizing it as a "Jewish state," which is a new Israeli unilaterally demanded precondition that even the Jordanian Foreign Minister, Nasser Judeh, considered "unacceptable" on this February 2 despite his country's peace treaty with Israel.
* In his interview with The New York Times on this February 2, Abbas reiterated his repeated pledge not to allow a third Intifada, or uprising: "In my life, and if I have any more life in the future, I will never return to the armed struggle," he said, thus voluntarily depriving himself from a successfully tested source of a negotiating power and a legitimate instrument of resisting foreign military occupation ordained by the international law and the UN charter.
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