Palestinian President Abbas, critical of peace process, says won't seek reelection

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas says he's made up his mind once and for all: There will be elections in January – and he will not be a candidate in them.

Mr. Abbas's announcement Thursday night was the pinnacle of a dramatic day's events in which he gathered together his closest allies and senior members of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) to tell them that he was fed up and would not seek reelection.

Abbas's statement comes on the heels of an intense but largely unsuccessful week of US diplomatic activity aimed at restarting Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, during which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the Palestinian president to come back to the negotiating table despite the lack of a freeze in Israeli settlement building in the West Bank.

In his speech, Abbas expressed disappointment in Israeli actions on settlements, and accused Israel of taking dangerous steps in Jerusalem as well as of "trying to destroy some holy sites around the Al Aqsa mosque," which he said threatened religious war. He hinted at a desire for international mediation in the conflict beyond the US as chief peace-broker.

His comments seemed a clear complaint lobbed toward the Obama administration, seen by Palestinians and others across the Arab world as backpedaling from a harder line toward Israeli settlement growth. Mrs. Clinton's praise for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's limits on settlement growth, which she called unprecedented, have raised Palestinian ire about US evenhandedness.

In fact, some analysts see Abbas's move as something of a final attempt to ring alarm bells for the US administration, perhaps to push it to more urgent action.

"We have pledged with Israel to reach [a] two-state solution," he said. "However, month after month, year and year, we have seen nothing but complacency and procrastination, and all of this led to a tainting of the negotiations."

Really leaving?

Abbas, who mentioned a variety of vexing factors – from an intransigent Hamas to an unsympathetic media – said that his decision not to run was not open "to debate or argument or bargaining at all."

But Abbas has threatened to quit before.

Khalil Shaheen, a leading columnist from the al-Ayyam newspaper, says that members of Fatah, as well as US officials – not to mention some Israelis – will try to convince him to stay. And with Fatah and Hamas still far away from a national reconciliation agreement, Mr. Shaheen says, it looks unlikely that elections will actually take place on Jan. 24, as Abbas decreed. Hamas, in control of the Gaza Strip, says it won't participate and rejected the call to elections.

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