U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday that he trusts Palestinian Authority (PA) president Mahmoud Abbas to “reform” the PA so that it can take over governing functions in Gaza at the end of Israel’s war against Hamas terrorists there.
The Times of Israel reported: “What I take away from this meeting is that he is committed to that and is very much prepared to move forward,” Blinken tells AFP in Bahrain in response to a question about Abbas’s commitment to reforming the PA.”
Tuesday marked the 19th anniversary of Abbas’s election as PA president. He is now in the 20th year of his first four-year term.
Abbas isa notorious antisemite who has drawn condemnation even from pro-Palestinian governments in the West in recent months for his fulminations against Jews and his defense of Adolf Hitler. He wrote a Ph.D. thesis minimizing the Holocaust.
In addition, Abbas refuses to end the “pay-to-slay” policy, under which the PA pays stipends to Palestinian terrorists in Israeli prisons, and pensions to the families of dead Palestinian terrorists, though it has meant the loss of U.S. taxpayer dollars. Abbas also names public sites in the West Bank after terrorists, and PA official media routinely produce antisemitic, anti-Israel hatred.
Perhaps most important — from a Palestinian perspective — is the fact that Abbas and the PA government generally are seen as irredeemably corrupt. As even the Atlantic noted, 87% of Palestinians believe that the PA is corrupt, and 78% want Abbas to quit.
Blinken did not indicate what had convinced him that Abbas would reform the PA. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ruled out any role for the PA in post-Hamas Gaza, where the PA governed until being ousted in a Hamas coup in 2007.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the 2021 e-book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now updated with a new foreword. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.