JERUSALEM — By saying he wants to step down as president, Mahmoud Abbas has highlighted a deep Palestinian despair rooted in decades of failed peace initiatives and fruitless violence.
Neither strategy has yielded a Palestinian state, and Israeli settlements still encroach on lands that would make up their would-be nation.
Facing a hawkish Israeli government and an Obama administration reluctant to put muscle behind its demands on Israel, many Palestinians say they see no hope at all.
“I am frustrated with so- called peace and the so-called two-state solution,” said Rami Hassouna, 34, a construction contractor in the West Bank city of Ramallah. “If all of this was 1 percent possible before, now I think it’s impossible.”
The day after Abbas’ Thursday speech, Palestinians debated whether their president was serious about not running in Jan. 24 elections or was just trying to shake things up.
It’s also unclear whether the vote can be held at all, given that 1.5 million Palestinians live in the Gaza Strip, a territory ruled by Hamas militants who do not recognize Abbas’ authority.
But the mere threat to step down has heightened Palestinians’ fear that their dream of independence is slipping away.
Abbas aides say the last straw for him was seeing U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton standing beside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem last weekend and agreeing with him that he had made “unprecedented” concessions over settlements.
The feeling on both the Palestinian street and in the corridors of power is that peace with Israel is not possible under Netanyahu, who rules out key concessions such as allowing the Palestinians to have their capital in east Jerusalem.
Abbas says he will not sit down with Israel to discuss a peace deal until it freezes all settlement expansion.
Abbas’ real problem is not Israeli settlements, wrote Jerusalem Post editor David Horo witz on Friday: “It is, rather, his knowledge that, were the talks to resume, Netanyahu would offer him less. Abbas, in short, missed the boat.”
