PA Threatens to Declare Independence

by Avi Tuchmayer
February 20, 2008

Palistinian Authority Policemen
Photo: Courtesy

Senior officials in the Palestinian Authority said Wednesday they could follow the lead of newly-independent Kosovo and unilaterally declare independence if the current round of negotiations with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni fail to yield sufficient Israeli concessions.

Yasser Abed Rabbo, a founding member of the Palestine Liberation Organization and a long-time confident of the late Yasser Arafat, told Reuters that "negotiations with Israel are not going anywhere" and said new and expanding Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria "prove" that Israel is "not serious" about achieving peace with the local Arab community. He continued to threaten a unilateral declaration of independence should Palestinian negotiators determine the current round of talks a failure.

"Kosovo is not better than us," he said. "If Kosovo was able to unilaterally declare independence and gain recognition from the United States, the European Union and many other important countries, then why can't we do the same?"

Should the PLO carry through on Abed Rabbo's threat to declare independence, it would not be the first such declaration. In 1988, at the height of the first Intifada, terror leader Arafat declared "independence" from the organization's headquarters in Algiers. The move was predictably supported by most of the Arab world, but the Western world largely ignored the move as a farce.

Reformed Terrorist?

The Israeli left considers Abed Rabbo a "moderate" because of his close relations with left-wing politicians such as Yossi Beilin. In recent years he has called on Arab terrorists to halt their attacks on Jewish civilians because he feels they do not serve the Arab national interest. He pointed to the Kosovo example as a model for local Arabs, saying the international community supported the Kosovar independence model because it was conducted peacefully.

But last November Abed Rabbo rejected out of hand Israel's demand for PLO negotiators to recognize Israel as a "Jewish state," raising fears that the true goal for Arab negotiators is to negotiate the death of the Jewish state, rather than peaceful settlement alongside Israel.

More recently, he featured prominently at the funeral of arch-terrorist George Habash in late-January. Rabbo and Habash co-founded the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) terrorist organization in the 1960s, before the pair split and Abed Rabbo formed a separate terrorist group, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, in the early 1970s.

Olmert: No Comment

As of this writing Prime Minister Olmert has not responded to Abed Rabbo's threat. Mark Regev, a spokesman for the prime minister, told Arutz 7 that "Palestinian leaders make many statements every day. We do not automatically respond to every comment that they make."