Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas will hold several diplomatic meetings before returning to Ramallah from New York, members of his delegation to the United Nations said on Wednesday.
A senior Palestinian official said Abbas wants to meet with Jordan’s King Abdullah II and Egyptian President Abdel Fatah el-Sissi, and discuss with them the consequences of the Palestinian failure to condemn the Trump administration’s Mideast peace initiative at the UN Security Council.
“There is an atmosphere of bitter disappointment among the members of the delegation who went to the UN with Abbas,” the Palestinian source said. “The sense is that we are coming back with our tails between our legs. We were caught unprepared, and we didn’t properly assess the American pressure on the members of the Security Council.”
The official added that representatives from almost all of the UNSC member states told the Palestinian delegation that they sympathize with the Palestinian claims, but that the Americans brought all of their weight and influence to bear to strike the draft resolution presented by Tunisia and Indonesia on behalf of the Palestinians.
He added: “The moment the draft resolution was changed to a softer version that completely excluded any explicit condemnation of the deal of the century – there was no longer any point in bringing it to a vote even if we had a majority. We are still in shock from the cold shoulder we received from Arab states, chief among them the Gulf emirates, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.”
It should be noted that despite the united front presented by the PA against the US peace initiative and the support for Abbas’ boycott of US President Donald Trump and his administration, some officials within the Palestinian leadership are calling for a change of thinking in the wake of the UN fiasco.
“The time has come to break free of the conception shackling Abbas and his old guard, whereby the international community and Arab countries will care for the Palestinians’ interests,” one official said. “The president and his people are cognizant of the lukewarm responses from the Arab countries against the plan, and the fact that there also isn’t sweeping opposition to it within the international community, and that the draft resolution was pulled at the Security Council, proves the claim that the time has come to change the thought process and reconsider the boycott of the Trump administration and the peace plan it formulated.”
