Senior Israeli official: World needs to see through Abbas’s ‘charade’
The international community should end the “charade” whereby Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas refuses to negotiate with Israel, deliberately creates a crisis, adds to the crisis through inflammatory rhetoric and then pleads to the world to “save us,” a senior government official said on Wednesday night.
The official, who said the world should finally hold Abbas “accountable” for his behavior, was responding to the PA leader’s comments in Paris on Tuesday alongside French President François Hollande warning of a third intifada resulting from violence in Jerusalem, and calling on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to end Israel’s actions in the Old City, stop settlement activity, and return to negotiations.
“We spoke about what’s happening at Al-Aksa,” Abbas told a news conference after meeting with Hollande. “It’s extremely dangerous. We don’t want it to continue, and [if it did] the alternative would be chaos or an intifada that we don’t want.”
Hollande urged calm in Jerusalem and said the post- 1967 status quo on the Temple Mount should not be put into question.
The senior government official in Jerusalem said that while it is incumbent upon all responsible leaders to do what they can to encourage calm, Abbas is doing the exact opposite.