Editorial (October 16, 2009)
The incredible shrinking Abbas
IT’S not easy to be Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas these days. First, he caved in to pressure from US President Barack Obama to attend a photo-op summit with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on the sidelines of the United Nations in September.
Then, he apparently agreed to what, in all likelihood, was another US request to defer until March a vote in the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) on the Goldstone Commission Report on the Gaza war.
In a perfect world, Abbas should have been commended for agreeing to both these acts, which were intended to create an environment where Israelis and Palestinians could resume peace negotiations.
Instead, Abbas has been viciously attacked internally, especially by Palestinian factions such as Hamas, which is looking for a way to exploit his miscues and destabilise his government. Branded “Obama’s lap dog” at best and a traitor at worst, many analysts believe Abbas is now engaged in the fight of his life.
Abbas’ shrinking stature has many consequences outside of the West Bank and Gaza, some of which have been seen in recent weeks.
The responsibility for the recent wave of Arab unrest in Jerusalem can be partially attributed to political banner-waving by the Palestinian Authority, which in turn is acting out Abbas’ urgent need to regain credibility as a champion of the Palestinian cause.
Additionally, the ugly situation that Israel finds itself in at the UN this week -— having to defend itself against the Goldstone report both in the UN Security Council and an emergency session of the UNHRC -— can be partially attributed, once again, to Abbas’ pressing desire to counter a Hamas smear that Abbas collaborated with the Israelis during the Gaza war.
Obama, who last week surprised the world by winning the Nobel Peace Prize — and it should remembered, made Abbas the first world leader he called after his presidential inauguration — will surely be tempted to soon pick up the phone again in an attempt to offer Abbas some words of encouragement.
However, sometimes the best thing to do for peace is step back and allow things to stabilise. Whether or not this is one of those times will be the dilemma Obama will face, as he determines the wisest application of US involvement in the peace process in the days and weeks ahead.
Holocaust legacy in 2045
ALTHOUGH unrelated, the death of Warsaw Ghetto fighter Marek Edelman last week, and the impending visit of an acclaimed Holocaust scholar to Australia, appear closely linked.
When he died, Mr Edelman was 90 and the last surviving leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. As detailed in an AJN feature this week, he lived out his life in his native Poland, eventually rediscovering his inner voice and retelling the horrific story of the 1943 revolt of a small group of Jews against the might of the Nazis.
Next week, Dr Stephen Smith, the newly appointed executive director of Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation in Los Angeles, will visit Australia to forge closer ties with local museums dedicated to Jewish history and to telling the wrenching narrative of the Holocaust.
In an interview with The AJN this week, Dr Smith posed the questions: How will the Shoah will be remembered in 2045, 100 years after the death camps were liberated? What impressions will young Jewish people of that time have of their great-great-grandparents? What truths will the world glean from events that occurred more than a century earlier?
It is a theme to which he has dedicated his studies and which he will address in Sydney and Melbourne next week.
While there is no doubt the Holocaust will be remembered, there is a question as to what shape those memories will take.
It will be a world that, for all its thousands of hours of digitised video testimonies will be without a single living eye-witness. Will it be a world still plagued by deniers and their iniquitous agendas?
Will Israel’s leaders still find it necessary to defend the bedrock reality of the Holocaust at world forums that entertain the rants of Israel’s enemies who claim the Holocaust was a Zionist myth? This was a defence Binyamin Netanyahu had to mount in the United Nations General Assembly last month, brandishing documents from the Nazis’ Wannsee Conference.
Will commemorating the Holocaust still be considered offensive by fringe Muslim groups in Europe?
And what impact will the Holocaust have in imparting the Jewish vow of “never again”? Will commemoration of the Shoah have helped to prevent the “Armenias”, “Cambodias” and “Rwandas” of the 21st century?
These are the questions bequeathed to us by Marek Edelman, and we place them in the hands of scholars such as Dr Smith and those who will follow in his steps.
comments