This is a guest post by Jonathan Sacerdoti
It’s not hard to find holes in the arguments used by Abdel Bari Atwan, the editor of Al-Quds Al-Arabi, in his frequent TV appearances. But he usually covers his tracks by saying the nasty stuff in Arabic and the ‘moderate’ stuff in English.
In January of this year, however, he appeared on Al Jazeera English, claiming that the Mahmoud Abba’s presidency had “expired” and thus he had had no mandate to represent the Palestinian people in the negotiations, confidential records of which had been leaked and tendentiously packaged by that very TV station in conjunction with The Guardian.
But just this week on the BBC’s Dateline London programme (which may as well be renamed the Abdel Bari Atwan Show, he appears so often), he seemed to have forgotten his concern about Abbas’ democratic legitimacy, when he argued very strongly in favour of Abbas’ efforts to push through a vote at the UN on Palestinian statehood. He also argued that the Gulf states should be invited to join the Eurozone, but that piece of lunacy is for another discussion.
It seems that Atwan is not so worried about proper democratic representation of the Palestinian people after all. Perhaps it only matters to him when he feels that the leaders in question might be willing to actually negotiate with Israel, improving the chances of peace, rather than when they are set to hijack the entire peace process through unilateral actions intended to escalate the conflict.
