Before the end of this month, Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian president, will address the UN General Assembly via a video conference facility. Abbas, who assumed office in 2005, has consistently participated in the world’s top annual diplomatic event, but was prohibited this year from attending UN headquarters in New York after the Trump administration declined his request for a visa, along with those of the Palestinian official delegation.
This is perhaps the last thing that Abbas would have anticipated when back in September 1993 he watched the signing of the Oslo Accords at the White House by his predecessor Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat along with then Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and foreign minister Shimon Peres.
Abbas, always described in regional diplomatic quarters as the “diplomatic arm” of Arafat, has been one of the most consequential figures in the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the pursuit of a negotiated settlement to the Palestinian plight that started officially with the Madrid Peace Conference in October 1991.
According to diplomatic accounts, both Arab and Israeli, in all cases, whether direct or indirect, Abbas was a key adviser to Arafat when it came to the political process. He was in favour of a negotiated settlement as opposed to some other Palestinian leaders who favoured militant resistance.
Today, only a few weeks from his 90th birthday on 15 November, Abbas stands at the head of a marginalised PA that is striving to survive in the face of an arrogant Israeli government that is openly shrugging off all the signed accords through aggressive military raids, the demolition of Palestinian houses, and the construction of illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
Worse still, the PA is being threatened with eradication by extreme-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who is also pushing for the annexation of the West Bank. According to the Israeli press, the fact that in response to the appeal of Arab capitals Netanyahu decided to take the annexation of the West Bank off the agenda of a recent cabinet meeting does not mean that the issue is off the table.
In Cairo, informed diplomatic and political sources say that on the ground everything indicates that the annexation is already in process, through the demolition of Palestinian houses, plans to expel Palestinian residents of the West Bank who carry Jordanian passports, and the effective empowerment of aggressive attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians and their property.
According to the same sources, there was also an American appeal to Netanyahu not to act aggressively on the West Bank pending an end to the Israeli war on Gaza that the Trump administration has been trying for the past few months to bring to an end.
The same sources say that Jordan has shared its deep concern with Washington and other influential international and regional capitals about the plan of the Israeli government to annex the West Bank and expel close to half a million Palestinians from there into Jordanian territory.
The Jordanians had previously tried through their direct contacts with Israel, with which they have had a peace treaty since 1994, to get Israel to abandon its plans for the West Bank. These attempts, however, have been declined by Netanyahu, who has been openly talking about his political and spiritual commitment to the establishment of “Greater Israel.”
Netanyahu has been open about his lack of interest in any political process that will allow the Palestinians to have a state. During the almost two years of the genocidal war on Gaza, which has done much to eradicate life from the Strip of land that houses some two million Palestinians, Netanyahu has been unequivocal in stating that he is not going to allow a Palestinian state.
“On the ground there is no room for a Palestinian state at all, not in the West Bank and not in Gaza Strip, because Israel is going to take over Gaza and will annex the West Bank,” said a Cairo-based European diplomat. Moreover, the diplomat added, “Netanyahu is actively working to expel the Palestinians out of the Palestinian Territories.”
Unlike the Madrid Peace Conference, which was supposed to pave the way to some sort of settlement to the Palestinian-Israeli struggle in a wider context of settling the overall Arab-Israeli struggle after the 1980 Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty, the Oslo Accords were designed to pave the way towards what was later seen as the two-state solution.
However, subsequent negotiations that lasted until 2007 under successive Israeli governments have failed to lead the way towards the ever-elusive Palestinian statehood, despite promises of a demilitarised state and the full integration of Israel within the Arab and Muslim world.
According to an Arab diplomat, Netanyahu has effectively scrapped all the agreements that Israel has committed to with the Palestinians. However, the diplomat added, he did this after years of degrading the letter and spirit of all previous agreements.
The same diplomat added that with Israel, “specifically Netanyahu,” having been “so successful” in convincing the Arab world that Iran is their real enemy not Israel, the Palestinian cause inevitably fell off the list of Arab diplomatic priorities “for the most part”.
The 2020 signing of the so-called “Abraham Accords” that opened the door for normalisation and cooperation between Israel and both the UAE and Bahrain was only one of many indications that some Arab capitals have decided to separate the path of a diplomatic settlement “of sorts” of the Palestinian cause from the chances for “profitable” cooperation with Israel “in general but specifically against what they perceive as the shared Iranian threat.”
However, he said that with the level of aggression that Israel has used in its genocidal war against Gaza, the Arab countries have had to express their “rejection” of the Israeli policies. Earlier this week, UAE commentators said that Israel would be threatening its cooperation with their country if it were to annex the West Bank. They suggested that it was due to pressure from Abu Dhabi that Netanyahu had decided to remove the discussion of the matter form the agenda of the Israeli cabinet meeting.
Meanwhile, in the statement they issued after their ordinary autumn meeting, the Arab foreign ministers earlier this week stated that Israel cannot expect the normalisation it has with the Arab countries to continue if it continues its policies against the Palestinian people. In parallel, there has been a push to support a joint Saudi-French initiative that was launched alongside the UN General Assembly meetings last year for the reinvigoration of the two-state solution “at least as a concept”.
Along with this initiative came diplomatic momentum for the recognition of the right of Palestinian statehood that is expected to come out of this year’s UN meetings, with several world capitals already committed to endorsing it. While in real terms this anticipated recognition may not mean much, Israel, with the firm support of the US, has been actively acting against it.
According to a New York-based Arab diplomatic source, while the Arab diplomatic missions have been lobbying the support of the UN member states for this recognition, both Israel and the US have been lobbying against it. In the assessment of this diplomat, maybe half of UN member states will go along with the initiative in what would amount to “a considerable diplomatic message to Israel” that the world is getting tired of its policies.
In the view of Cairo-based European diplomats, such recognition is also a message to the Palestinians about the efficiency of the diplomatic path as opposed to that of the militant resistance that had been pursued by Hamas and other resistance groups.
“Ideally, we hope to keep the faith in diplomacy,” they said.
In practical terms, however, the New York-based diplomat agreed that this recognition would neither prompt Netanyahu to end his war on Gaza nor to reconsider his plans to annex the West Bank.
According to Hussein, a Palestinian who exited Gaza using his foreign passport for Europe, “today the Palestinians have no faith in diplomacy and no hope in resistance.”
“Both have been crushed,” he said. “And it is not just Israel, because the entire world is complacent in one way or another,” he added.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 11 September, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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