PA Is Opposed To Upcoming Conference In Warsaw: Fears Of Anti-Iran Coalition

Why Palestinians Oppose an Anti-Iran Coalition

• It seems the Palestinian leadership would rather see Iran continue to pose a threat to Arab countries than see peace between those countries and Israel.
  
  
• Several Arab countries appear completely fed up with the Palestinians, particularly the continued bickering between Fatah and Hamas. Egyptian intelligence officials have devoted years trying to convince Hamas and Fatah to work together for the benefit of the Palestinians.
  
  
• Instead of doing so, however, Palestinian leaders are preoccupied with blocking Arab participation in a conference that could see the creation of a coalition against Iran -- the same country Abbas and his loyalists hold responsible for the ongoing divisions among the Palestinians. Might it be possible that the Arab countries are finally rousing themselves from their long slumber and beginning to seek better lives for themselves and their neighbors?
  
  
  
  
  The Palestinians have good reason to believe that some influential Arab countries have given up on both them and the Palestinian cause. They fear that several Arab countries might even be headed toward normalizing their relations with Israel.
  
  
  
  
  For several weeks now, the leadership of the Palestinian Authority (PA) has been waging a campaign against a US-Polish conference that is scheduled to take place in Warsaw later this month. 
  
  
  US and Polish officials said that the conference will include sessions on the situation in Syria, Yemen, missile development, terrorism and illicit finance and cybersecurity. A US official said that the conference will also discuss "Iran's destructive policies in the region."
  
  
  Why are the Palestinians so worried about the upcoming conference? Because they care about Iran or Yemen or Syria or missile development? 
  
  No, the Palestinians are concerned because they have somehow convinced themselves that the main purpose of the conference is to bring the Arab countries closer to Israel. It is not clear on what the Palestinian claim is based, especially as neither the US nor Poland has mentioned the issue of normalization between Israel and the Arab countries as being on the agenda of the conference.
  
  
  
  "The PLO considers the conference a form of direct and public normalization [between the Arabs and Israel]," said PLO Executive Committee member Ahmed Majdalani. "This is an attempt to change the priorities in the Middle East so that confronting Iran would become the main issue instead of ending the [Israeli] occupation." The PLO official called on the Arab countries to boycott the conference.
  
  
  PLO Secretary-General Saeb Erekat also expressed concern over the planned conference in Warsaw; he said it was a "serious attempt to overturn the Arab Peace Initiative" that was endorsed by the Arab League in 2002. This 10-sentence initiative calls for normalizing relations between the Arab countries and Israel in exchange for a full Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines (including east Jerusalem) and a "just settlement" of the Palestinian refugee issue based on UN resolution 194. The resolution states that refugees "wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practical date."
  
  
  Although Israel has expressed tentative support for the initiative, it also made clear that it cannot accept the relocation of millions of Palestinians into Israel. Such a move would mean the creation of two Palestinians states: one in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem, and another in Israel, where Jews would become a minority in their country.