Abbas Is 'Going for Broke'

JERUSALEM, Israel -- Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas says he's ready to create an independent Palestinian state at any cost.

The status quo, he says, is unacceptable. He's demanding recognition of a Palestinian state in the pre-1967 borders, with Jerusalem as its capital, by the United Nations and the international community.

"If we don't receive any response from Israel, we will officially submit the draft resolution to the U.N. Security Council and sign the applications to accede to international organizations and conventions, including the International Criminal Court," Abbas told Arab foreign ministers in Cairo on Saturday.

To achieve that goal, he envisions Israel evicting hundreds of thousands of Jews, virtually all Israelis living outside the 1948 armistice lines. The late Israeli U.N. Ambassador Abba Eban called those boundaries "Auschwitz borders." Abbas says there won't be a single Jew, Israeli soldier or citizen, in a future Palestinian state.

With Abbas at the helm, the P.A. government is pushing ahead with a series of unilateral steps they're hoping will force Israel to give in to their demands.

Basically, they're the same old demands, recycled, but with rising anti-Israel sentiment worldwide, it appears he's going for broke.

Repeatedly painting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as impossible to work with, Abbas says he's planning a series of unilateral steps to force Israel into submission.

His method appears to be presenting ultimatums, non-starters for Israel, and then blaming Israel for the stalemate. Abbas says Netanyahu's the problem, not him. With the backing of the international media community, he's focusing on gathering support, appearing increasingly confident he's on a winning roll.

It seems he's mastered the art of doublespeak.

For years, Abbas mirrored his mentor, the late PLO chairman Yasser Arafat, speaking one message in Arabic and another in English.

But now that he's going all out in the international arena, it behooves people to know who they're dealing with.

Mahmoud Abbas wrote his doctoral thesis on Holocaust denial. He served as aide in Arafat's corrupt regime for decades.

Today, as P.A. leader, he approves curriculum that calls Israel's re-birth a catastrophe. He refers to Israelis as occupiers of Palestinian land. He dedicates public buildings and squares to terrorists who've murdered Jews. There's more but that's the idea.

Unlike the way media presents him, some analysts say Abbas is not particularly well-liked by his own people.

Perhaps they understand that billions of dollars donated by the international community has not been used to help them build better lives. Rather much of it wound up fattening the coffers of the P.A. leadership.