The death of Abu Abbas -- and hope in the Middle East

The death of Abu Abbas -- and hope in the Middle East[/u]
Paul Greenberg
March 22, 2004

The body was shipped out of Baghdad. That's where Abu Abbas, aka Abul Abbas, ne Muhammad Abbas, had been apprehended by American forces last April.

By then this man of many names had accumulated a rap sheet going back 30 years, beginning with the time he personally wiped out a family in Nahariya, Israel. (Only the mother lived to tell the tale.) Now he is said to have died of a heart attack while in custody, the first sign that he ever had a heart.

Naturally he will be given a hero's burial by the Palestine Authority. For Abu Abbas had moved steadily up in the terrorist ranks over the years, becoming chief of his own faction, the Palestinian Liberation Front. His most notorious exploit was the hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro, during which a crippled passenger - 69-year-old Leon Klinghoffer - was shot in the head and his wheelchair-bound body dumped overboard. Nice people, the Palestine Liberation Front.

As a result, a life sentence awaited Abu Abbas in Italy, where he'd been tried in absentia. But he found sanctuary in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. (Tell us again that Saddam had no links to terrorism.) And now he's escaped justice once again.

In its own bloody way, the life of Abu Abbas mirrored the history of the Palestinian cause over the past half-century - from waging terror to talking peace and back again.

First came the years of terror. One of Abu Abbas' more brilliant failures came in 1990. It featured a fleet of rubber boats used to land terrorists on a Tel Aviv beach, where they were supposed to wipe out sunbathers. It was characteristic of his M.O. - bold, clever, and confined to civilian targets. (As in the case of the Achille Lauro, he scrupulously avoided military ones.)

Then came the outward conversion to peace. Remember the Oslo Accords, that wondrous mirage? All would be forgiven, and both Arabs and Israelis would live happily ever after. A peaceful Palestinian state would arise next to Israel, and both Arab and Jew would thrive. Abu Abbas, among others, was granted amnesty and returned to Gaza.

Then the masquerade ended. Offered a Palestinian state that would have embraced Gaza, almost all of the West Bank, and half of Jerusalem, including control of the Temple Mount, Yasser Arafat couldn't bring himself to accept victory. Not if it had to be shared.

Instead, the Palestinian delegation walked out of Camp David, and Abu Abbas returned to Baghdad, where he became Saddam Hussein's bag man for the suicide bombers that would spearhead the next intifada. All the talk of peace had been a charade.

When arrested by American special forces, Abu Abbas was found with several Lebanese and Yemeni passports and a small arsenal of weapons, including rocket-propelled grenades. He'd been running what the Associated Press reported as a "sprawling, recently abandoned terrorist training camp south of Baghdad." The game was up. Now it has ended.

Yasser Arafat remains a virtual prisoner, holed up in his headquarters at Ramallah. And with the Roadmap to Peace having led to war, the Israelis prepare to wall themselves off from Palestinian areas. They propose to abandon their exposed settlements in the Gaza Strip and declare peace on their own terms. The practical result will probably not be noticeably different from the current war. That's the Middle East, where anything that can go wrong already has.

Fearing a vacuum of whatever authority remains in Gaza, the Egyptians and the Palestinian Authority have been meeting with various Palestinian factions/militias/gangs/gunmen to work out some sort of arrangement there after the Israelis pull back.

These are same outfits - Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the usual murderous assortment - that were supposed to be dismantled as the first step along the Roadmap to Peace. Which is one more indication of how effective the roadmap has been. Where there's no will, there's no way.

Meanwhile, Yasser Arafat's umbrella organization, the Palestinian Authority, is falling apart under the weight of its own corruption and oppression. When it's not sponsoring violence against Israelis, it's exploiting and suppressing its own people. Any hopes for a stable Palestinian state are now as dead as Abu Abbas.

The Palestinian Authority has, however, achieved a rare distinction in international diplomacy: It has become a failed state without ever having been a state.

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