08/10/2009 While furor against Mahmoud Abbas may come as no surprise in Hamas-controlled Gaza, there has also been outrage in his own West Bank territory. Abbas is accused of betrayal for bowing to US pressure over voting on a key report criticizing Israel’s offensive in Gaza. A vote that would have been one of many steps to bring Israel before a war crimes tribunal, something many people longs for.
 
The UN Human Rights Council, based in Geneva, Switzerland, had postponed a vote last Friday on a resolution that would have condemned Israel's failure to co-operate with a UN investigation into the December-January war.
But after pushing for the UNHRC to endorse the report and forward it to the Security Council, Abbas’s Palestinian Authority relented to American pressure and agreed to drop the issue for six months.
 
Now the Palestinians are grappling with a domestic and regional uproar, with angry street protests at home and condemnation pouring in from Doha to Damascus.
 
“The level of public protest is unprecedented,” said Ghassan Khatib, director of the Palestinian Authority’s media center. “I do not remember any situation before when the leadership was so unpopular,” he said, speaking by telephone from Ramallah in the West Bank. Khatib said there was a feeling among Palestinian leaders that “they have to reconsider” their approach.
 
In Gaza, posters appeared on walls on Wednesday calling Abbas a traitor and saying he should be consigned to “the trash heap of history.” A protester said Abbas had abandoned the cause and deserved shoes being thrown in anger at street posters showing his face. Many of them had taken off their shoes and slapped the posters of the Palestinian president.
 
Hundreds of Palestinians demonstrated in Ramallah on Tuesday against the leadership’s conduct and called on Abbas and other officials to resign.
 
PRESS OUTCRY AGAINST ABBAS
In the Palestinian press, Abbas's intervention to persuade the UN to put off its response has been greeted with fury, even in papers normally loyal to the president's Fatah faction.
 
"This was a humiliating capitulation in the face of US and Israeli pressure", Hani al-Masri fumes in the pro-Fatah daily al-Ayyam.
 
Writing in another pro-Fatah paper, the privately-owned al-Quds, Rana Bisharah, says the postponement had effectively "aborted" the Goldstone report, adding that even a promise by Abbas to form a committee to investigate his decision to cease support for it would not correct matters. "The only way to partially fix the damage is to take back the report to the UN as soon as possible," she says.
 
In the Hamas-run daily Filastin, commentator Fayiz Abu-Shammalah says the Palestinian people had lost patience with Abbas and "his group". "They can no longer be trusted to lead the Palestinian people and protect their rights and cause after this resounding and shameful scandal following the PA's withdrawal of the Goldstone report."
 
ABBAS AIDE: WE ERRED!
Even Abbas’s own government has been critical. In a statement released by the Palestinian cabinet on Monday, the ministers reaffirmed their position of late September, which called for the Human Rights Council to adopt the Goldstone report, and said it was “unacceptable” for such efforts to be undermined.
 
A senior Abbas aide tried to ease the pressure by calling the postponement a mistake. Another leading Palestinian said Abbas was now considering recommending the Goldstone report be referred to the UN Security Council.
Yasser Abed Rabbo, Abbas' senior adviser, told the Voice of Palestine radio that what happened was a “mistake”, but added “it can be repaired. We have the courage to admit there was a mistake.”
 
A Hamas official, Salah Bardawil, said in a statement that his group would join Egyptian-mediated reconciliation talks with Abbas’s Fatah movement, to take place in Cairo this month, only if Abbas apologized to the Palestinian people for the debacle around the United Nations report.
 
U-TURN
Ahmed Gebreel, a Libyan government spokesman, said his country had requested the meeting "because of the seriousness of the report and because we think it's too long to wait until March".
 
The Libyan delegation had requested to hold a Security Council discussion on the report issue and the UN Security Council has agreed to hold a discussion next week.
 
Marking a U-turn in the PA policy, the Palestinian Observer Mission at the UN has expressed "full support" for the move. "We are welcoming Libya's step that they have asked the Security Council to meet to discuss the Goldstone report," Abbas told the AFP news agency in a telephone conversation from Rome, the Italian capital. "Libya's step is supporting the Palestinian people's rights."
 
Palestine TV, the official television channel of the Palestinian Authority (PA), reported that Abbas would send Riyadh al-Malki, the Palestinian foreign minister, to New York to assist in the Libyan bid to have the council address the report. The Security Council session, however, may not be enough to limit the political damage suffered by Abbas and Fatah.