Does Abbas really respect law and order, or is he just currying favour?

Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas may like to think that he can curry favour with Donald Trump with his letter deploring the assassination attempt on the former US president. Instead, however, Abbas continued to expose himself as a puppet dancing on international strings. He received a scribbled, disjointed message from Trump in response: “Mahmoud – So nice – thank you – Everything will be good”.

What did Abbas say? “Acts of violence must not have a place in a world of law and order. Respect for the other with tolerance and valuing of human life is what must prevail.”

This world is not one of law and order, though, and Abbas need look no further than Israel for the evidence of this. If he does, he will surely recall what law and order meant to Trump during his presidency: more unilateral concessions to Israel. In the context of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Trump urged Israel to “finish what they started”.

“What I said very plainly is get it over with, and let’s get back to peace and stop killing people,” Trump has said by way of clarification. But he did not call for an end to genocide, and for Israel to finish what it started means that genocide goes on unabated. What peace is Trump talking about in such a context?

And is this the kind of law and order that Abbas endorses?

Perhaps. After all, the PA’s security services’ idea of law and order is to collaborate with the occupation forces and stifle anti-colonial resistance by all means, including killing if need be.

Abbas has no dignity. The effort spent trying to win favour and failing consistently only illustrates how beholden the PA is to any US president who is elected, even though each one will ensure Israel’s impunity at all costs, even at the cost of the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

So, in turn, what does such a scenario tell us about Abbas, whose main concern so far has been to see if he can ensure that the PA’s rule from Ramallah covers the enclave? How does winning favour with Trump – an unlikely scenario – work for Palestinians, when any US administration will only exploit the PA to ensure that Israel can continue its colonial expansion? Abbas’s tactics are predictable; any rhetorical rage dies down quickly to reveal the prevailing acquiescence, and his letter to Trump is more about the same attempts to garner some favour, rather than concern about law, order and tolerance.

The dissonance between Abbas’s well-wishes and the genocide in Gaza which is financed by the US and which Trump, in his usual rambling style, has not completely written off, is palpable. Abbas treats US presidents like a toddler treats an adult who scolds a child, because he has no politics of his own to stand on. When Trump was president, Abbas quickly joined the international chorus of the US stepping outside international consensus. Joe Biden’s support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza left Abbas scrambling for any crumbs that would allow the PA a little leverage in Palestinian politics. With Trump being a presidential candidate again, is the PA thinking along the lines of normalisation being better than genocide, rather than normalisation facilitating genocide? After all, Israel garners allies that need its unfettered power in the region.

Does Abbas really respect law and order, or is he just currying favour?