Palestine: no elections, no solutions

The PLO negotiating team - headed by perennial negotiator Saeb Erekat - resigned this week in the middle of a nine month period set aside for intense and secret negotiations with Israel to achieve the creation of a second Arab state - in addition to Jordan - in former Mandatory Palestine.

PLO Chairman, head of Fatah, unconstitutional self-styled President of the defunct Palestinian Authority and unelected President of the "State of Palestine" - Mahmoud Abbas - was quick to point out on Egyptian TV:

Either we can convince it to return, and we're trying with them, or we form a new delegation.

Either way - it will be a waste of time.

The "two state solution" posited by these currently stalled negotiations is doomed to failure.

Ramzy Baroud - a Palestinian-American journalist, author and editor who taught Mass Communication at Australia's Curtin University of Technology, and is Editor-in-Chief of the Palestine Chronicle - explains the futility of further negotiations with the PLO in his article "Why a winning Palestinian narrative is hard to find":

In an initially pointless exercise that lasted nearly an hour, I flipped between two Palestinian television channels, al-Aqsa TV of Hamas in Gaza and Palestine TV of Fatah in the West Bank. While both purported to represent Palestine and the Palestinians, each seemed to represent some other place and some other people. It was all very disappointing.

Hamas' world is fixated on their hate of Fatah and other factional personal business. Fatah TV is stuck between several worlds of archaic language of phony revolutions, factional rivalry and unmatched self-adoration. The two narratives are growingly alien and will unlikely ever move beyond their immediate sense of self-gratification and utter absurdity.

These irreconcilable differences between Fatah - the dominant faction in the PLO - and Hamas - not a member of the PLO - have remained unresolved since 2007.

In the absence of any unified representation for the Palestinian Arabs living in the West Bank and Gaza - how can any agreement between Israel and the PLO ever bring about a final end to the Arab-Jewish conflict that has raged unresolved for the last 130 years?

Mahmoud Al-Zahar, a Hamas official based in Gaza, told his movement's daily newspaper - Al-Resalah - in August this year that Hamas should act to isolate Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and strip him of any representative capacity over his decision to negotiate with Israel.

The PA has dealt the final blow to reconciliation talks, and Hamas will never accept the negotiation track and its result.

CBN News confirmed Hamas's stance on 30 September in its article "Hamas: No Agreement That Includes Israel's Right to Exist":