What if Abbas dropped Fayyad? It would be a blow to the Palestinian Authority, but also to the US/Zionist colonial structure

Recently Hamas and Fatah of Palestine have agreed to a unity government of technocrats not affiliated with the current governments ruling all of Palestine pending new elections. Mahmoud Abbas is now going back on that agreement. Tony Karon is probably right that the entire exercise was, from the start, a naive and clumsy attempt by Abbas to pressure Israel to suspend construction in the West Bank.

Abbas always intended to pull back at the last minute, exactly by naming a candidate for Prime Minister who was famously unacceptable to Hamas contrary to the terms he claimed to agree to earlier. Barack Obama, with the firmness any right-wing Israeli politician would show the Palestinians, has called his bluff. There will be no concessions from Israel and Abbas still must cancel the unity agreement.

But what if Abbas called Obama's bluff and agreed to the terms Hamas and Fatah understood to be in place when the unity agreement was first announced? If an approved US/Zionist loyalist like Fayyad were to not retain the post of prime minister, the United States and Israel would carry out their threats to freeze payments to Abbas and the Palestinian Authority if it removes the US choice for Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad from power. An interesting question is what would happen then.

Important for that question is what would the dictatorships of the US colonies of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, UAE, Kuwait and others do. The US has ordered them to honor its freeze on the Palestinians, but their job is to put an Arab face on US/Zionist policies and there is no way to put an Arab face on a freeze on Palestinian funds on behalf of America and Israel's favorite Palestinian politician.

It would build a crisis immediately leading into the only decisive currently scheduled event in the Middle East - Egypt's elections - and if Palestine is an active issue when those elections are held, notwithstanding US efforts to delay them, that will tangibly damage the US/Zionist colonial structure, with reverberations that would be felt even beyond Egypt.

Egypt publicly participated in the US/Israeli siege on Gaza. It wasn't clear at the time the toll that was taking on his grip on power. A president that spineless and without substance on as clear an issue as putting Palestinians on a diet could not inspire fear in his own people.

The US would order its colonial subjects in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Jordan, Kuwait and others to put all of Palestine on a diet. They have no choice but to say yes, just as Mubarak did. Like Mubarak, none of the members of the US/Zionist colonial structure are accountable to their people but rather to US officials in embassies and military bases on their territories and ultimately to Barack Obama. But in saying yes, they would lose a little more of the respect of their own people and their continued rule would become somewhat more unacceptable.

Abbas standing up to Barack Obama would bring the Middle East a little closer to puncturing the heart of the US/Zionist colonial structure that Israel depends on to remain a viable state. The image of Saudi leaders claiming that as Sunnis they have a duty to starve the Palestinians into accepting a US-educated and selected leader would bring us closer to the day that the people of decide that until there is a national commitment to a Republic of Arabia politically accountable to its citizens, they will not allow the state to function as usual.

After Egypt, when Saudi Arabia falls, the entire US/Zionist Middle East colonial structure will be broken. Barack Obama is counting on Abbas not putting the other stooge dictators into an embarrassing position. His gamble likely will pay off and Abbas will back down. Abbas would not be in his position if he was not naive, clumsy and pliable any more than Obama would himself.

But the structure is creaking today. Abbas even making the threat to unify the Palestinians, even if he does not carry it out is an indication that the job of being the Arab face of US/Zionist colonialism is becoming steadily more difficult. Like Egypt, it will be unexpected, but the structure can only collapse over time.