Is Abbas after war????

So-called reconciliation with Hamas and an unwillingness to negotiate with Israel...

Two weeks ago, Abbas blew up four years of U.S.-sponsored institution building, relative peace and growing prosperity in the West Bank by signing a “reconciliation” agreement with the Hamas movement — a deal that probably will obligate him to fire his progressive prime minister, release scores of jailed Hamas militants and bond his security forces with Hamas’s Iranian-equipped army. On Tuesday, he published an op-ed in the New York Times in which he committed himself to seeking a U.N. General Assembly vote on Palestinian statehood in September.

It was, as the Times put it in a separate news story, “a declaration of war on the status quo.” Abbas’s new strategy is radically different: The U.N. vote, he wrote, will “pave the way for us to pursue claims against Israel at the United Nations, human rights bodies and the International Court of Justice” — in other words, sanctions.

Meanwhile, there will be a change in Palestinian doctrine. The new goal will be one on which Abbas and Hamas can agree: not a peace treaty leading to statehood but statehood followed by negotiations, “a key focus” of which “will be reaching a just solution for Palestinian refugees” — whose return to Israel would mean its demise. “Palestine would be negotiating from the position of one United Nations member whose territory is militarily occupied by another,” Abbas declared. This is a formula for war — or “the third intifada,” as Palestinians are already calling it.