Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas

Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas has said he will not run in presidential elections he has called for in January, saying he had had enough after years of frustration fighting for an independent homeland.
“I have told our brethren in the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization]… that I have no desire to run in the forthcoming election,” Abbas said on Thursday in a speech broadcast live from his headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

“This decision is not a kind of compromise or a maneuver,” he said, adding that he was not willing to debate the issue, rejecting moves to dissuade him from standing down.

The 74-year-old leader who replaced Yasser Arafat five years ago as the Palestinian president said: “We’re at cross roads. We have made lots of sacrifices in order to be able to have a right to a state.

“Since the Oslo agreements in 1993, all these agreements are based on land and on peace and an end to Israel occupation of 1967.

“We’ve pledged with Israel to reach a two-state solution, but month after month we’ve seen nothing but complacency and procrastination.”

Abbas criticized the U.S. for “favoring” Israel, but said the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is “still possible and achievable”, adding that the U.S. can play a “central and pivotal role” to achieve peace.

His decision not to take part in the elections comes days after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Israel to try to kickstart the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, which has stalled over Israel’s refusal to halt settlement activity in the occupied territories.

Clinton said on Thursday she looked forward to working with Abbas in “any new capacity”.

Spokesman for the U.S. State Department P.J. Crowley said Washington would continue to push for a peace agreement, although he acknowledged that the U.S. and the Palestinian president have had their disagreements over illegal Israeli settlements and conditions for peace talks.

“We certainly will continue our efforts and we certainly would encourage president Abbas to continue his lifelong efforts in pursuit of peace and a resolution that would lead to a Palestinian state,” Crowley said.

“We still think that’s possible and we’re going to search for a variety of ways to get that.”

Israeli position

Al Jazeera’s Jacky Rowland, reporting from Jerusalem, said Israel was not expected to immediately react to Abbas’s decision.“The official position of the Israeli side is that this is an internal Palestinian matter and, therefore, Israel won’t be making any comment at all,” our correspondent said.

Al Jazeera’s Zeina Awad reporting from Gaza said the Hamas leadership in the territory considers Abbas’ decision as an internal matter for Fatah and the PLO, and that the actual problem was their lack of support for the principles of resistance.

She said a Hamas official told Al Jazeera that Hamas was not happy, specifically with the position Abbas and his party had taken in regard to “Palestinian reconciliation, and the negotiation track that they have chosen in dealing with the Israelis and achieving the two-state solution”.

Saeb Erakat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, said: “At the end of the day, it’s not the presidency. It’s the question of the Israeli government continuing settlement activity, fait accompli policies, dictation.

“And nineteen years after trying to achieve a two-state solution, maybe the president has come to his moment of truth…”

Middle East analysts said Abbas would find it hard to make strategic concessions.Mouin Rabbani, a contributing editor to The Middle East Report, told Al Jazeera: “After the fiascos he [Abbas] created by meeting Netanyahu and Obama in New York without any of the conditions for negotiations being met; and even more importantly after orchestrating the withdrawal of the Goldstone report from the UN Human Rights Council, he simply is not in a position to make any more strategic concessions without paying a price.”

Abbas recently issued a decree announcing  presidential and parliamentary polls, but the Hamas-run interior ministry in the Gaza Strip ordered Palestinians not to take part in the elections.

The interior ministry said in a statement that the election had been called “by figures who do not have the right to declare it”.Abbas has of late been facing heavy criticism for defending a decision to delay the endorsement of a UN report on Gaza war crimes at the UN Human Rights Council.

Although the council later passed a resolution adopting the report, Abbas continues to be criticized by Hamas, a rival Palestinian faction in control of the Gaza Strip, which has called on Palestinians to reject his leadership.

The rift between Fatah and Hamas has derailed a unity deal the two factions have been pushing forward under the auspices of the Egyptian government.

After the storm that was generated by the October 2 delay of the vote on the Gaza war report, Hamas said it had asked Egypt’s intelligence chief to put off the reconciliation deal until November.