Holding PNC meeting reinforces domination policy, claims ex-PLO official

The former Secretary of the PLO Executive Committee, Yasser Abed Rabbo, said on Wednesday that holding the Palestinian National Council (PNC) meeting without a national consensus reinforces the domination policy of the current leadership and complicates further an already complex situation, Quds Press has reported. Abed Rabbo, who remains a member of the Executive Committee, claimed that this would widen the internal Palestinian division.

“The legitimacy of the PLO would be at stake before the eyes of the world if the preparation committee insists on going ahead with the PNC meeting with the announced agenda,” he explained.

Hamas, the largest Palestinian faction, Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and other factions have announced their boycott of the PNC meeting planned to take place on 30 April in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah. According to Abed Rabbo, holding the PNC would be a “coup” against the outcomes of meetings held in Beirut last year in preparation for the PNC, in which there was a degree of consensus.

Palestine: 100 PNC members call for delaying meeting

The PLO veteran lamented the fact that the Palestinian factions which refuse to take part in the PNC meeting do not use the issue of their participation as a condition for the lifting of the punitive measures imposed on Gaza by Palestinian Authority (and PLO, and Fatah) President Mahmoud Abbas. He stressed that the Palestinian leadership “urgently needs the Palestinian factions now,” and that the latter have “wasted a golden opportunity” to ease the hardships of the residents of the Gaza Strip.

Abed Rabbo revealed that even though he is the oldest member of the PLO Executive Committee, he has not been invited to the PNC meeting. The Palestinian national movement, he said, is passing along with “unprecedented indifference.” However, he told Quds Press that he is not seeking such an invitation, or to be “exposed to all forms of forgery and attempts to exclude other parties in order to compose a PLO in line with the individual and political mode of a certain side.”