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Palestinian human rights lawyer and former diplomat Ghaith al-Omari, a prominent advocate of the two-state solution and negotiations with Israel, gave FRANCE 24 a lengthy interview on a recent visit to Paris. In this second of a two-part series, he lamented the Palestinian Authority’s stagnation under longstanding President Mahmoud Abbas.
Ghaith al-Omari has long been a key player in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, acting as a Palestinian negotiator at the 2000 Camp David Summit convened by then-US president Bill Clinton and again at the 2001 Taba Summit in Egypt. He was an adviser to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas until 2006. With the peace process stalled since 2014, he now works as a senior fellow at the Washington Institute’s Irwin Levy Family Program on the US-Israel Strategic Relationship.
Al-Omari was in Paris last week to unveil the Whispered in Gaza project – a series of short animated films based on the testimonies of Palestinians living in Gaza – at the French National Assembly.
>> Click here for the first part of the interview
After discussing the despair of Palestinian youth in the first of this two-part interview series, al-Omari spoke about the political situation in the occupied West Bank under the 87-year-old Abbas, whose leadership has not been subject to democratic contestation since the last Palestinian presidential elections in 2005 and the last legislative elections in 2006.
What is your assessment of the situation in the West Bank as Abbas clings to power?
There’s a political and security vacuum in the West Bank that is prompting its people to abandon their government…
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