Mahmud Abbas called on Thursday for concrete US efforts to deliver a Palestinian state, as crowds marked the sixth anniversary of Yasser Arafat's death. The Palestinian president said he would hold US President Barack Obama, who helped relaunch direct peace talks in early September, to his pledge to seek the creation of a Palestinian state within a year.
"We consider this statement to be a commitment by President Obama, not just a slogan, and we hope that next year he won't say to us 'we apologise, we can't,'" Abbas said in an address to tens of thousands. In a September address at the United Nations, Obama insisted new peace talks could succeed, despite grinding to a halt three weeks after they started over the issue of settlement construction in the West Bank.
"When we come back here next year, we can have an agreement that will lead to a new member of the United Nations - an independent, sovereign state of Palestine, living in peace with Israel," Obama said. In a speech delivered at Arafat's grave site, where a new museum is being built to honour the veteran leader, Abbas vowed he would not negotiate while Israel continued to build settlements on Palestinian land.
He pledged to uphold Arafat's insistence that Palestinians would one day secure east Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state and the right of return for refugees. The Palestinians have refused to continue negotiations unless Israel reinstates a ban on settlement construction, which expired on September 26, and have threatened to seek UN recognition for an independent state. Abbas defended that proposal on Thursday, despite a warning from US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton against "unilateral steps."
"We are thinking of going to the Security Council, and that is considered a unilateral act on our part, but when they (the Israelis) take unilateral actions like the wall, incursions, assassinations, uprooting olive trees, that isn't considered unilateral," he said. In a sign of continuing Palestinian divisions, Hamas forces in Gaza banned public commemoration of Arafat's death, and a senior advisor to Ismail Haniya, the head of the Hamas government in Gaza, criticised Abbas's speech.