Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) was set to meet Sunday with members of the Palestinian Central Election Commission, signaling he is serious about calling a do-over on the previous elections. Abbas’s Fatah movement, inherited from Yassir Arafat and seen as selling out Palestinian interests for money, was trounced by the revolutionary Jihadist Hamas movement in the January elections.

Hamas officials say Abbas, who holds the figurehead position of President of a country that has yet to be declared, has no authority to call for new elections and say the move is a call for civil war. Indeed clashes have erupted throughout PA-administered areas between Fatah militias, trained by the US, and Hamas cells, trained and funded by Iran.

But behind the scenes, Fatah officials have begun pointing to Israel and the US, blaming them for the PA's Arabs' affinity for Hamas's no-compromise stance and leveraging the situation in an attempt to induce Israel to cross its final red line – a full return to the pre-1967 borders and a return of Arab refugees.

The officials, quoted anonymously in a Yediot Acharonot report, insisted: "The key is still in the Israelis' hands. Without a serious diplomatic agreement, we will not be able to fight against Hamas."

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert says he refuses to allow Israel to be dragged into the internal PA debate, though his government approved a transfer of arms to Abbas’s forces in June.

At the same time, reports from Damascus have Hamas chief Khaled Mashaal forming a new PLO umbrella group with anti-Western Fatah chief Farouk Kaddoumi, Abbas’s exiled rival for Fatah leadership and filling Yassir Arafat’s shoes.

Abbas’s emissaries say this is the last chance to bolster the Fatah leader, who cannot set a date until the election commission informs him how long it will take to prepare for the balloting. Abbas’s chief of staff, former Arafat aide Saeb Erekat, said it would be impossible to hold the elections before mid-2007 due to the bureaucratic process.

In the meantime, aides concede that Abbas’s elections move was not expected to have any effect on its standing opposite Hamas unless Israel provides the mother of all confidence-building measures: turning back the clock to 1947, before a Jewish state was established in Israel.

"[The choice is] a just solution based on the '67 borders, or alternatively, a reality in which Israel finds itself with a strong Hamas and a crushed Fatah,” the Fatah sources said. “Without a real diplomatic solution, we will not be able to fight against Hamas, which will be happy to claim that recognizing Israel did not get [them] anywhere."

The demanded withdrawal would mean the eviction and compensation of more than half a million Jews from Judea, Samaria, the Golan Heights and eastern Jerusalem, including the Old City and the Temple Mount. It entails the removal of the billion-dollar Partition Wall and the repatriation of not only the new Jewish refugees but the literal return of all Arabs who left Israel in 1948 as well as their relatives.

That is what the so-called Prisoners’ Document, which Abbas is demanding Hamas accept, calls for explicitly:

“The Palestinian people in the homeland and in the Diaspora seek to liberate their land and to achieve their right in freedom, return and independence and to exercise their right in self determination, including the right to establish their independent state with [Jerusalem] as its capital on all territories occupied in 1967 and to secure the right of return for the refugees and to liberate all prisoners and detainees based on the historical right of our people on the land of the fathers and grandfathers and based on the U.N. Charter and the international law and international legitimacy.”

The document fits perfectly with the PLO’s 1974 Political Program, commonly known as the "Phased Plan," which was adopted at the 12th Session of the Palestinian National Council in Cairo, June 9, 1974. It calls for the PLO to work toward attaining statehood on parts of Israel while using those areas as bases for further attacks until all-out war to destroy Israel becomes a possibility.

The Prisoners’ Document goes as far as to openly cite the plan, referring to it as the Cairo Declaration: “In order to maintain the accomplishments of our people achieved in long struggle path and in loyalty to the martyrs of our great people and the pains of their prisoners and the agony of their injured, and based on the fact that we are still passing through a liberation phase with nationalism and democracy as the basic features, and this imposes a political struggle strategy that meets with these features and in order to make the Palestinian comprehensive national dialogue succeed, and based on the Cairo Declaration (emphasis added) and the urgent need for unity and solidarity, we present this document…”

Hamas conditioned its acceptance of the document upon removal of the words “with nationalism and democracy as the basic features,” so it could not be construed that the plan suggested an end goal of anything but Islamic liberation of occupied Muslim land and the reestablishment of the Caliphate. Fatah obliged.

Nevertheless, the Western press greeted the document with optimism, claiming it “implicitly” recognized Israel. They point to the fact that the carefully-worded document calls for the establishment of a state on areas Israel won in 1967, while ignoring the fact that nothing is written implying any acceptance of Israel or even an end to hostilities against a smaller Israel post full-withdrawal and absorption of millions of Arabs.

67-Borders Back on the Table
Bolstered by the stance of the recently-published US Baker-Hamilton Report that recommends a full Israeli withdrawal for the sake of US strategy in Iraq, Israel’s Labor Party officials have met in recent weeks with PA officials to pledge their allegiance to the pre-1967 borders.

The Saudi Initiative, introduced by American Jewish New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in 2002, lists the exact same demands for full withdrawal and a return of Arab refugees and has been brought back to the headlines recently by Baker-Hamilton and Israel’s own government, which previously rejected it out of hand.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert met the Saudis to discuss it in recent weeks and Defense Minister Amir Peretz mentioned it explicitly Sunday, saying it should be used “as a basis for negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.”