Legitimacy

Since the election of Mahmoud Abbas, the "international community" has been pressuring Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians, and Sharon has been complying with these demands. The concessions are ostensibly meant to give legitimacy to him among the Palestinians. Caroline Glick asks an excellent question about that:

Why does Abbas, who (according to the so-called international community) was legitimately and overwhelmingly elected in a free and open and democratic election, need legitimacy? Isn't the 66 percent of the vote he garnered in a more or less uncontested race legitimacy enough?

What are these concessions for then?

Additionally, Glick points out that Abbas has undertaken to fight terror. Yet,

[i]f Abbas is supposed to be convincing the Palestinians that they have to reject terrorism, it seems odd for him to be insisting that Israel conduct a mass release of convicted terrorists, let alone murderers. Abbas justifies this demand by claiming that these men and women are Palestinian heroes and that his people won't accept their remaining in prison.

Yet his acceptance of the notion that these war criminals are heroes of the Palestinian people makes it hard to imagine that he has anything but admiration for the crimes they committed – namely acts of terrorism against Israelis. Far from opposing terrorism and being poised to purge the scourge from Palestinian society, in his first act as the legitimate, democratically elected, anti-terror, reform leader, Abbas is sticking out his neck to support terrorism.

It seems that once again we are going down the Oslo road - Israel makes real concessions for Palestinian promises that are never fulfilled. As we have already seen, such a strategy does not lead to peace.