Abu Mazen in the NYT

Today’s NYTimes has an intriguing interview with Abu Mazen that’s well worth reading. (I think you have to register to do so. Go thru Bugmenot.)
In digesting Abu Mazen’s comments at the top of the article, reporter Steve Erlanger wrote that, “The new Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, said in an interview this weekend that the war with the Israelis is effectively over”, a theme that was picked up in the headline.
I scanned eagerly down the text to find the exact way in which AM had worded this. But I found no actual quoted text that related to Erlanger’s attention-grabbing lede. What I did find was this:

Mr. Abbas said the war with the Israelis would be over “when the Israelis declare that they will comply with the agreement I made in Sharm el Sheik…”

… which I believe has a somewhat different, more conditional sense to it.
Never mind about that perplexing error, though. The AM remarks as quoted were significant enough.
He clearly signaled that his prime political focus will be on getting final-status negotiations started (and completed) as rapidly as possible:

Although the road map mentions the option of declaring a sovereign “Palestinian state within provisional borders” while talks continue about a final settlement, Mr. Abbas said, “If it is up to me, I will reject it.” Palestinians will see an interim solution as a trap, replacing a final settlement, and “peace will not prevail anymore in the region,” he said.
“So it’s better for us and for the Israelis to go directly to final status,” he said. “I told Mr. Sharon that it’s better for both sides to establish this back channel to deal with final status and go in parallel with the stages of the road map.”

This fits completely with the assessment that Rob Malley and Hussein Agha had made in this late January article (which was also in the NYRB.)
Erlanger evidently asked AM how Sharon had responded to the suggestion to open a back channel to work out the details on final-status issues. He reported that AM laughed, and said Sharon had not responded:

“But we’ll talk more about it. Maybe he didn’t like it. We have to repeat it more and more in our ongoing negotiations.”

In the lede, Erlanger also wrote that AM had said that :

the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, is speaking “a different language” to the Palestinians. Mr. Sharon’s commitment to withdraw from Gaza and dismantle all Israeli settlements there and four in the West Bank, despite “how much pressure is on him from the Israeli Likud rightists,” Mr. Abbas said, “is a good sign to start with” on the road to real peace.
“And now he has a partner,” Mr. Abbas said.

Then later, this:

Was the armed intifada of the last four and a half years a mistake? “We cannot say it was a mistake,” he said. “But any war will have an end. And what is the end? To sit around the table and talk. And they [Hamas and Islamic Jihad] realize that this is the time to come to the table and talk and negotiate.”

For now, AM made quite clear that his immediate priority was to secure the release of as many of the Palestinian prisoners being held by Israel, as possible. (There have been big, Hamas-led demonstrations in Gaza about this, over the past week.)
Prisoner releases have also, of course, been a big issue inside nearly every other transformational negotiation in recent decades.
Up near the top of the piece, Erlanger has a little reference to AM having said that, “The Americans were talking to him ‘in a very helpful way’.” I did not, however, see that expanded anywhere later in the text.
I have to say, for myself, I haven’t spent any time with Abu Mazen face-to-face for many years now. But just the way he has been carrying himself in the past couple of months is extremely impressive. He suddenly seems to have significant new amounts of self-confidence. That, allied with his natural modesty and self-deprecating nature, seem to give him a relaxed way of being in which he doesn’t have to be shrill and accusatory in order to be firm and get his view across.
I like the way he talked about Hamas and Islamic Jihad, in general:

[start quote:]
Mr. Abbas said he was surprised that the armed militants, many wanted by Israel, embraced his candidacy. “All the fugitives came to me from all factions and said: ‘We are for you. You were with us, and we want you to solve our problems,’ ” he said. They wanted real jobs in the security forces of the Palestinian Authority “and to be secure from Israeli assassination and attacks,” he said. “I promised them, and now it is realized.”
… Asked if Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which are labeled terrorist organizations by the United States, want what he wants, he laughed and said: “No, of course they don’t want what I want! They want to come to power if they can. For that they ran in municipal elections and after that they will go” to the legislative elections. “And if they win, of course they want power. And it is their right. It is the competition” of democracy.
Asked about Hamas’s recent victories in local elections in 7 of the 10 cities and villages in Gaza, Mr. Abbas said: “This is democracy. We have to congratulate Hamas and say, ‘O.K., you won.’ Why not?” [HC editorial here: How many other Middle Eastern leaders could be equally relaxed when talking about the strength of their political opponents?] His own mainstream Fatah faction made many mistakes, he said. The vote “is a good lesson for Fatah to realize its position toward this and that and prepare themselves for the coming elections” for Parliament on July 17.
Fatah is already working to renew itself and bring in a younger generation “in parallel” with preparations for the elections, Mr. Abbas said, including work to form a new government, expected within the next week. Some in Fatah worry that Hamas could win more a substantial share of the vote, and Mr. Abbas is negotiating a new law with Hamas about how much proportional representation, which Hamas favors, will be used to elect legislators.
Mr. Abbas argued that democracy would help tame the radicals. “Of course they should be converted into a political party,” he said. “It’s good for us. We’re talking about national unity.”
He said he was not bothered that Hamas could construe the acceptance of Israel merely as a stage toward a Palestinian state, to be followed by a renewed desire to eliminate Israel. “Whether they consider it a stage or not, they will accept an Israeli state within the 1967 borders and they declare it,” he said. “For me it is not a stage; for them it is a stage – O.K.”

Significant, too, that though he is a refugee (Safed, 1948) and certainly doesn’t present himself as someone who’s about to “sell the refugees and their cause down the river”– still, he is able to talk in a calm, humane, and reasonable way about the refugee issue:

Mr. Abbas, who will be 70 on March 26, is a refugee, and says he will insist on the right of Palestinian refugees, under United Nations Resolution 194 of 1948, “to return back or to be compensated.” But he says he is willing to negotiate this, as all other matters, with the Israelis.
“I don’t think the Israelis have the right to say, ‘No, we won’t discuss it,’ ” he said. “We will ask them to discuss this resolution, and when we come to an agreement, on anything, of course we will accept it.”
Mr. Abbas was born in Safed, in what was then British Mandate Palestine. He was 13 in 1948, during the Arab-Israeli war that followed Israel’s establishment as a state. “I remember everything,” he said. “It was 1948 when we have been deported from Safed to the Golan Heights to Damascus, and I remember every specific point,” he said. “There was a war. We had to leave the city. The Israelis invaded the city, the Haganah at the time. We left our country.”
With Safed in Israeli hands, Mr. Abbas said, he could not return until 1995, after the leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization were allowed to return to the territories after the 1993 Oslo accords. He wanted to go sooner, but the mayor of Safed organized demonstrations against the visit, he said.But in 1995, “I did go back, but secretly,” he said. “The Israeli ministry of interior helped me to go discreetly there.” He stopped, his face suddenly softer. “I was there for 5 or 10 minutes only,” he said. “I was very, very sad. I was very sad.”
He looked off toward the far wall, then continued, “Every place, every quarter, every building I remember. I saw my house. But I didn’t go inside.”

Altogether, an intriguing new “public face of Palestine” for the rest of the world to deal with.