Armed struggle OK alongside diplomacy — Abbas adviser

Armed struggle can be waged in parallel to diplomacy, a senior adviser to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said in a television interview last week.

Nabil Shaath, a former negotiator for the Palestinians who now serves as the Fatah party’s international relations commissioner, told an interviewer on the Palestinian Awda television channel that he had “never thought that there was any problem with engaging in armed struggle, and at the same time engaging in political and diplomatic efforts in support of your cause,” according to the Middle East Media Research Institute’s TV monitoring project.

He said the Palestinians had an “indisputable” right to take part in armed struggle.

Despite the fact that surveys show widespread support for armed struggle on the Palestinian street, Abbas has made diplomacy the focus of his efforts to achieve Palestinian independence.

Shaath’s comments follow Friday’s surprising departure from formal Palestinian policy by another top Fatah official, Jibril Rajoub, who told Israel’s Channel 2 television that Palestinians recognize the Western Wall as a Jewish holy site that must remain under Jewish sovereignty.

Rajoub later seemed to deny he had made the comments, which were aired in full on Israeli television. In a Facebook post on Sunday, Rajoub claimed his remarks were mistranslated, and that he had not used the word “sovereignty.” In fact, however, in the interview, in which he spoke Hebrew, he used the word “ribonut,” which means sovereignty.

The Palestinians view all of Jerusalem’s Old City as occupied territory slated to become part of a Palestinian state, and have officially denied a Jewish historical connection to Jerusalem.

Rajoub stressed, however, that the Temple Mount — the holiest site in Judaism and third-holiest in Islam, once the site of the Jewish Temples and today housing the Dome of the Rock shrine and the Al-Aqsa Mosque — must be under Palestinian control in any future peace deal.