Elliott Abrams: “The challenge here is not only to President Abbas and to the P.A. It is, for one thing, a challenge to the Fatah Party…”

“The challenge here is not only to President Abbas and to the P.A. It is, for one thing, a challenge to the Fatah Party, whose future ability to defeat Hamas is surely tied to public perceptions of whether it remains a home to corruption. And it is a challenge to us, to the United States. If we turn a blind eye to corruption and to persecution of those who expose it, we are in a very real way contributing to the problem and undermining those Palestinians who wish to build public integrity into their system. It is widely understood that donors in the Arab states and Europe, as well as we ourselves, look favorably on Prime Minister Fayyad, but that is not enough.”